Ken Oshitani

According to contractualists, whether we are able to lead a flourishing and meaningful life is influenced, in part, by our capacity to relate to other rational self-governing beings on mutually justifiable terms. At the same time, it seems that our success in relating with our fellow rational creatures on terms that they could not reasonably reject is crucially dependent on moral luck, specifically, on what I call justificatory moral luck. In this paper, I argue that these two thoughts, together with certain plausible assumptions about the nature of social justice, yield the following claim: that insofar as individuals are owed the preconditions normally necessary for leading flourishing and meaningful lives, and insofar as the capacity to enter into morally justified relationships with others is a normal precondition for leading a flourishing and meaningful life, our public institutions are under a duty of justice to ensure each a fair and adequate opportunity to stand in morally justified relations with others.

On the relational conception of morality, the question of what we ought, morally, to do is understood as a question of how we ought to regulate our moral relations with one another. Despite its attractions, the philosophical foundations of the relational view are notoriously hard to make precise. In this paper, I offer a novel contractualist account of the foundations of relational moral obligations, which I call joint commitment contractualism. On this view, the normativity of relational moral obligations is explained by reference to a distinctive kind of relationship in which moral agents have jointly committed themselves to the aim of justifying their behavior to each other on terms that others could not reasonably reject.

Conditional egalitarianism is a form of egalitarianism that responds to the levelling-down objection by asserting that equality is intrinsically valuable only when it benefits some individuals. Andrew Mason’s original formulation of conditional egalitarianism faces criticism from Nils Holtug, who proposes a refined formulation that introduces a clause regarding the effects of additional benefits on equality. However, Holtug’s own formulation encounters internal inconsistencies. This paper proposes a positional refinement of Holtug’s conditional egalitarianism, emphasizing the importance of impartiality in evaluating distributions. This refinement incorporates an anonymity condition, ensuring that distributional evaluations remain invariant under permutations of individuals. By emphasizing how the non-instrumental value of equality is conditional on benefiting positions impartially, the proposed positional conditional egalitarianism reconciles egalitarian aims with concerns about inequality-enhancing benefits. This nuanced formulation provides a potential rebuttal to arguments against conditional egalitarianism and suggests a novel approach to distributive justice.

The implications of the repugnant conclusion for consequentialist theories, such as total utilitarianism, have been extensively discussed since the work of Derek Parfit. These discussions make the paradoxes of population ethics depend on welfarist conditions, like the dominance condition (or the Pareto Principle). Thus, one might think that the repugnant conclusion is not a practical problem for deontologists, who deny that we always ought to do what produces the most aggregate welfare. In this study, we offer two impossibility results using what we call the limit aggregation property. This states that when welfaristic and non-welfaristic considerations conflict, there is a threshold number of persons such that the former can override the latter as long as more people than the threshold number can enjoy increases in well-being levels. We argue that this property should be accepted even by deontologists, insofar as they do not commit themselves to the implausible absolutist position that fails to assign any moral weight to aggregate welfare. Our results therefore state that any normative population theory that is not absolutist entails (a variant of) the repugnant conclusion or some other implausible conclusion. Therefore, the repugnant conclusion must be taken seriously even by non-absolutist deontologists, not just consequentialists.

This paper examines the concept of ‘tsunami-tendenko,’ a guideline suggesting that individuals prioritise their own safety over aiding others during large-scale disasters. Kodama defends tsunami-tendenko against accusations of egoism by arguing that the principle can be justified ethically on consequentialist (or more precisely, utilitarian) grounds. Kodama asserts that attempting to assist others during such disasters heightens the risk of ‘tomo-daore,’ where both the rescuer and the victim may perish. He claims that having people focus solely on saving themselves can maximise the overall number of lives saved. However, we challenge Kodama’s assertion that utilitarianism inherently favours tsunami-tendenko over mutual assistance during disasters. Instead, this paper proposes an alternative ethical foundation for tsunami-tendenko grounded in the ‘antiextinction principle,’ which prioritises minimising the potential for catastrophic outcomes. When considering the ethics of responding to disaster, it is important to distinguish between maximising the number of lives saved (utilitarianism) and minimising the risk of tomo-daore (antiextinction principle). This distinction may be overlooked if the distribution of probabilities is not considered. We conclude that the antiextinction principle aligns more naturally with tsunami-tendenko, emphasising the avoidance of catastrophic outcomes—a concern not always addressed by utilitarianism. Therefore, tsunami-tendenko should be regarded as a societal guideline aimed at preserving community sustainability by averting total destruction.

In this paper, I argue that accounts of the normative basis of morality face the following puzzle, drawing on a case found in Susan Wolf’s influential discussion of conflicts between the moral and personal points of view. On the one hand, morality appears to constitute an independent point of view that can intelligibly conflict with, and can conceivably be overruled by, the verdicts of other points of view. On the other hand, moral demands appear to carry a distinctive sort of authority; moral reasons normally seem to take priority over other kinds of considerations, and the verdicts of morality seem to possess a distinctive place in our deliberations, in that they appear to represent standards that we are open to legitimate complaint for failing to honor. After clarifying the nature of the problem, I argue that a contractualist theory of morality can resolve the puzzle by offering a compelling vindication of the independence of the moral perspective, the normal priority of moral reasons, and the deliberative significance of moral verdicts, within a unified theoretical framework. Furthermore, I claim that this contractualist analysis can help account for the sense of deep conflict that is characteristic of the sort of troubling moral choices that Wolf calls to our attention.

Moral contractualism holds that addressing our minds to the morality of right and wrong involves identifying principles for the mutual regulation of behavior that could be the object of reasonable agreement among persons if they were appropriately motivated and fully informed. A common criticism of the theory is that the test of reasonable agreement it endorses is indeterminate. To be more specific, it is claimed that the notion of reasonableness is too vague or ill-defined to be of use in guiding our decisions in situations where it is necessary to balance the complaints of different people against each other, so that we may derive an all things considered conclusion regarding what we ought, morally, to do. In this article, I propose a novel interpretation of the contractualist method of reasoning that overcomes the indeterminacy objection, building on a broadly Aristotelian conception of practical deliberation about ends. I demonstrate that this criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of contractualist moral reasoning. The key is to recognize that deliberation about what others could not reasonably reject is not a matter of applying a fixed criterion of reasonableness in order to arbitrate conflicts between the interests of different individuals, as it is commonly assumed. Rather, it is a process in which the ideal of justifiability to others and people’s moral claims are specified together through holistic deliberation. The goal of this process is to construct a coherent conception of both our particular moral claims and the general aim of reasonable agreement that is reasonably acceptable to each person. On this view, contrary to what critics assert, the contractualist method of reasoning, properly understood, will almost always have a determinate answer.