Victor Mardellat

We have duties toward one another simply as persons. There are things we may not do to others (what Philippa Foot referred to as “negative duties”), and things we ought to do for them (what she called “positive duties”). It is commonly held that, all else being equal, negative duties are more stringent, morally speaking, than positive duties. For example, one may not in general save the lives of several individuals by killing another. What explains this? This study provides a contractualist answer to this question. T. M. Scanlon developed his contractualist moral theory as an alternative to utilitarianism. Contractualism would meet this ambition on two conditions. The first is that its answers to the three foundational questions of moral philosophy—what is the subject matter of moral judgments? how can their practical significance be explained? what standards of reasoning ought we follow to identify morally wrong actions and to understand their wrongness?—are at least as convincing as those of utilitarianism. The second is that the conclusions of contractualist reasoning align with our most firmly held moral convictions. This condition would not be satisfied if it were impossible to account for the moral significance of the killing versus letting die distinction without violating the constraints of contractualist reasoning. I show that this is possible and conclude that contractualism’s normative implications are superior to those of utilitarianism.

In the third volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit argued that the distinction between imposing a newly created threat on someone and making what threatens some people instead threaten someone else has no genuine moral significance. This article's central thesis is that although there is much to learn from Parfit's arguments, they are ultimately unsuccessful at establishing that the redirected versus newly created threats distinction is morally irrelevant. In particular, I show that my Causal Sequences Principle specifies this distinction in such a way that it is immune to Parfit's objections against the Redirection Principle. It follows that any moral theory that can provide a sound rationale for the Causal Sequences Principle can solve the trolley problem.

Scanlonian contractualism rejects the consequentialist assumptions about morality, value, and rationality in virtue of which deontological constraints appear paradoxical. And yet, Jeffrey Brand-Ballard and Robert Shaver have claimed that it cannot succeed in defending the said restrictions. That is because they see Scanlon’s tie-breaking argument as threatening to justify aggregation in paradox of deontology cases. I argue that this claim rests upon a failure to appreciate contractualism’s relational character. Once we take this feature of the view into account, it becomes clear that the tie-breaking argument is ruled out in cases where the only way for us to prevent several killings would be to commit one ourselves. To show this, I provide a contractualist explanation of why our duty not to harm persons is stricter than our duty to help them when they are threatened with harm. I conclude by distinguishing two ways in which this defense of deontological restrictions might bring contractualism objectionably close to absolutism.