Contractualist Moral Reasoning

Contractualism

T. M. Scanlon's contractualism provides a non-consequentialist account of morality. An action is wrong if it would be disallowed by principles that no one could reasonably reject, given the aim of finding principles for mutual recognition and governance.

Core Idea: Reasonable Rejection

• Individual standpoint: Morality is about what we owe to each individual person, not about maximizing aggregate welfare. Each person has a separate complaint.
• Reasonable rejection: A principle is reasonably rejectable if someone has a sufficiently strong objection to it from their individual perspective.
• Strongest complaint wins: An action is wrong if the person with the strongest individual complaint against it has a complaint strong enough to reasonably reject.
• No aggregation across persons: Unlike utilitarianism, many small harms to many people don't automatically outweigh one large harm to one person.

Contractualism vs Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism permits trading off one person's severe suffering against many people's minor benefits, as long as the sum is positive. Contractualism rejects this: if one person faces death and many others face only minor inconvenience, the person facing death can reasonably reject any principle that sacrifices them.

• Utilitarian logic: 100 people's mild headaches (1 unit each = 100 total) can outweigh one person's death (50 units). Maximize the sum.
• Contractualist logic: The person facing death has a complaint of 50 units. Each person with a headache has only a 1-unit complaint. The strongest individual complaint (50) determines permissibility, not the sum (100).
• Result: Contractualism forbids sacrificing the one person, even though utilitarian calculation favors it.

The Complaint Model

Scanlon's framework uses individual complaints (or objections) as the currency of moral evaluation:

• Burden as complaint: Each person's complaint against an action is the burden or loss they would bear if that action is performed.
• Compare alternatives: For each alternative action, identify the person with the strongest complaint. The permissible action is the one where the strongest complaint is minimized (or below the reasonable rejection threshold).
• Personal standpoint: Each person's complaint is assessed from their own perspective, not from an impartial aggregative perspective.

Classic Examples

Rescue Scenario

You can save either one person from death or five people from death, but not both. Who should you save?

• Utilitarian answer: Save the five (maximize total lives saved).
• Contractualist answer: Save the five. The one person's complaint ("I will die") is matched by each of the five ("I will die"). But five people each have that complaint, so the principle "save the one" is reasonably rejected by any of the five.
• Key insight: When complaints are identical (death vs death), numbers matter. Contractualism is not a "numbers don't count" view, but a "aggregation isn't automatic" view.

Transplant Scenario

You can kill one healthy person to harvest organs to save five dying patients. Should you?

• Utilitarian answer: If forced to choose, killing one to save five maximizes lives.
• Contractualist answer: No. The one person has a complaint: "I am being killed without my consent." This complaint is stronger than each of the five patients' complaints "I was not saved," because the five patients are not being actively harmed, only not helped. The one person can reasonably reject the principle allowing their sacrifice.
• Doing vs allowing distinction: Contractualism naturally captures the intuition that actively harming is worse than failing to help, because the complaint structure differs.

Aggregation Paradox (World Cup Radio)

Millions want to listen to the World Cup on the radio. One person needs the frequency for a distress call to avoid severe injury. Should we give the frequency to the radio station or the individual?

• Utilitarian answer: Give it to the World Cup. Millions of small pleasures (1 unit each) vastly outweigh one person's injury avoidance (1000 units).
• Contractualist answer: Give it to the individual. The individual's complaint (1000 units) is far stronger than any individual listener's complaint (1 unit). We don't aggregate the small complaints across millions. The strongest individual complaint wins.
• Anti-aggregation: Contractualism denies that many trivial benefits can outweigh one serious harm in the complaint structure.

Reasonable Rejection

What makes a rejection "reasonable"? Scanlon offers several criteria:

• Generic reasons: Personal preferences alone don't justify rejection. The complaint must be based on generic features of the situation (harm, burden, fairness).
• Standpoint relativity: Each person assesses complaints from their own perspective, but must recognize others' similar reasoning.
• Threshold of significance: Not every slight burden grounds reasonable rejection. There's a threshold below which complaints aren't decisive (though where exactly is debatable).
• Reasonableness: Rejection must be based on considerations others, seeking mutual justification, could recognize as legitimate.

Philosophical Significance

• Alternative to consequentialism: Provides a systematic non-consequentialist moral theory without relying solely on intuitions about rights or duties.
• Respect for persons: Treats each person's claim as mattering in its own right, not just as a contribution to aggregate welfare.
• Justification to each: Morality requires being able to justify our actions to each affected individual, not just to everyone considered collectively.
• Anti-aggregation: Blocks certain aggregative tradeoffs that seem intuitively wrong (e.g., torturing one to give many mild pleasures).

Criticisms and Challenges

• Individualist atomism: Does contractualism wrongly ignore group-level goods and collective interests?
• Threshold vagueness: What counts as "reasonable rejection" is often unclear in practice.
• Numbers problem: How do we handle cases where complaints are equal but numbers differ? Scanlon allows numbers to matter in tie-breaking, but critics question the consistency.
• Saving the greater number: If we can save 5 or save 1, contractualism says save 5. But why, if we're not aggregating? Scanlon: each of the 5 has an equal claim, so there's a tie-breaking procedure, not aggregation.
• Demandingness: Like other impartial theories, contractualism may be very demanding in requiring us to justify our actions to all affected parties.

Key References

• T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (1998) - Original systematic presentation
• T. M. Scanlon, "Contractualism and Utilitarianism" (1982) - Earlier influential paper
• Derek Parfit, On What Matters (2011) - Critical engagement and "triple theory" convergence
• Rahul Kumar, "Contractualism on Saving the Many" (2001) - On numbers and tie-breaking
• Niko Kolodny & John MacFarlane, "Ifs and Oughts" (2010) - On reject-conditions and deontic logic