MAKING THE SIMPLE OBSCURE:

Hieronymi, who'd been a student of Scanlon's at Harvard, described contractualism to me this way: Imagine our crew has been at war with another crew for years, just slugging it out in a dense forest, firing on each other from trenches a hundred feet apart. It's an absolute stalemate. Neither side has any advantage over the other, and no hope of ever gaining one. Exhausted and weary, we call a temporary truce and decide we somehow need to design and describe a mutually livable society; we need a set of rules that can be accepted by both sides, no matter how wildly different our views are (and we obviously hold very different views, hence the endless trench warfare). Scanlon's suggestion: We give everyone on both sides the power to veto every rule, and then we start pitching rules.

Assuming everyone is motivated to actually find some rules in the first place--that everyone is reasonable--the rules that pass are the ones no one can reject. This means we'll all design our rules in such a way that they can be justified to other people, because if we don't, they won't become rules. It's a simple, elegant way of finding the basic bucket of societal goo that holds us together.

Now, it makes a big assumption--that everyone is going to be "reasonable." This is definitely one of those moments in philosophy where we have to back up and define something in order to feel like we know what the hell we're talking about. Scanlon doesn't give a quick, pithy definition of "reasonable," in part because . . . there isn't one. But in essence he says this: I'm reasonable if, when you and I disagree, I'm willing to constrain or modify my pursuit of my own interests to the same degree that you're willing to constrain or modify your pursuit of your interests.

When we come together to suggest our rules, then, we aren't just "looking out for number one." Rather, we both want to design a world where we accommodate each other's needs, so that when we don't see eye to eye on something, finding a way to coexist in some kind of harmony becomes our top priority. Scanlon is after "a shared willingness to modify our private demands in order to find a basis of justification that others also have reason to accept." It's a contract he wants all of us to sign, giving us all the same exact motivations.

Scanlon wants us to figure this stuff out with each other--to sit across from one another and simply ask: "Do you agree that this is okay?"

Importantly, this doesn't mean we always have to defer to other people in every conflict--because in Scanlon's world, they're approaching the conflict with the same intention to modify their interests in order to justify them to us. It creates a kind of dynamic tension, where we all regard everyone else's interests as equal to our own--not more important, but equally important. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd