Abstract

Contractarians are interested in producing a fundamental justification for moral or political institutions. A fundamental justification must both produce: compelling reasons to adopt, and rely on grounds other than, the moral theory to be so justified. Taking instrumental rationality to be independent of any moral theory and sufficiently likely to lead to action, contractarians argue that a moral or political system is justified by its instrumental value to agents. ;Contractarians have previously relied on a bargaining model of contractarian justification, where agents to be bound by a particular set of moral dictates are understood as if they are bargaining with each other over which rules to adopt. I find this unacceptable: no agent could foretell any other agent's worth to him or her in the future---which is critical in bargaining theory. Agents do not have prior knowledge regarding which rules will thereafter govern their interactions, and therefore have no way to reliably estimate the ability of each to enhance or detract from each other's preferences. ;I suggest an alternative. Summing each person's preferences over each set of rules which might govern interaction, we identify the set of rules which is thereby ranked highest to be justified. This process is also found to be calculable in principle tractable), which is a necessary condition for providing a fundamental justification. Nevertheless we do not have sufficient information at this time to proceed. We do not have access to each person's preferences and beliefs regarding the set of moral systems. Exploring the literature surrounding contractarianism leads us to recommend an examination of psychology and economics to attempt to identify for each agent preferences that are of paramount import to that agent