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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)