COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, David Gauthier, Thomas Nagel
10 Feb 2020
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At contractualism: contractualism requires a metastandard of what exactly a fair or reasonable judgment entails. Scanlon thinks that the shared aim of finding non-rejectable principles "brings other reasons in its train. Given this aim, for example, it would be unreasonable to give the interests of others no weight in deciding which principles to accept. This seems to me to leave his account almost completely indeterminate. One ground for reasonable rejection that scanlon specifically appeals to is fairness (cf. Consider the difference between the role he assigns to fairness and the role rawls assigns to it. For scanlon, fairness is a ground for accepting principles, unfairness for rejecting them. Agreement on principles thus requires an independent standard of fairness to which the parties can appeal: under contractualism, everyone could claim that their moral principles could not be reasonably rejected. There is no higher authority to delineate between the two claims.
