Animals, Mental Defectives, and the Social Contract

Abstract

Wbatever its merit as an account of political institutions, the social contract theory bas, in recent years, been the subject of intense scrutiny as an explanation for our moral obligations. Prominent examples of this approacb include the work of Jobn Rawls and David Gauthier. l A criticism of this understanding ofmoral obligation arises from several commentators, partly as a result of claims made by the original authors. The criticism is this: The social contract theory seems to imply that the scope of our moral obligations is unreasonably narrow. In particular, at fIrSt glance the theory seems to exclude from direct consideration the interests of animals and severely defective bumans. Criticisms of this sort are intuitive in nature and common to pbilosophy, yet many view them with disdain. It is an open question whether the failure of an otherwise attractive theoretical account to square with our moral intuitions tells against thetheory or the intuition, but resolving this dispute lies beyond the scope of this paper. However, surely the intuition and the theory cannot both be true, or at least this is bow it has seemed to the majority ofcommentators on the question. One either believes that we bave direct duties to animals