Contractualism on saving the many

Abstract

Imagine three boats, the position of each being equidistant from the other two. You are in the largest boat, alone, and your boat is in excellent condition. The other two boats are rapidly sinking; one contains two people (B&C), the other only one person (A). You only have time to reach one of the boats and save its passengers, before both boats sink beneath the surface, each taking all its remaining passengers with it. As far as common-sense morality is concerned, one's duty as rescuer, under the circumstances, is a straightforward matter: one ought to save the greater number. For some non-consequentialist characterizations of moral reasoning, however, the question of how this claim is to be justified if, in fact, it is justifiable is anything but an obvious matter. T. M. Scanlon's contractualism is a case in point. It excludes appeals to either the aggregate value of outcomes, or to the combined force of individual claims, from valid moral reasoning about the justification of the principles governing the duties we owe one another, which constitute much of what is normally appealed to as 'common-sense morality'. That such appeals are debarred by contractualism from playing any kind of fundamental role in moral reasoning is one of the central features of the view that mark it as a distinctively non-consequentialist characterization of common-sense moral reasoning. The exclusion of appeals to aggregate considerations, or claims on behalf of groups, from valid moral reasoning may lead one to doubt whether a plausible rationale, on contractualist terms, for the duty to save the greater number is even available. For how is a duty to save the many to be justified if one cannot appeal to the force of considerations like 'the claim of the many'? Some kind of aggregation of claims, one might think, has to be allowed to play a role in valid moral reasoning if the duty to save the many, rather than the one, is to prove to be morally defensible.' This suggests that a plausible rationale for the duty to save the many cannot be developed in contractualist terms, a conclusion that is certainly damaging for contractualism's claim to provide an illuminating characterization of common-sense moral reasoning about the kinds of duties we owe one another.