Empathy, Contractual Ethics, and Justification

Abstract

To this point, I have shown that empathy makes a valuable epistemic contribution to producing sensitive understanding of others, and that it can play an important instrumental role in enabling moral deliberation as it is defined in a variety of ethical theories. I now turn to examining empathy’s role in contractual ethical theories in particular, specifically, those of John Rawls, John Harsanyi and David Gauthier. Contractual ethical theories are distinct from other normative ethical theories because they are based on the idea of rational agreement through a kind of social contract, and seek the public justification of moral principles. Public justification involves showing that an action, principle, or practice is reasonable because a variety of people have reasons in favor of that action, principle, or practice. My aim here is to show that contract theories model different types of perspective-taking empathy and empathetic deliberation. This means contract theories express the reasoning of empathetic deliberation, in that they provide a rationale for agreement to moral or political principles that takes into account a variety of perspectives, or points of view that are thought to be irreconcilable. Insofar as contract theories seek to express the reasoning of a variety of perspectives, they seek what could be called both public justification and interpersonal justification.KeywordsRational AgentSocial ContractMoral DimensionContract TheoryIdeal AgentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.