Robust Reconciliation

Abstract

Abstract Despite relying on contractarian thinking for much of his career, in one of his last articles Gerald Gaus critiques social contract theory for not fully engaging with the problem of diversity that serves as its theoretical starting point. As an improvement upon the social contract approach, Gaus proposes the “self-organizing moral systems approach.” As part of this approach, Gaus develops an agent-based model that aims to explore the possibility of emergent moral order amidst a highly diverse populace. This chapter reconstructs Gaus’s critique of social contract theory and presents three variations of a new agent-based model that seeks to qualify and extend Gaus’s results. Several philosophical insights emerge from this investigations. Most notably, social-moral systems can exhibit complex, nonequilibrium dynamics while maintaining high levels of coordination on shared rules. In other words, it is possible for moral reconciliation to remain robust in the face of exogenous and endogenous changes in social morality.