Contractarian Ethics Research Articles

Ethics, Force, and Power: On the Political Preconditions of Just War

Benbaji and Statman’s contractarian ethics of war offers a powerful new philosophical defence of orthodox conclusions against revisionist criticism. I present a two-pronged argument in reply. First, contractarianism yields what I call ‘decent war theory,’ a theory in which war between decent states is paradigmatic. I argue, by contrast, that states should treat wars against indecent states as paradigmatic, resulting in a Rawlsian alternative that issues in an ethics closer to revisionism. The second prong argues that the symmetrical international distribution of power required by contractarianism throws into doubt the viability of war as an instrument for securing just ends. But I argue that there is a very important lesson to take from Benbaji and Statman’s analysis here. Even if contractarianism is arguably weakened by its political assumptions, revisionists frequently fail to pay any attention to the vagaries of power and their effects in shaping the outcomes of different accounts of ethics. I therefore argue that just war theory in general ought to develop an ethics with sufficient versatility to respond to shifts and variations in the distribution of military power. In particular, philosophers must consider morally defensible ways in which decent states can challenge rising indecent powers.

War by Agreement: A Contractarian Ethics of War, Yitzhak Benbaji and Daniel Statman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 240 pp., $65 cloth, $52.99 eBook.

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Evaluation as institution: a contractarian argument for needs-based economic evaluation

BackgroundThere is a gap between health economic evaluation methods and the value judgments of coverage decision makers, at least in Germany. Measuring preference satisfaction has been claimed to be inappropriate for allocating health care resources, e.g. because it disregards medical need. The existing methods oriented at medical need have been claimed to disregard non-consequentialist fairness concerns. The aim of this article is to propose a new, contractarian argument for justifying needs-based economic evaluation. It is based on consent rather than maximization of some impersonal unit of value to accommodate the fairness concerns.Main textThis conceptual paper draws upon contractarian ethics and constitution economics to show how economic evaluation can be viewed as an institution to overcome societal conflicts in the allocation of scarce health care resources. For this, the problem of allocating scarce health care resources in a society is reconstructed as a social dilemma.Both disadvantaged patients and affluent healthy individuals can be argued to share interests in a societal contract to provide technologies which ameliorate medical need, based on progressive funding. The use of needs-based economic evaluation methods for coverage determination can be interpreted as institutions for conflict resolution as far as they use consented criteria to ensure the social contract’s sustainability and avoid implicit rationing or unaffordable contribution rates. This justifies the use of needs-based evaluation methods by Pareto-superiority and consent (rather than by some needs-based value function per se).ConclusionThe view of economic evaluation presented here may help account for fairness concerns in the further development of evaluation methods. This is because it directs the attention away from determining some unit of value to be maximized towards determining those persons who are most likely not to consent and meeting their concerns. Following this direction in methods development is likely to increase the acceptability of health economic evaluation by decision makers.

Potential Employees' Ethical Perceptions of Active Monitoring: The Dark Side of Data Analytics

ABSTRACTEmployees are increasingly monitored through integrated, data analytic-driven continuous (i.e., active) monitoring systems that analyze a wealth of data concerning their behaviors and actions. While use of these active monitoring systems has been advocated for improved performance measurement, increased productivity, and reduced costs, discussion has generally ignored the ethical implications of such monitoring as well as the impact on employees' morale and views of the organization. This study investigates these issues through application of contractarian ethics in the experimental examination of employees' beliefs and intentions based on organizational monitoring practices. In the first experiment, the level of monitoring and pay are varied to understand potential employees' perspectives on organizational ethics, willingness to accept a job with an organization, and their likely job satisfaction. While pay may sway willingness to accept a job and even the level of satisfaction, pay does not affect potential employees' ethical perceptions of the organization. Under high monitoring situations, potential employees consistently rate the ethics of the organization as poor. In a second experiment, four justifications that the literature suggests employers may provide for using employee monitoring are found to have no effect on employees' views about the organization in a high monitoring environment.Data Availability: Please contact the authors.

Contractarian ethics and Harsanyi’s two justifications of utilitarianism

Harsanyi defends utilitarianism by means of an axiomatic proof and by what he calls the ‘equiprobability model’. Both justifications of utilitarianism aim to show that utilitarian ethics can be derived from Bayesian rationality and some weak moral constraints on the reasoning of rational agents. I argue that, from the perspective of Bayesian agents, one of these constraints, the impersonality constraint, is not weak at all if its meaning is made precise and that generally it even contradicts individual rational agency. Without the impersonality constraint, Harsanyi’s two justifications of utilitarianism on the grounds of Bayesian rationality fail. As an alternative, I develop a contractarian framework that is compatible with individual rational agency and Harsanyi’s central assumptions, and that allows the derivation of moral conclusions on the grounds of Bayesian rationality. The developed framework offers a novel justification of contractarian ethics and may best be described as a combined version of Harsanyi’s equiprobability model and Rawls’s original position.

Introduction: The Relevance of Rational Decision Theory for Ethics

Rational decision theory (including rational game theory) has played important roles in more formally oriented ethics, from providing the definition of ‘utility’ in welfare ethics to much more substantial contributions, like the justification of morals in game-theoretic reconstructions of contractarian ethics. Further uses of rational decision theory in ethics include: the justification of morals by means of rational decisions in an original position; the axiomatic justification of utilitarianism; risk ethics etc. So there are many ways in which rational decision theory has actually been used in ethics. These various endeavours are rather intricate, and it is far from clear which role(s) rational decision theory should play in ethics. There is a role for empirical (psychological or economic) decision theory in ethics too. However this introduction as well as this whole issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice deals with rational decision theory only; therefore, the addendum “rational” in the following will often be omitted. During the last decades, several proposals have been made to justify certain systems of morals in a decision-theoretic fashion (e.g. by Harsanyi, Rawls, Gauthier, Broome); and, because of the purely formal character of rational decision theory, such proposals are held to be rather strong justifications of morals. However, as is usual in ethics, all these proposals have been contested—in part precisely because of their too formal nature. How much rational decision theory can and should contribute to ethics largely depends on which kind of justification of morals (or parts of morals) by decisiontheoretic means in the end turns out to be valid and sound. The various justificatory uses of decision theory in ethics can be ordered according to the strength of the claims these arguments try to prove. The stronger the most ambitious justificatory project that in the end turns out to be valid and sound, the more important the role of rational DOI 10.1007/s10677-010-9228-9

The Moral Problem of Health Disparities

Health disparities exist along lines of race/ethnicity and socioeconomic class in US society. I argue that we should work to eliminate these health disparities because their existence is a moral wrong that needs to be addressed. Health disparities are morally wrong because they exemplify historical injustices. Contractarian ethics, Kantian ethics, and utilitarian ethics all provide theoretical justification for viewing health disparities as a moral wrong, as do several ethical principles of primary importance in bioethics. The moral consequences of health disparities are also troubling and further support the claim that these disparities are a moral wrong. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides additional support that health disparities are a moral wrong, as does an analogy with the generally accepted duty to provide equal access to education. In this article, I also consider and respond to 3 objections to my thesis.

Revisiting Confucian Jen Ethics and Feminist Care Ethics: A Reply to Daniel Star and Lijun Yuan

At two fronts I defend my 1994 article. I argue that differences between Confucian jen ethics and feminist care ethics do not preclude their shared commonalities in comparison with Kantian. utilitarian, and contractarian ethics, and that Confucians do care. I also argue that Confucianism is capable of changing its rules to reflect its renewed understanding of jen, that care ethics is feminist, and that similarities between Confucian and care ethics have significant implications.

The New social contract: essays on Gauthier

Rationality in agreement - a commentary on Gauthier's Morals by Agreement, Gilbert Harman rationality, value and preference, Kurt Baier bargaining, justice and justification - toward reconstruction, James S.Fishkin bargaining for justice, Russell Hardin the Gauthier enterprise, James M.Buchanan constained maximization and resolute choice, Edward F.McClennen the relation between self-interest and contractarian ethics, Christopher W.Morris rationality and affectivity - the metaphysics of the moral self, Laurence Thomas morality, rational choice and semantic representation - a reply to my critics, David Gauthier

The Relation between Self-Interest and Justice in Contractarian Ethics

One of the most noteworthy features of David Gauthier's rational choice, contractarian theory of morality is its appeal to self-interested rationality. This appeal, however, will undoubtedly be the source of much controversy and criticism. For while self-interestedness is characteristic of much human behavior, it is not characteristic of all such behavior, much less of that which is most admirable. Yet contractarian ethics appears to assume that humans are entirely self-interested. It is not usually thought a virtue of a theory that its assumptions are literally false. What may be said on behalf of the contractarian?