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Conservative Contractarianism

Moral contractarianism, as demonstrated in the work of David Gauthier, is an attempt to derive moral principles from the non-moral premises of rational choice. However, this contractarian enterprise runs aground because it is unable to show that agents would commit to norms in a fairly realistic world where knowledge is limited in space and time, where random shocks are likely, and where agents can be arbitrarily differentiated from one another. In a world like this, agents will find that the most "rational" strategy is to behave "non-rationally," imitating the behavior of others in their vicinity and preserving a limited sort of ignorance.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OWTU.10012/762
Date January 2004
CreatorsWatson, Terrence
PublisherUniversity of Waterloo
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
RightsCopyright: 2004, Watson, Terrence. All rights reserved.

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