Abstract
This chapter summarizes the main findings of the book and their implications for moral contract theory. That the Practicability Assumption is empirically plausible means that we have reason to think people can learn to reason about and identify what principles would be the object of unanimous hypothetical agreement. That a qualified version of the Translucency Assumption is empirically plausible means that most of us can also become motivated to comply with those principles. Taken together, this means that people can become contractarian moral agents. The second part of the chapter discusses what steps agents must take to indeed become contractarian moral agents.
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Notes
- 1.
Once again, I use the word ‘contractarian’ to refer not only to Hobbesian contract theory, but also to the Kantian strain that is often called contractualism.
- 2.
It bears noting that given that Gauthier’s argument concentrates on cooperative norms that one’s interaction partners expect one to follow, and as such concerns a rather limited morality, this conclusion is unlikely to generalise to all moral principles that a Kantian contract theorist such as Scanlon deems valid.
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Timmerman, P. (2014). Conclusions. In: Moral Contract Theory and Social Cognition. Theory and Decision Library A:, vol 48. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04262-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04262-6_10
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04262-6
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