Conservative Contractarianism
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Date
2004
Authors
Watson, Terrence
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
Philosophy, Contractarianism, Gauthier, conservativism, evolutionary dynamics, computer simulations