ABSTRACT
Jan Narveson has long advocated contractarianism as the only viable theory of justification in moral and political contexts. This chapter shows that one must derive very different substantive conclusions from the contractarian methodology, using a few of Jan Narveson's own discussions of substantive issues such as drug legislation, education and information policy. Narveson defends libertarianism as a substantive moral theory, with its attendant anarchistic or near-anarchistic implications for politics. Lawrence Haworth argues that autonomy is a basic value and so its protection must also come within the first principles of an adequate moral theory. The chapter argues that only autonomous desires can be values in the sense needed to ground the internalism of contractarian-based morality. Only desires that satisfy a range of conditions, drawn from a theory of autonomy, can have the normativity essential to the contractarian project. Personal autonomy consists, in its most basic sense, in the condition of being self-directed or self-governed.
