ABSTRACT
Parfit offers a reformulation and defense of T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism, elaborately argued in What We Owe to Each Other . Scanlon has offered his theory as an alternative to some dominant doctrines in moral philosophy, such as utilitarianism and intuitionism. We should be concerned with that remarkable theory because Parfit’s hope is that the reformulated Scanlon’s principle will help him to underwrite his own thesis—the Ultimate Derivation thesis. The task of this chapter is to determine whether Scanlon’s theory—as Parfit reconstructs and underwrites it by fresh arguments—can serve Parfit’s cause.
If Parfit is to extract any consequentialist conclusion from Scanlon’s contractualism, this would mean either that Scanlon’s Contractualism has consequentialism embedded in it—Scanlon’s qualified protest notwithstanding—or Parfit needs to put a consequentialist element as a separate element into Scanlon’s Contractualism; or third and finally, Parfit is able to extract consequentialist conclusions from purely non-consequentialist premises. This has obvious bearing on Parfit’s Ultimate Derivation thesis. Of the three foregoing alternatives, the first two would not serve Parfit’s thesis.
The Circularity Objection that Scanlon forthrightly presents as an objection that allegedly confronts his theory is delineated. Scanlon’s as well as Parfit’s defense against the said objection are also sketched, and it is shown why these two defenses fail. It is further shown that Scanlon’s Contractualism does not satisfy Parfit’s Uniqueness Condition, which, in turn, puts the Ultimate Derivation thesis in jeopardy. Much of this chapter has a fairly significant bearing on Scanlon’s signature Individualist Restriction Principle (the particular reasons of particular agents are of paramount importance) and Parfit’s signature Impersonalist Restriction Principle (which allows aggregative reasoning, thus transcending particular reasons of particular agents). The chapter concludes with a paradox
