ABSTRACT
An objection may be raised to the relevance of such conclusions for the problems of ethics. One is a kind of coherence theory for ethics, which is illustrated by Professor Rawls’s conception of ‘reflective equilibrium’, and appears to be the guiding idea behind many discussions of normative problems like infanticide, euthanasia, and capital punishment at the present time. The most influential conception of ‘rationality’ among social sciences is simply a requirement on a person’s preferences: that they be transitive, complete, continuous and strongly independent. Professor Gauthier also appears to depart from these conceptions of rationality, although he professes to accept the standard social scientists’ ‘expected utility maximization’ conception of rational choice. Alan Gewirth’s ethical theory utilizes a very astringent notion of ‘rational’: as accepting observed facts and the principles of deductive and inductive logic. The views of philosophers like Rawls, Kurt Baier, and David Gauthier are somewhat less dependent on the content of empirical psychology.
