ABSTRACT
The purpose of my paper is to discuss the relationship between Hobbesian contractarianism and applied ethics from some kind of meta-perspective. It is often urged that contractarianism and the issues characteristic of applied ethics are something of a bad match because the contractarian approach forces us into conclusions regarding the moral status of children, disabled people or animals that are incompatible with deep-rooted moral intuitions. My aim in this paper is to identify the specific features of the contractarian approach from which these counter-intuitive conclusions result and to reject some common misconceptions about what these features are. The upshot of my analysis will be that the limited scope of contractarian morality, which is explicitly conceded by leading contractarians such as Hobbes, David Gauthier or Peter Stemmer, does not follow from the contractarian rationale itself but from a further commitment to a quite narrow conception of self-interest and mutual advantage. In my view, this further commitment can be traced to certain views about the demands of moral justification in the political arena, views which appear somewhat misguided if scrutinized more closely. My overall conclusion is that a residual challenge remains for contractarians and that they, more so perhaps than proponents of rival normative-ethical theories, face a decision that arises from the janus-faced nature of applied ethics: to take a stand on whether their main goal consists in providing the most straightforward philosophical justification of morality or in providing a consensualist solution to the moral and political problems of our time.
