ABSTRACT
Contractarianism has been deployed as an answer to just about every kind of question there is in moral and political philosophy, and over time its opponents have taken the opportunity to devise a set of very robust objections to the theory. This chapter discusses six of them: (1) The fact-sensitivity objection, (2) the directed wrongdoing objection, (3) the problem of immoral purposes, (4) the grandfathering-in-immoral-circumstances objection, (5) the arbitrariness objection, and (6) Hegel’s objection. Contractarianism sidesteps the first three of them, the chapter maintains, because it applies only to political morality; it sidesteps the last three because its state of nature thought experiment is reversed. Over the course of the chapter the metaethical status of political morality becomes clearer. The chapter argues that the contractarian should take the position that the most fundamental truths of political morality aren’t fundamental full stop; rather, they follow from the truth that generally speaking role-holders are morally obligated to do what it is their role to do. From this it follows that a contractarian about political morality need not be a contractarian about other areas of morality and that no political morality can license what would otherwise be morally impermissible.
