David Gauthier

This article discusses Gauthier's defense of morality as "rational constraint on the pursuit of individual interest". The article criticizes his attempt to base the defense on the "utility-maximizing conception of rationality", the article and argues: (i) Gauthier needs to take a principle connecting the rationality of forming the disposition to constrained maximization to the rationality of acting in accordance with the disposition; (ii) the principle cannot be derived from the action-maximizing conception of rationality. (iii) if the principle is considered a separate component of the disposition-maximizing conception of rationality, his defense cannot be taken to begin "from an initial presumption against morality."

Recently, philosophers have investigated the emergence and evolution of the social contract. Yet extant work is limited as it focuses on the use of simple behavioral norms in rather rigid strategic settings. Drawing on ax-iomatic bargaining theory, we explore the dynamics of more sophisticated norms capable of guiding behavior in a wide range of scenarios. Overall, our investigation suggests the utilitarian bargaining solution has a privileged status as it has certain stability properties other social arrangements lack.

The prisoner's dilemma plays a central, but shifting, role in Gauthier's moral theorizing. In " Morality and Advantage " it provides a model, demonstrating how morality can have seemingly contradictory properties. In Morals By Agreement, it poses a special problem for the view that moral behavior is individually rational. Authorities on game theory have subsequently disputed the idea the idea that the PD is an appropriate tool for thinking about moral theory. The first part of this paper examines the roles of the PD in Gauthier's writings. The second part outlines a project, with both descriptive and normative components, that develops the insights of " Morality and Advantage " while preserving it from the attack of the game theorists.

Ordered social life requires rules of conduct that help generate and preserve peaceful and cooperative interactions among individuals. The problem is that these social rules impose costs. They prohibit us from doing some things we might see as important and they require us to do other things that we might otherwise not do. The question for the contractarian is whether the costs of these social rules can be rationally justified. I argue that traditional contract theories have tended to underestimate the importance of evaluating the cost of enforcement and compliance in the contract procedure. In addition, the social contract has been understood narrowly as a method of justifying specifically moral or political rules. I defend a broader version of contractarianism as a justificatory model that can be used to evaluate any set of social rules or institutions that impose costs on agents. In so doing, I argue that contractarianism is a general method of evaluating and justifying the rules that order the structure of social life.

For contractarians, justice is the result of a rational bargain. The goal is to show that the rules of justice are consistent with rationality. The two most important bargaining theories of justice are David Gauthier’s and those that use the Nash’s bargaining solution. I argue that both of these approaches are fatally undermined by their reliance on a symmetry condition. Symmetry is a substantive constraint, not an implication of rationality. I argue that using symmetry to generate uniqueness undermines the goal of bargaining theories of justice.

Public reason theories are characterized by three conditions: constructivism, representation, and stability. Constructivism holds that justification does not rely on any antecedent moral or political values outside of the procedure of agreement. Representation holds that the reasons for the choice in the model must be rationally explicable to real agents outside the model. Stability holds that the principles chosen in the procedure should be stable upon reflection, especially in the face of diversity in a pluralistic society. Choice procedures that involve at least two-stages with different information, as Rawls’s theory does, will be path-dependent and not meet the condition of representation since it will not be globally coherent. Attempts to solve this problem without eliminating the segmentation of choice in the procedure will run afoul of constructivism or stability. This problem is instructive because it highlights how public reason theories must evolve in the face of increased concerns about diversity.

En el intento de defender una interpretación de la ética y la filosofía política de David Hume cercana al utilitarismo clásico, se interpone de un modo  clave el llamado problema del “Sensible Knave” planteado por este autor al final de su obra más utilitarista, la Investigación sobre los Principios de la Moral.

Según la interpretación clásica de este fragmento, la racionalidad utilitarista en el ámbito político colisionaría con la moral volviendo a ésta última inútil. Por tanto, en el ámbito político la defensa de un utilitarismo moral sería una tarea autocontradictoria.

Con el fin de mostrar que, primero, Hume no dice nada parecido a esto y, segundo, que incluso señala la forma de superar esta aparente contradicción entre moralidad y racionalidad, se analizan brevemente los argumentos de los que procede básicamente esta interpretación “antiutilitarista” estándar y se defiende una interpretación de la discusión humeana sobre el problema del aparente conflicto entre moralidad y racionalidad, o de los incentivos racionales para el comportamiento inmoral, que permite explicar mejor la posición de Hume sobre este problema.

Finalmente, se propone una instancia de superación de la contradicción moralidad/racionalidad por medio de un utilitarismo de la regla atemperado centrado en la idea del “desarrollo progresivo de instituciones artificiales de refuerzo de la moralidad”, que el propio Hume sugeriría en otros lugares en los que aborda el tema de la contradicción aparente entre “morality” y “knavery”. Se proponen también posibles líneas de desarrollo futuro de esta idea, entre ellas su uso para aclarar la posible relación del pensamiento de David Hume con ciertas formas de liberalismo contemporáneo.

Palabras clave: David Hume, Utilitarismo de la regla, Sensible Knave, David Gauthier, Annete Baier, John Rawls, Instituciones, Árbitros Institucionales, Liberalismo, Socialismo.

'Dissonance of Objects' is an essay by Lotte Løvholm accompanying artist Nour Fog's exhibition Body Objects at Overgaden, Copenhagen Spring 2019.

Excerpt: In ‘Body Objects’, the material references to the human body as a creature are less clear than in Thek. They are mere hints. This is where ceramics, smoke, and noise come together in a conference on bodies. Hearts pump out smoke and, whether it is an intended criticism of twenty-first-century biopolitical health regimes remains unclear, since, like the smoke throwing a veil of mist across the exhibition, the din upends any hope of clarity. It prophesises and compels. This is not a linear narrative as is that of Thek, for, in the words borrowed from David Gauthier’s text on the Sirens, the works ‘no longer carry a specific meaning; they carry all or none’.This is the reason for nausea. But not in an unpleasant sense of the word. Rather as a clarified human condi-tion. Like a devotion to ’seeing the body’. The demons of death are not dangerous, they are just part of existence.

Institutions have often been characterized as responses to conflict, and assumptions about the nature of conflict have frequently determined the structure and scope of political activity.  Two prevalent interpretations of conflict portray it as either a conflict of interest or a competition for resources.  Yet there is another view of conflict that regards it in terms of a contest of values, something that raises a different set of questions and issues.  These issues involve concerns about the incommensurability and incompatibility of values, and challenge contemporary arguments that rely upon the ordering of preferences or that urge the pursuit of a normative consensus.  As I argue, both preference based theories and theories of deliberative democracy prove to deal inadequately with the challenges of moral pluralism and value conflict.