Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

consequentialism above, or may equally be considered as socially constructed or relative. These are — discourse ethics and contractarianism. A contractarian approach to morality asks what solutions could be agreed upon by various ‘contracting parties’ such as, people making up a nation state, a community or a commons. The parties start from some idealised position(s) and then negotiate until ethics (laws/rules) are agreed and may choose to discount things such as gross inequalities of power and malicious intentions underlying the formation of the rules. Rawls’ approach is contractarian as well as consequentialist. However, ‘contractarianism’ is not to be confused with ‘contractualism’, which can be understood in the Kantian sense of not allowing behaviour which could not be adopted as a universal law. Note there is some confusion in these terms, with both of these two very different meanings sometimes being conflated into the term ‘contractarianism’.

Discourse ethics likewise can have a more generalised interpretation. Note that in both instances (contractarianism and discourse ethics) the contracting parties would seem to need some principles already in place before deciding their rules and policies. So we can summarise by saying that the ‘making of a universal rule’ is contractualist in a very general sense. If a group of people agree amongst themselves about their own rules then this shades into contractarianism — and, when less formal — it becomes discourse ethics. Another way to understand the different meanings of contractualism and contractarianism is to say that in contractarianism participants seek simply

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