Contractarian constructivism
Journal of philosophy, vol. 92, no. 4, 1995, pp. 181–204
Abstract
The Story of Philosophy: the Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers is a book by Will Durant that profiles several prominent Western philosophers and their ideas, beginning with Plato and on through Friedrich Nietzsche. Durant attempts to show the interconnection of their ideas and how one philosopher’s ideas informed the next.\textbackslashn\textbackslashnThere are nine chapters each focused on one philosopher, and two more chapters each containing briefer profiles of three early 20th century philosophers. The book was published in 1926, with a revised second edition released in 1933. The work was originally published as a number of pamphlets in the Little Blue Books series of inexpensive worker education pamphlets.[1] They proved so popular they were assembled into a single book and published in hardcover form by Simon & Schuster in 1926.\textbackslashn\textbackslashnPhilosophers profiled are, in order: Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire (with a section on Rousseau), Immanuel Kant (with a section on Hegel), Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche.\textbackslashn\textbackslashnThe final two chapters are devoted to European and then American philosophers. Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, and Bertrand Russell are covered in the tenth, and George Santayana, William James, and John Dewey are covered in the eleventh.
Quotes from this work
[C]ritics have complained that contractarians fail to provide any good reason for thinking that acts prohibited by the norms agreed on by the hypothetical contractors must be wrong. It would be absurd, they argue, to suggest that this is because hypothetical contracts (that is, contracts that one has not in fact made but would have made under certain circumstances) are somehow morally binding. Contractarian constructivism is clearly not committed to such an absurd view. Although it makes the wrongness of lying a consequence of the fact that lying would be prohibited by the norms agreed on by the contractors, this is not because an obligation to refrain from lying is created by such an agreement in the way that promises create obligations. Rather, the wrongness of lying (like the wrongness of breaking a promise) is a consequence of this agreement simply in the sense that being prohibited by such an agreement is what its moral wrongness consists in.