Justifiability to each person

Abstract

Scanlon’s contractualist framework defines moral wrongness through principles that no one could reasonably reject, yet the efficacy of this formula depends heavily on the “Individualist Restriction.” This restriction, which limits valid grounds for rejecting a principle to its implications for a single individual, is intended to distinguish contractualism from utilitarianism by blocking the aggregation of benefits across different people. However, this individualistic focus generates significant moral difficulties. It potentially mandates an “Equal Chance Principle” in life-saving scenarios that leads to fewer lives saved, and it fails to account for distributive justice in cases with unequal baselines of well-being. By forbidding the summing of benefits, the restriction can prioritize a larger benefit for a single person over smaller but more urgent benefits for a vast number of others who are worse off. This suggests that the utilitarian error is not the act of aggregation itself, but rather the failure to apply principles of priority or equality. Abandoning the Individualist Restriction allows contractualism to better incorporate distributive principles without sacrificing the core ideal of justifiability to each person. By allowing the moral weighing of aggregate claims, the framework remains a distinct alternative to utilitarianism while providing more intuitive results in complex trade-offs. – AI-generated abstract.