Counting on Contractualism : Numbers, Risk, and the Individualist Restriction

T.M. Scanlon’s version of contractualism has emerged as one of the most well-developed challengers to consequentialism. According to one of contractualism’s most appealing features—the Individualist Restriction—the justifiability of our actions depends solely on the personal reasons of single individuals. While it allows contractualism to avoid many of consequentialism’s most implausible implications, it causes trouble for the theory with regards to aggregation, as contractualism cannot justify saving a larger group, rather than a smaller group, from equal harms (so-called equal stakes cases). In this thesis, I distinguish between two versions of the Individualist Restriction—a Strong Individualist Restriction and a Weak Individualist Restriction. While most writers have assumed the former, I argue that we ought to reject it and adopt the Weak Individualist Restriction instead. I argue that doing so allows us to provide a solution to the problem of aggregation in equal stakes cases. Further, I argue that this solution can be extended to cases of non-equal harms. I argue that doing so allows us to give a plausible account of when and how the numbers of individuals involved matter for cases with non-equal stakes. The account can also be extended to cases of risk. Doing so strengthens the case for one strand of contractualism—ex post contractualism—as this strand can make use of the same tools in both risk cases and non-risk cases. The same cannot be said for its main rival, ex ante contractualism: it cannot make use of those tools. Lastly, the thesis considers whether or not adopting the Weak Individualist Restriction calls contractualism’s explanatory adequacy into question. It is argued that it does not.