Contractualism and Risk

Philosophy Compass 20 (9):e70055 (2025)
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Abstract

Individualist or non-aggregative moral theories, such as Scanlonian contractualism, deny the plausibility or the permissibility of interpersonal aggregation of harms and benefits or individual claims to determine what we ought to do. There has recently been much discussion about how these theories should be extended to cover cases in which we face empirical uncertainty about the effects of our actions. In this article, I provide a critical introduction to this debate. I introduce the two main opposing approaches to this problem, the ex-ante and the ex-post approach, and introduce the main objections they face.

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References found in this work

Quotation.Herman Cappelen, Ernest Lepore & Matthew McKeever - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
What We Owe to Each Other.Thomas Scanlon (ed.) - 1998 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Contractualism and utilitarianism.Thomas M. Scanlon - 1982 - In Amartya Sen & Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism and Beyond. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 103--128.
Contractualism and Social Risk.Johann Frick - 2015 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 43 (3):175-223.

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