I just read the summary but I want to disagree with:
Contractualism says: When your actions could benefit both an individual and a group, don’t compare the individual’s claim to aid to the group’s claim to aid, which assumes that you can aggregate claims across individuals. Instead, compare an individual’s claim to aid to the claim of every other relevant individual in the situation by pairwise comparison. If one individual’s claim to aid is a lot stronger than any other’s, then you should help them.
“Contractualism” is a broad family of theories, many of which don’t entail this. (Indeed, some are equivalent to classical utilitarianism.) (And in particular, Scanlonian contractualism or (C1) don’t entail this.)
Fair point about it being a broad family of theories, Zach. What’s the claim that you take Scanlonian contractualism not to entail? The bit about not comparing the individual’s claim to aid to the group’s? Or the bit about who you should help?
Both. As you note, Scanlonian contractualism is about reasonable-rejection.
(Personally, I think it’s kinda appealing to consider contractualism for deriving principles, e.g. via rational-rejection or more concretely via veil-of-ignorance. I’m much less compelled by thinking in terms of claims-to-aid. I kinda assert that deriving-principles is much more central to contractualism; I notice that https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/ doesn’t use “claim,” “aid,” or “assistance” in the relevant sense, but does use “principle.”)
I just read the summary but I want to disagree with:
“Contractualism” is a broad family of theories, many of which don’t entail this. (Indeed, some are equivalent to classical utilitarianism.) (And in particular, Scanlonian contractualism or (C1) don’t entail this.)
Fair point about it being a broad family of theories, Zach. What’s the claim that you take Scanlonian contractualism not to entail? The bit about not comparing the individual’s claim to aid to the group’s? Or the bit about who you should help?
Both. As you note, Scanlonian contractualism is about reasonable-rejection.
(Personally, I think it’s kinda appealing to consider contractualism for deriving principles, e.g. via rational-rejection or more concretely via veil-of-ignorance. I’m much less compelled by thinking in terms of claims-to-aid. I kinda assert that deriving-principles is much more central to contractualism; I notice that https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/ doesn’t use “claim,” “aid,” or “assistance” in the relevant sense, but does use “principle.”)
(Probably not going to engage more on this.)
Ah, I see. Yeah, we discuss this explicitly in Section 2. The language in the executive summary is a simplification.