Thanks for your question, Eli. The contractualist can say that it would be callous, uncaring, indecent, or invoke any number of other virtue theoretic notions to explain why you shouldn’t leave broken glass bottles in the woods. What they can’t say is that, in some situation where (a) there’s a tradeoff between some present person’s weighty interests and the 20-years-from-now young child’s interests and (b) addressing the present person’s weighty interests requires leaving the broken glass bottles, the 20-years-from-now young child could reasonably reject a principle that exposed them to risk instead of the present person’s. Upshot: they can condemn the action in any realistic scenario.
Thanks for your question, Eli. The contractualist can say that it would be callous, uncaring, indecent, or invoke any number of other virtue theoretic notions to explain why you shouldn’t leave broken glass bottles in the woods. What they can’t say is that, in some situation where (a) there’s a tradeoff between some present person’s weighty interests and the 20-years-from-now young child’s interests and (b) addressing the present person’s weighty interests requires leaving the broken glass bottles, the 20-years-from-now young child could reasonably reject a principle that exposed them to risk instead of the present person’s. Upshot: they can condemn the action in any realistic scenario.