Academic

Alm on Contractualism and the Duties of Compensation & Reciprocity

By Lawrence Solum

David Alm has posted Contractualism, Reciprocity, Compensation on the Internet. Here is a taste:

TWO GENERALLY RECOGNIZED moral duties are to reciprocate benefits one has received from others and to compensate harms one has done to others. In this paper I want to show that it is not possible to give an adequate account of either duty ? or at least one that corresponds to our actual practices ? within a contractualist moral theory of the type developed by T. M. Scanlon (1982, 1998). This fact is interesting in its own right, as contractualism is a leading contemporary contender among deontological moral theories, and the two duties I have mentioned are fairly standard ingredients of such theories.1 But it also serves to highlight a general problem with contractualism, at least in Scanlon?s version ? namely its one-dimensional view of the keystone of any plausible deontological theory: the idea of respect for persons.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on March 31, 2008 (boomark / email).