Can Contractualism Be Saved?
Over the past fifteen years, a number of scholars sympathetic to Scanlonian contractualism have sought to rescue it from the paradox created by Scanlon’s original ex post version: that the wrongness of an act depends on its consequences. Their proposed solution, “ex ante contractualism,” retains the most distinctive feature of Scanlonian contractualism, the maximin rule embedded in Scanlon’s Greater Burden Principle, but applies it to expected rather than actual outcomes. That change in epistemic perspective eliminates the paradox at the heart of ex post contractualism. But it introduces a number of equally serious problems that limit its application to a small set of stylized cases that have colonized the philosophical laboratory but are rarely encountered outside of it.