Conservative Contractarianism

[摘要] Moral contractarianism, as demonstrated in the work of David Gauthier, is an attempt to derive moral principles from the non-moral premises of rational choice.However, this contractarian enterprise runs aground because it is unable to show that agents would commit to norms in a fairly realistic world where knowledge is limited in space and time, where random shocks are likely, and where agents can be arbitrarily differentiated from one another.In a world like this, agents will find that the most ;;rational;; strategy is to behave ;;non-rationally,;; imitating the behavior of others in their vicinity and preserving a limited sort of ignorance.

[发布机构] University of Waterloo

[效力级别] Contractarianism

[关键词] Philosophy;Contractarianism;Gauthier;conservativism;evolutionary dynamics;computer simulations