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The Gauthier Contract: Applicable or Not?

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Abstract

In a 2013 article, David Gauthier noted upon the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Morals by Agreement that his contractarian approach to morality had found a niche among ‘some of those who remain unpersuaded by either Kantianism or utilitarianism’. In this article I will focus on Pareto optimization and I will argue that the Gauthier contract, even in spite of the article’s revisions, is still less useful for consultation purposes than Gauthier is assuming. To highlight the conceptual distance that I think separates the Gauthier contract from real-world circumstances—a separation that is greater than Gauthier supposes—I will focus on the problem of ‘civic defection’. The point is not for us to repudiate as such the deliverances of the Gauthier model, but simply to use caution in our deployment of the model, and, in order to access the full extent of the model’s offerings, to resist the temptation to deploy it in the service of purposes which it is not capable of accomplishing.

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Notes

  1. ‘[o]n the maximizing conception it is not interests in the self, that take oneself as object, but interests of the self, held by oneself as subject, that provide the basis for rational choice and action’ (Gauthier 1986, p. 7).

  2. To be a utility maximizer is not necessarily to maximize one’s non-tuistic preferences. I follow Christopher Morris: contractarians can defend the view that utility-maximization involves the maximization of agent-relative coherent preference. Such a conception of maximization allows for both non-tuistic and tuistic preferences.

  3. Pareto optimality is a way of measuring social efficiency: an outcome is Pareto optimal if no other outcome would make every participant at least as well off and at least one participant strictly better off.

  4. Also, Gauthier (1997, pp. 132–148) and Gauthier (1993, pp. 24–40).

  5. My critiques draw to some extent on Murray (2007) and also Southwood (2010).

  6. Without the political domain, how else in a large liberal democracy would morals be enforced?

  7. See Putnam (2000, pp. 31–64, 277–284), Galston (2001a, p. 16), Elshtain (1995, pp. 1–36), Galston (2004, pp. 263–266), Galston (2001a, pp. 217–234), and Dagger (1997, pp. 132–153).

  8. Activities which are being abandoned include voting, demonstrating, lobbying, and running for office. See Putnam (1995, pp. 664–683), Rahn and Transue (1998, pp. 545–565), and Costa and Kahn (2001).

  9. Their partial defections are representable with the preference relation R, where xRy means that x is at least as good as y. If agents believe that xRy and not that yRx, then for them, xPy—x is preferred to y. The participation of the civic defectors is describable as yPx, where y is civic defection and x is civic participation. Yet, typically, they also believe that yPz, where z is a further step – defection from society as such – and y is merely an initial step of civic defection. In selecting both yPx and yPz, they are electing to be first-stage cooperators and second-stage defectors.

  10. For evidence that liberal democratic governance is more functional the more that the citizens participate, see Putnam (1993) and Knack (2002).

  11. See Taylor (1985), Crowder (2002), Gans (1991), Grabb et al. (1999), and (Bellah et al. 2007).

  12. American Millennials are increasingly viewing the Pareto-optimizing impact of civic defectors as being just as great as the Pareto-optimizing impact of civic participants. Instead of choosing lives of civic service the Millennials are turning increasingly to the private sector, believing that their capacity to promote a Pareto-optimal outcome is just as great through civic defection as it is through second-stage participation. See Duncan (2012), Lapin (2012), and Denz (2012).

  13. The institutional system is an indifferent cooperator and not an unconditional cooperator. It does not cooperate at all times—the roads are not always reliably repaired.

  14. Suppose it were objected that at America’s stage two the decision-making scenario is already moralized because its stage-one moral features are already shaping the citizens, and thus the case study does not resemble Gauthier. I respond that the empirical evidence suggests that the second stage is inseparable from the first, because in a society of strangers who lack relational discernment mechanisms, the choice has to be for both, and not just for one.

  15. Think of the senior citizens who donate their time to public causes, the altruistic polling station operators, the citizens who serve for lesser pay on county juries, and the volunteer political campaign workers.

  16. Civic defection of course has been well-traveled in the literature; here I am just saying it is not capable of being solved via a Pareto-optimization strategy. For instance, Brian Barry has argued that Gauthier's contractarianism collapses because it fails to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of why agents should obey the rules if at some time some other action path offers a better prospect of promoting their conception of the good (Barry 1995, p. 34). Examples of works that have highlighted the free-rider problem in a general-purpose civic context include Schumpeter (2008), and Arneson (2009).

  17. Civic defection is just one of numerous different real-world problems that could potentially be referenced to demonstrate the inability of the Gauthier contract to offer consultation help. Others are the tendency of persons to change their minds in the course of their cooperative efforts; the inconsistencies of their behaviors in crises; their inability to discern each other’s intentions with the certainty that Gauthier anticipates; and their propensity to deceive each other.

  18. For McClennen, ‘the failure of any arrangement to generate a Strictly Pareto-Optimal outcome means that the arrangement in question fails to meet a condition of individual rationality’ (McClennen 2010, p. 531). Also, see Roth (1977, pp. 64-65).

  19. Note that while defection is just as rational as participation (if not more so, because of the agent’s other considerations), it too is not decisively rational because the agent might have an individual cocktail of non-Pareto-optimizing considerations that suggest participation.

  20. See Bogaert et al. (2008), Also, Murphy et al. (2011). Another good overview of social value orientation and the social dilemmas literature is Van Lange et al. (2013); and also Henrich et al. (2005). There is likewise literature on the neurodynamics of prosocial behavior (Declerck et al. 2013).

  21. This point has already to some extent been made, although in a different way and not in a manner that is backed with recent social science studies, by Hubin (1991); also on point is McCracken and Shaw (1995); a response is available in Dimock (1999); again, see Morris and Ripstein (2001).

  22. This conviction is a reiteration of what he said earlier in Morals: ‘[a] community in which most individuals are disposed to comply with fair and optimal agreements and practices, and so to base their actions on joint cooperative strategies, will be self-sustaining’ (Gauthier 1986, p. 182).

  23. See Biel et al. (2008).

  24. Such a response is certainly consistent with Gauthier’s sentiments in chapter six of Morals, where he suggests that real-world persons act for motives and principles that are otherwise than the motives and principles of his ideal bargainers.

  25. This is true, I think, even though I grant that he does not see its normative deliverances as being one-to-one replacements for real-world cooperative values (Gauthier 1991, p. 27). In numerous passages in Morals Gauthier also expresses his confidence in the real-world traction of his contract: in chapter six he says that ‘Constrained maximization thus links the idea of morals by agreement to actual moral practice’ (Gauthier 1986, p. 168).

  26. ‘…the force of the social contract is not found simply in its being an agreement. Rather its force lies in its being the nearest approximation to an agreement in a context in which literal agreement is not possible but would be desirable. We cannot literally choose the terms of our interaction, but we can determine what terms we would rationally choose, from an ex ante standpoint that does not privilege the actual course that our interaction has taken’ (Gauthier 2013, p. 619).

  27. This includes especially the setups which are nefarious (Gauthier 1991, p. 29).

  28. Earlier, in Morals, Gauthier confirms these sentiments. For instance, in chapter six of Morals he says that ‘Constrained maximization thus links the idea of morals by agreement to actual moral practice’ (Gauthier 1986, p. 168). Elsewhere, he says that ‘we may defend actual moral principles by reference to ideal co-operative arrangements, and the closer the principles fit, the stronger the defense’ (Gauthier 1991, p. 28).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their revision suggestions.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Houston Baptist University, Houston, TX, 77074, USA

    Jeremy Neill

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Neill, J. The Gauthier Contract: Applicable or Not?. Res Publica 23, 1–22 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9294-x

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