On Ex Ante Contractualism

Korbinian Rüger

doi:https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v13i3.323

Volume 13, Number 3
July 2018

ARTICLE

On Ex Ante Contractualism

Volume 13, Number 3, July 2018, Pages 240–258

https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v13i3.323

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Abstract

Ex ante contractualism holds that in situations involving risk we ought to act in accordance with principles that license the action that satisfies the strongest individual claim, where those claims are a function of the expected value that a given policy gives each person ex ante. I here challenge ex ante contractualism on contractualist grounds. I argue that adopting ex ante contractualism would have far reaching implications that contractualists, or many nonconsequentialist in general, would find very hard to accept. I conclude that to block these implications, contractualists should adopt an ex post approach to deal with decisions under risk.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

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