A Study Of Thomas Scanlon's Moral Contractualism

John Rawls has a powerful justification of the justice of social basicinstitution by recasting social contract theory in A Theory of Justice (1971),and released moral philosophy and political philosophy from the enclosure ofscientism and analytical philosophy. It influences covered philosophy, ethics,economics, politics, and many other fields, and today is still in the ascendant.His moral contract theory has generally been appreciated, in the meantimewas open to many criticisms. In the family of the "equal" liberalism, hiscompanions did their best to illuminate, defend, revise, and complete theprinciples of justice from different perspectives;one of the most influentialcontributors to John Rawls' moral theory is Thomas Scanlon.Basing on the tradition of social contract theory, Scanlon keeps going onwith ideas of Kantian deontology ethics, and takes Rawls' moral contract ashis starting point, and takes utilitarian moral theory as primary rival debater,and sets up a moral contractualism that focuses on impersonal right and wrongand takes the idea of a reason as primitive and the contract theory as reasoningform. According to the contractualism, in a society of plural cultures andvalues, that an action is right or wrong is decided by the principles that baseon particular reasons and are the results of informed, unforced and generalagreement. Actually, it tells us that moral requirement should root inindividuals' voluntary agreement, and morality is the result that agentsconstruct, who have the status as creators of morality;people should be awareof the importance and priority of morality in process of action choice anddecision.This thesis examines curtly the history of coming into being,development, maturity and decadency of social contract theory, and detailedlyintroduces and analyzes the two features of Scanlon contractualism: reasonand particular moral motivation. I think that Scanlon's new points of view hasbasically realized conversion from the universal to the particular and fromformalization to substantiality, which consumedly advance the developmentof Rawls' contract theory, and efficiently dispose the criticisms thatcontractualism is faced with and accomplish modern revolution of traditionalsocial contract theory.The reasons that Rawls and Scanlon can get a great success in the modernrevolution of traditional social contract theory are these, on the one hand, theyconsummate it in theory;on the other hand, modern civil society needs it. If atheory is successful just depends on the demands of society itself.