| There are strong indications that a model of agency which suggests that rational action is a matter of responding to reasons (termed the "classical" view, due to its Aristotelian roots) threatens to undermine certain traditional modern beliefs about the content, authority and boundaries of morality. In this project, I begin by outlining the apparent incompatibility between reasons-responsiveness views of agency and four common sense features of conventional thinking about morality (the distinctness of moral reasons from other reasons, the authority and priority of moral considerations in practical deliberation, the wrongness of moral failures, and the relationship between morality and reactive attitudes). I explore the classical views of agency put forth by John McDowell and Joseph Raz in an effort to demonstrate the basis of the incompatibility concern.;In the final section, I consider how one might offer a contractualist explanation of the amoralist---the hypothetical individual who, though wholly rational, does not see the force of moral considerations. This section serves three purposes: it assists in reinforcing contractualism's thoroughgoing commitment to the classical conception, it suggests that contractualism's account of morality and moral reasoning is as robust as we require, and it illuminates the lacuna which exists in versions of the classical conception which fail to take notice of the contribution of morality to human flourishing.;Having outlined the concern, I turn toward Thomas Scanlon's contractualist account of morality and moral reasoning. I suggest that contractualism provides us with a comprehensive account of morality from within the framework of the classical view. Contractualism, I argue, allows us to make sense of each of the four features of conventional thinking about morality, without relinquishing our claim to the pluralistic account of reason and value which underwrites the classical conception of agency. According to contractualism, although moral reasons are not a logically distinct class of considerations and they do not occupy a deliberative status which fundamentally sets them apart from other reasons, moral reasons tend to play a central role in the structuring of agents' deliberative outlooks. I suggest that morality's status can be explained from within the classical conception by paying special attention to the relationship between living morally and living well. |
