Contractarianism - Contractualism »

Stephen Darwall is the John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He has written widely on moral philosophy and its history, and is the author of Impartial Reason (1983), The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640–1740 (1995), Philosophical Ethics (1998), and Welfare and Rational Care (2002). He is the editor, with Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton, of Moral Discourse and Practice (1997).

First articulated by Hobbes, contractarianism presumes that ethical norms are the agreed upon rules that people have instituted to promote their own self-interests. In contrast, contractualism, stemming from Kant's Categorical Imperative, sees the common laws and ethics as being a result of the mutual free agreement of equal individuals. Darwall (philosophy, U. of Michigan) presents ten readings of classical and contemporary treatments of these two related but competing ideas, including writings by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, David Gauthier, Gilbert Harman, John Rawls, and T. M. Scanlon. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR