Our discussion of the connection between eudaimonism, contractualism and libertarianism continues, and now good ole’ Will Wilkinson has joined it. Will makes two basic points in his post: (i) eudaimonism is false so it’s not going to help much in grounding self-ownership or contractualism and (ii) the best reason to be a contractualist is because contractualism is sensitive to lots of reasons. I’ll make five small points and then take things in a different direction.

            I. Five Small Points

(1) My reply to Roderick was merely meant to show that even Roderick-style-eudaimonism underdetermines whether contractualism or self-ownership is true. My endorsement of eudaimonism was meant merely as an illustration of this point.

(2) I am less confident than Will is that Darwinism (plus the metaphysical commitments Will seems to think are part of Darwinism) is incompatible with eudaimonism. I think Darwinism underdetermines whether eudaimonism is true, even if it undermines essentialism (which it doesn’t). But Roderick has written a lot on this, so I’ll let him tend to these matters.

(3) As my friend Mark Lebar notes in his comment over at Will’s blog, the version of eudaimonism that Roderick and I embrace is not the same as Will describes.

(4) I think a form of pluralism about reasons for actions is true, as Will notes, and I think the fact that contractualism is sensitive to this pluralism is a great reason to be a contractualist, as Will notes. But I still think a good reason to be a contractualist is that it’s properly consequence-sensitive. Will seems to agree at the beginning of his post, though less so by the end.

(5) I do not want to defend eudaimonism in my first series of posts. Instead, I hope to clear the way for introducing contractualist libertarianism. The point of introducing contractualist libertarianism is to help BHL readers explore new defenses of libertarianism that are friendly to social justice.

            II. The Good in the Contract

One general worry about contractualist theories of right action is that they are too insensitive to conceptions of the good. After all, deontological theories generally (of which contractualism is a version) are glossed as theories that place “right prior to good.” But it seems implausible to many how what is right and wrong could be so insensitive to our goals and ends (I know Roderick thinks this, as you can see in the penultimate paragraph here).

But on my reading, the great contract theorists were deeply concerned to ensure that the norms and institutions required by the social contract were sensitive to persons’ conceptions of the good, including eudaimonist conceptions. In fact, one of the reasons that an entire third of A Theory of Justice is about ends (see Part III: Ends) is to demonstrate that Justice as Fairness is “congruent” with our shared conceptions of the good, which Rawls construes in a partly eudaimonist manner. I believe a strong case can be made that all of the great contract theorists have some implicit or explicit theory of congruence that explains how justice and the good “match,” as Rawls puts it (TJ, p. 399).

We need not determine whether eudaimonism is true in order to determine whether contractualist libertarianism is viable. However, we will need to address the extent to which the deontological reasons generated by contractualism congrue with our flourishing (or at least our conception of our flourishing). Our conception of flourishing helps determine which norms are justified via the contractualist procedure. Shared conceptions of flourishing and eudaimonia are rich sources of defeaters for proposed coercive norms and so will contribute to the conclusion that political contractualism requires substantially limited government.

I don’t think Roderick or Will disagree with the foregoing. I mean only to turn the discussion back to the connection between contractualism and eudaimonism as it pertains to the moral foundations of libertarianism.