Morals By Agreement: Part I

To begin, Gautier outlines what he plans to show in his work.

According to Gautier, rationality is all about seeking the maximization of benefits for oneself. To be rational is to determine your greatest interest and then to pursue it. Despite the fact that this view would seem to imply that people who act on moral grounds are irrational, Gautier says that this is not so. On his view, acting in accordance with the constraints of morality is rational because when one does so along with his community he will maximize his benefits more than if he along with everyone else failed to act morally. The idea is that completely free agents acting so as to maximize their own benefits will not fare as well as slightly constrained agents acting so as to maximize their own benefits. Morality is to be understood as the constraints.

I want to draw attention to two things Gautier says. "The contractarian need not claim that actual persons take no interest in their fellows: indeed, we suppose that some degree of sociability is characteristic of human beings. But the contractarian sees sociability as enriching human life; for him, it becomes a source of exploitation if it induces persons to acquiesce in institutions and practices that but for their fellow-feelings would be costly to them." I think that the final statement is false. There are certain things that we do for our friends and loved ones that we do not do for just anyone else (raising children, helping elderly parents, doing selfless favors for friends) which would seem to be very costly to us were it not for our "fellow-feelings". Does this in anyway show that these practices are forms of exploitation? Surely this can not be true as it is the "fellow-feeling" that makes us want to do these things. The benefit to us is the well-being of the other person. Another thought that if Gautier takes the sort of approach that he does here with other people's interests, how can he not take the same approach when it comes to a person's own interest? Why not say 'in cases where it would appear costly to partake in a particular practice were it not for his self love, then a person is irrational if he engages in that practice? (Epicetus once wrote (for another purpose) to the effect that it is only because of the fact that we love our bodies so much that we do the things we do as when we imagine having to do these things for others they seem repulsive i.e. washing oneself. The point that you can not separate our affections for something from it when trying to determine whether or not acting in a particular way with regard to it is rational.)

The other statement that I find myself disagreeing with is when he says "Those who claim to establish the rationality of such compliance (with moral principles) appeal to a strong and controversial conception of reason that seems to incorporate prior moral suppositions." The thought that I have here is that it would seem as though those leave out these moral considerations in their conception of reason have the supposition that moral principles are not a part of reason. He says that those who take morality to be a part of reason have just assumed it to be there, but my point is that he has just assumed it not to be there; no argument has been given as to why it is not a part of reason or why it can not be. Maybe an argument will come for this later on, but at this point there is none.