Bradford Hooker

Contractualism, spare wheel, aggregation

This essay explores the reasons for thinking that Scanlons contractualist principle serves merely as a ‘spare wheel’, an element that spins along nicely but bears no real weight, because it presupposes too much of what it should be explaning. The ambitions and scope of Scanlons contractualism are discussed, as is Scanlons thesis that contracualism will assess candidate moral principles individually rather than as sets. The final third of the paper critizes Scanlons account of fairness and his approach to cases where agents can save either one person or many people.

UP AND DOWN WITH AGGREGATION

This paper starts by addressing some objections to the very idea of aggregate social good. The paper goes on to review the case for letting aggregate social good be not only morally relevant but also sometimes morally decisive. Then the paper surveys objections to letting aggregate social good determine personal or political decisions. The paper goes on to argue against the idea that aggregate good is sensitive to desert and the idea that aggregate good should be construed as incorporating agent-relativity.

Rule-consequentialism and Internal Consistency: A Reply to Card

Rule-consequentialism has been accused of either collapsing into act-consequentialism or being internally inconsistent. I have tried to develop a form of rule-consequentialism without these flaws. In this Junes issue of Utilitas, Robert Card argued that I have failed. Here I assess his arguments.

Equality and Partiality.

This collection of essays, based on the Locke Lectures that Nagel delivered at Oxford University in 1990, addresses the conflict between the claims of the group and those of the individual. Nagel attempts to clarify the nature of the conflict - one of the most fundamental problems in moral and political theory - and concludes that its reconciliation is the essential task of any legitimate political system.