Chapter 6 - The Value of Values: The Importance of Autonomy in Contractarian Reasoning

Abstract

Jan Narveson has long advocated contractarianism as the only viable theory of justification in moral and political contexts. In this he is correct. Narveson further thinks that libertarianism is the substantive moral view entailed by contractarianism, given a set of assumptions about human nature and the circumstances of human interaction. In this he is mistaken, or so I suggest. The reason Narveson is led to the erroneous conclusion that libertarianism follows from contractarianism is his employment of an inadequate conception of ‘value’ at the heart of contractarianism justifications of normative constraints. Contractarians justify a set of moral rules on the basis of their service to the values of individuals, but the resulting theory depends for its normativity on the strength of the theory of values upon which it is built. I argue that if values are to play the role assigned to them in contractarian accounts then they cannot include all desires or ends an agent might have, but instead they must be restricted to autonomous desires. I then (begin to) show that one must derive very different substantive conclusions from the contractarian methodology, using a few of Narveson’s own discussions of substantive issues such as drug legislation, education and information policy.

Keywords: Autonomy, Contractarianism, Narveson, Gauthier, Values, Preferences, Liberalism, Libertarianism