Rahul Kumar (Queen's University): 'Contractualism and the Value of Mutual Recognition'
Abstract: Contractualism takes the relation that obtains between persons who are guided in how they relate to one another by principles no one can reasonably reject to be constitutive of a valuable way of living with others. This way of living with others is aptly characterized as a matter of living with others on a basis of mutual recognition.
The value and appeal of living with others in this way, contractualism holds, plays an important role in accounting for the normative authority of the standards governing what we morally owe to one another. A morally good person is one who strives to always relate to others in the way morality requires, not only because to do otherwise would be wrong, but because doing so is an aspect of what living with others on terms of mutual recognition demands.
What exactly being guided by this ideal involves, however, and how it is related to other aspects of contractualist thinking, has received little attention. My paper aims to address this gap by developing an account of the value of mutual recognition. This account, I will argue, emerges naturally from the way contractualism characterizes reasoning about what we owe to one another, and is of general significance for its interpretation as a non-consequentialist theory of interpersonal morality.
