Contractualism and Aggregation

Abstract

In What We Owe to Each Other Tim Scanlon attempts to have his cake and eat it too. He claims both that his contractualist theory provides an intuitive way to block the aggregative feature of consequentialist theories that leads to counterintuitive results, and that it allows for at least the ap pearance of aggregation in those situations in which aggregative reasoning is intuitively acceptable. His argument is interesting and challenging, but, I will argue, ultimately unconvincing.