What does 'reasonable rejection' mean?

A principle can be reasonably rejected if someone has a strong enough personal objection to it, given the burdens it would impose on them, compared with the burdens alternatives would impose on others; an act is wrong if every principle permitting it can be reasonably rejected.

Why does contractualism reject aggregation?

Because objections are assessed one individual at a time under the individualist restriction, the combined weight of many small burdens cannot outweigh one person's serious complaint, which blocks the trade-offs utilitarian aggregation permits.

Scanlonian Contractualism

Scanlonian contractualism holds that an act is wrong if it would be disallowed by any principle that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement.

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Definition

Scanlonian contractualism holds that an act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it could reasonably be rejected by someone, where reasonable rejection appeals to the burdens the principle would impose on individuals, assessed person by person rather than in aggregate.

Scope

This topic covers T. M. Scanlon's contractualist account of the morality of right and wrong: the reasonable-rejection formula, the individualist restriction on the reasons that may be appealed to, the contrast with utilitarian aggregation, and the principal objections such as the redundancy and circularity worries. It treats contractualism as a distinctively Kantian, non-aggregative theory of wrongness.

Core questions

What makes an action wrong on the contractualist account?
Whose reasons count in assessing whether a principle could be reasonably rejected?
Why does the individualist restriction block the aggregation that utilitarianism permits?
What is the source of our reason to act on principles no one could reasonably reject?

Key theories

The reasonable-rejection criterion: The core formula on which the wrongness of an act consists in its being forbidden by every principle that no individual, suitably motivated to find principles others could also accept, could reasonably reject.
The individualist restriction: Scanlon's requirement that objections to a principle be raised one person at a time, so that the strength of a complaint cannot be increased simply by adding up many small burdens across different people.

History

Scanlon first sketched contractualism in his 1982 essay contrasting it with utilitarianism, then developed it fully in What We Owe to Each Other (1998), grounding wrongness in reasonable rejection and the ideal of justifiability to others. Parfit (2011) engaged it extensively, arguing for convergence among contractualism, Kantian ethics, and rule consequentialism.

Debates

The redundancy objection: Critics argue that the notion of reasonable rejection already presupposes substantive moral judgments about which burdens matter, so the contractualist formula adds nothing and is explanatorily redundant.
Aggregation and the rescue cases: The individualist restriction appears to forbid saving the greater number when each person's claim is considered separately, generating debate over whether contractualism can accommodate the numbers.

Key figures

T. M. Scanlon
Derek Parfit
Rahul Kumar
Elizabeth Ashford

Seminal works

scanlon1982
scanlon1998

Frequently asked questions

What does 'reasonable rejection' mean?: A principle can be reasonably rejected if someone has a strong enough personal objection to it, given the burdens it would impose on them, compared with the burdens alternatives would impose on others; an act is wrong if every principle permitting it can be reasonably rejected.
Why does contractualism reject aggregation?: Because objections are assessed one individual at a time under the individualist restriction, the combined weight of many small burdens cannot outweigh one person's serious complaint, which blocks the trade-offs utilitarian aggregation permits.