Contractualist Theory of Morality

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Don Goodman-Wilson:

"T.M. Scalon’s contractualist theory of morality is a productive framework for thinking about how to treat people. I’m not going to summarize the theory here, as it has quite a lot of moving parts—you can read the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on your own time. But I will (roughly) summarize the key takeaway for this discussion, which is that insofar as our concern is understanding how we are to live together as humans (and that certainly concerns me, and it sure as hell is a central concern of any collaborative software development model), then the normative content of our moral judgments derives from whether we are treating our fellow humans as humans. If our choices derive from (or can ever be justified by) dehumanizing our fellow humans, then those choices are wrong. And therefore if our choices come from (and only from) a place of respect and recognition of other people, then our choices are right. (Footnote: An important part of Scanlon’s theory is that intent doesn’t enter into this determination. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The question is this: If we look at the complete set of all reasonable justifications for a particular choice, do any of those dehumanize others, regardless of intent?)

I like this theory, because it provides a fairly straightforward litmus test that we can apply to different situations. And, unlike consequentialism, it doesn’t require us to engage in fanciful accounting of future (and hence unknowable) outcomes, nor can it be easily tweaked and twisted to give us the answers we want." (https://don.goodman-wilson.com/posts/open-source-is-broken/)