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The Maximum Claims of Gauthier's Bargainers: Are the Fixed Social Inequalities Acceptable?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

David Braybrooke
David Braybrooke
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

A central feature of David Gauthier's impressively searching version of social contract theory is the principle of maximin relative advantage. Given certain assumptions—more than he originally thought—this principle may be described as calling for maximum equal advantage, which is easier to talk about; and I shall refer to the principle under this description. Maximum equal relative advantage is equivalent to minimum equal relative concession; hence the principle of maximum equal relative advantage has a twin and mirror, the principle of minimum equal relative concession. Relative advantage and relative concession are ratios with the same denominator, the difference for a given agent between the maximum utility (umax) that she might get from the societyt o be contracted for and the minimum utility (umin) that would give her an incentive to cooperate in establishing the society and in keeping it up. The numerator for the one ratio—relative advantage—is the difference between the utility that she is actually going to gain from society (ua) and her minimum cooperative utility (umin). The numerator for the other ratio—relative concession—is the difference between her maximum utility (umax) and the utility that she is going to get (ua), in other words, the amount of utility that she foregoes in not getting her maximum.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , September 1982 , pp. 411 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1982

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References

1 Noûs 7 (1974), 53–65.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., 65, footnote 2.

3 Ibid., 62.

4 Ibid., 56-57.

5 Showing equal utility only for additions to physical income beyond N's and M's minimum cooperative utilities, which may differ. Apart from the case of equality, whether y1, M's loss, is greater or less than y2, N's gain, depends on where the functions intersect. (I have set era = 50% to make the geometry more visible.)

6 Strictly speaking, it is true, for Gauthier the threat, if carrying it out would hurt the threatener ever so little, would be spurious.

7 “If a man be exalted by reason of any excellence in his soul, he may please to remember that all souls are equal, and their differing operations are because their instrument is in better tune, their body is more healthful or better tempered; which is no more praise to him than it is that he was born in Italy”. Taylor, Jeremy, quoted by R. H. Tawney in Equality (4th ed.; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), 37–38.Google Scholar Cf. Hobbes, speaking of one sort of excellence that may command a premium in the market:“Of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn” (Leviathan, Part I, chap. 6).

8 Here are two senses: (1) Society could less easily sacrifice even one child's or one automobilist's life than the spectacle of Chamberlain scoring: (2) society could get almost as much amusement from something else, say, from basketball played by players all five and one-half feet tall, while in the other cases, alternatives to the sort of contributions are much less eligible.

9 In Hooker, C. A. et al. , eds., Foundations and Applications of Decision Theory (Dordrecht, 1978), 47–67, at 54.Google Scholar

10 In “Co-ordination”, Dialogue 14 (1975), 195–221.Google Scholar

11 In “Reason and Maximization”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1975), 411–433Google Scholar.

12 Partly in “Rational Cooperation”; more fully in “The Social Contract as Ideology”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), 130–164,Google Scholar and in work forthcoming.

13 I have had substantial help, for which I am grateful, from points made in my P.P.E. Seminar, Spring 1981, by Professor Richmond Campbell and by the student members of the seminar, Neil Dauphinée, Anna McCarron, Brian Penrose, and Jesse Tucker; and from unpublished materials by Gauthier, which he kindly sent me. I also wish to thank Cynthia Langille for redrawing my diagrams.