David Gauthier develops morality in the social contract tradition as an emergent property rationally necessitated by the presence of inefficiency. To demarcate situations in which morality arises from those in which it does not, two principles, Strategic Emergence and Market Emergence, are motivated and assumed by Gauthier to be equivalent. Following the work of Bob Bright, this paper formalizes and expands upon a demonstration of the inconsistency of the two principles. Eliminating each of the emergence conditions is considered to resolve the inconsistency. Additionally, the Kantian equilibrium is examined in place of the Nash equilibrium; however, Gauthier’s approach resists such amendments.

Contractarianism is more inclusive than critics (and, indeed, David Gauthier) sometimes suggest. Contractarianism can justify equal moral standing for human persons (in some respects) and provide sufficient moral standing for many nonhuman animals to require what we commonly call ‘decent treatment.’ Moreover, contractarianism may allow that some entities have more moral standing than do others. This does not necessarily license the oppression that liberal egalitarians rightly fear. Instead, it shows that contractarianism may support a nuanced account of moral status.

I focus on David Gauthier’s intriguing suggestion that actions are not to be evaluated directly but via an evaluation of deliberative procedures. I argue that this suggestion is misleading, since even the most direct evaluation of (intentional) actions involves the evaluation of different ways of deliberating about what to do. Relatedly, a complete picture of what an agent is or might be (intentionally) doing cannot be disentangled from a complete picture of how s/he is or might be deliberating. A more viable contrast concerns whether actions and deliberative procedures are properly evaluated on the whole or, instead, through time.