SUBJECTIVIST RATIONALISM

It is Gauthier's declared aim in Morals by Agreement to argue that “[m]orality … can be generated as a rational constraint from the non-moral premisses of rational choice.” One way of interpreting the project of starting from non-moral premises – and this is indeed how Gauthier understood it in this work – is that the goal is to show that “agents lacking all moral concerns … would rationally introduce morality into their interactions in order better to achieve their nonmoral ends.” In his more recent article “Value, Reasons, and the Sense of Justice,” Gauthier has outlined another justification that can also be understood as relying only on non-moral premises. There, the idea is not to show that moral sensibility – or, more specifically, the sense of justice which is the focus of Gauthier's discussion in this article – is a “mere instrument for our nonmoral gratification.” Rather, the aim is to show that the sense of justice is of value to agents “whatever their particular aims and concerns.” It is on account of this idea, as will be explained, that I take Gauthier to be a rationalist. This idea can be captured by saying that “justice is a necessary instrumental value.” To show justice to be a necessary instrumental value is, in my terminology, to give a subjectivist rationalistic justification of justice. The subjectivism is reflected in the instrumentality of the value and the rationalism in the necessity.