Abstracts
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at AAP 2013. If you've just submitted an abstract, it may take a few days to appear.
| Name: Mr Michael Vincent |
| Institution: University of Queensland |
| Title: Consensus, Coherence, and Social Contract |
| Abstract: Gerald Gaus in his The Order of Public Reason (2011) argues for a social morality based on consensus among rational members of a community. This consensus is to be reached without coordination between, or extensive deliberation by, community members, as to engage in either of these would be impractical in reality, and if done only hypothetically would result in values that diverged too far from existing beliefs to be helpful. Yet Gaus defends the need for a social morality largely as a means to ensure social stability, and this goal does not seem to be assured by the consensus method. Rather, I will argue that it is neither analytic nor indeed probable that a stabilising social morality will be the result of this procedure. |
| Keywords: social conrtact, Gaus, consensus, public reason |
