THE LIMITS OF MORAL CONSTRUCTIVISM Mark Timmons Moral contractualism is a type of view in ethics that attempts to justify morality, or at least a part of it, by appealing to some sort of rational or reasonable agreement among individuals. 1 In What We Owe to Each Other, T. M. Scanlon defends a contractualist account of that part of morality that concerns our obligations to others, according to which an action is right if and only if it is jus- tifiable to others. Actions that are justifiable to others are ones based on principles upon which all reasonable individuals who are appropriately motivated can agree. Much of Scanlon’s book is devoted to spelling out and illustrating the relevant notion of justifiability to others which represents a distinctive account of moral motivation and moral reasoning. But Scanlon also intends his contractualist view to represent an account of the nature of the properties of moral rightness and wrongness. He identifies the property of wrongness with the property of not being justifi- able to others. As I shall explain, Scanlon’s metaphysical account of moral properties apparently represents a version of moral con- structivism: the existence and nature of moral properties (and moral facts in which they figure) are constituted by the agree- ments that would be reached by appropriately motivated individ- uals under specified circumstances. Thus, on the reading I shall propose, Scanlon advocates a version of what I will call construc- tivist contractualism in ethics. One important goal of Scanlon’s contractualism is to accom- modate the idea that moral judgments are (or can be) objective in a way that is incompatible with moral relativism. However, as I will argue, there is tension within Scanlon’s view. In particular, his © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Ratio (new series) XVI 4 December 2003 0034–0006 1 ‘Contractualism’ is Scanlon’s term for what is perhaps more often referred to as con- tractarianism. Henceforth, I will use Scanlon’s term for this family of views. My charac- terization of moral contractualism has to do with the normative enterprise of justifying morality. Some thinkers appeal to contractualist ideas in an attempt to explain rather than justify moral norms and principles. For an overview of the contractualist tradition in moral and political philosophy, where the distinction between evaluative and explanatory ver- sions of contractualism is discussed, see Morris 1996 and Sayre-McCord 2000.