Abstract

Contractualism has obtained relative success in moral theory for being able to deal with cases in which consequentialist theories of morality fail, specially those that involve problems with aggregation. Aggregation is, simply put, the ideia that we should measure the value of an action not by considering how it affects each individual, but by adding the good its consequences produce, looking for the best "balance" of good. Philosophers like John Rawls and T. M. Scanlon pointed out that aggregation seems to require positive evaluation of cases in which a minority is deeply burdened so that a majority is a little benefited; a rather uninituitive result. Contractualists like Scanlon argue that their theory, because of their Individualist Restriction, is essentially anti-aggregative and so it is immune to this problem. However, as Michael Otsuka and others noted, eliminating aggregation has its costs, since we are left with difficulties to explain cases where the "numbers seem to matter". This chapter aims to present different contractualist responses to these cases, laying out the distinction between ex post and ex ante contractualism — a distinction relative to the conditions in which moral justification is to be considered — and defends the ex ante view of justification advocated by contractualists like Rahul Kumar, Johann Frick and, recently, even Scanlon.