David Gauthier

David Gauthier (born 1932) is a Canadian-American philosopher best known for his neo-Hobbesian social contract (contractarian) theory of morality, as laid out in his book Morals By Agreement.

Biography

Gauthier was born in Toronto in 1932 and educated at the University of Toronto (B.A. Hons., 1954), Harvard University (A.M., 1955), and the University of Oxford (B. Phil., 1957; D. Phil., 1961). In 1979, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (F.R.S.C.).

From 1958 to 1980, he was a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, serving as Chairman from 1974 to 1979. Since 1980, he has been a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He served as Chairman from 1983 to 1987, and was appointed a Distinquished Service Professor in 1986. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. He has held visiting appointments at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and UC Irvine. Gauthier is the author of numerous articles, some of the most important of which are collected in Moral Dealing, and several books including Practical Reasoning, The Logic of Leviathan, Morals by Agreement, and the forthcoming Rousseau.

In addition to systematic work in moral theory, Gauthier's main philosophical interests are in the history of political philosophy, with special attention to Hobbes and Rousseau, and in the theory of practical rationality, where he begins from an attempt to understand economic rationality, rather than from Kantian or Aristotelian antecedents.

His principal nonphilosophical interest, arising from his observation of trolley cars while still in his pram, is in what now is called light rail transit. When much younger, he was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Canadian House of Commons, an occasional newspaper columnist, and a writer on public affairs.

Asteroid (15911) Davidgauthier is named after him.

Contribution to political and moral philosophy

Gauthier takes value as a matter of individuals' subjective preferences, and argues that moral constraints on straightforward utility-maximizing are prudentially justified. He argues that it's most prudent to give up straightforward maximizing and instead adopt a disposition of constrained maximization, according to which one resolves to cooperate with all similarly disposed persons and defect on the rest. In other words, moral constraints are justified because they make us all better off, in terms of our preferences (whatever they may be). A consequence is that good moral thinking is just an elevated and subtly strategic version of plain old means-end reasoning.

Morals by Agreement

Gauthier links morality to reason, and reason to practical reason, and practical reason to interest, which he identifies with "individual utility". He means subjective utility rather than objective utility as it figures in, say, David Brink's list of objective requirements for a good human life. And he means expected utility of an act's possible outcomes rather than symbolic utility of the act itself, as it figures in Robert Nozick's decision-value alternative to conceiving of rational choice exclusively by reference to expected utility. Gauthier's procedure is to develop constraints on individuals required by rationality, and to identify these constraints as moral principles. This is rationality "in its full generality" as dealing with the choices of others, for it will be rationality as understood by games theory. This will not be a theory like Thomas Nagel's or R.M. Hare's, "deriving from Kant," that already includes the moral dimension of impartiality.

His maximizing conception of rationality takes the interests of of the self to be fundamental, but these need not be interests in the self: practical reasons need not be self-interested. However, your interest in your welfare gives me no reason to promote your welfare. This is a basic difference from the universalistic conceptions of rationality such as the kantian ones. The moral constraints to be generated are understood as objects of fully voluntary ex ante agreement among rational persons. The agreement is hypothetical and supposes a pre-moral context, the morally free zone of the perfectly competive market; but the parties to the agreement are real, determinate individuals. Where mutual benefit requires constraint, the bargainers will demand that their greatest concession, measured as a proportion of the stake that they bring to the table, should be as small as possible. This is the principle of minimax relative concession. In order to ensure that people don't bring exploitative holdings to the table, the bargaining is constrained by a proviso that prohibits bettering one's position through interaction worsening the position of another. No one should be worse off than in a non-social context of no interaction.

The dicey step from hypothetical agreement to actual moral constraint will have to solve the problem of the apparent rationality of being a free rider on the cooperative behavior of others. This problem about compliance.which is essentially thePrisoner's Dilemma, is addressed by the idea of the constrained maximizer, who is disposed to comply with mutually advantageous moral constraints, provided he expects similar compliance from others. Unlike a straightforward maximizer, he has internalized principles that govern his choices, and "under plausible conditions" he will do better than one who aims for exploitative benefits. So two constrained maximizers in a Prisoner's Dilemma, knowing that the other has a cooperative disposition, will choose the cooperative option and arrive at the optimal outcome, avoiding the dilemma.

The Hobbist's modern-day successor, Gauthier acknowledges that only beings whose physical and mental capacities are either roughly equal or mutually complementary can expect to find cooperation beneficial to all. Horses will not be protected by moral constraints, which doesn't necessarily mean that moral agents won't protect horses.

Bibliography

Works by Gauthier

• David Gauthier, Practical Reasoning: The Structure and Foundations of Prudential and Moral Arguments and Their Exemplification in Discourse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).
• David Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
• David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
• David Gauthier, Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990).
• David Gauthier, Rousseau: The Social and the Solitary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Selected secondary literature

• E. F. Paul, F. D. Miller, Jr., and J. Paul, eds., The New Social Contract: Essays on Gauthier (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
• Peter Vallentyne, ed., Contractarianism and Rational Choice: Essays on David Gauthier's Morals by Agreement(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.)
• David Gauthier and Robert Sugden, eds., Rationality, Justice and the Social Contract: Themes from Morals by Agreement (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
• Christopher W. Morris, and Arthur Ripstein, eds., Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)