Joint Commitment Contractualism

On the relational conception of morality, the question of what we ought, morally, to do is understood as a question of how we ought to regulate our moral relations with one another. Despite its attractions, the philosophical foundations of the relational view are notoriously hard to make precise. In this paper, I offer a novel contractualist account of the foundations of relational moral obligations, which I call joint commitment contractualism . On this view, the normativity of relational moral obligations is explained by reference to a distinctive kind of relationship in which moral agents have jointly committed themselves to the aim of justifying their behavior to each other on terms that others could not reasonably reject.