The Maximum Claims of Gauthier's Bargainers: Are the Fixed Social Inequalities Acceptable?*

1 Noûs 7 (1974), 53–65.

2 Ibid., 65, footnote 2.

3 Ibid., 62.

4 Ibid., 56-57.

5 Showing equal utility only for additions to physical income beyond N's and M's minimum cooperative utilities, which may differ. Apart from the case of equality, whether y₁, M's loss, is greater or less than y₂, N's gain, depends on where the functions intersect. (I have set era = 50% to make the geometry more visible.)

6 Strictly speaking, it is true, for Gauthier the threat, if carrying it out would hurt the threatener ever so little, would be spurious.

7 “If a man be exalted by reason of any excellence in his soul, he may please to remember that all souls are equal, and their differing operations are because their instrument is in better tune, their body is more healthful or better tempered; which is no more praise to him than it is that he was born in Italy”. Taylor, Jeremy, quoted by R. H. Tawney in Equality (4th ed.; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), 37–38. Cf. Hobbes, speaking of one sort of excellence that may command a premium in the market:“Of great minds, one of the proper works is, to help and free others from scorn” (Leviathan, Part I, chap. 6).

8 Here are two senses: (1) Society could less easily sacrifice even one child's or one automobilist's life than the spectacle of Chamberlain scoring: (2) society could get almost as much amusement from something else, say, from basketball played by players all five and one-half feet tall, while in the other cases, alternatives to the sort of contributions are much less eligible.

9 In Hooker, C. A. et al. , eds., Foundations and Applications of Decision Theory (Dordrecht, 1978), 47–67, at 54.

10 In “Co-ordination”, Dialogue 14 (1975), 195–221.

11 In “Reason and Maximization”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1975), 411–433.

12 Partly in “Rational Cooperation”; more fully in “The Social Contract as Ideology”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977), 130–164, and in work forthcoming.

13 I have had substantial help, for which I am grateful, from points made in my P.P.E. Seminar, Spring 1981, by Professor Richmond Campbell and by the student members of the seminar, Neil Dauphinée, Anna McCarron, Brian Penrose, and Jesse Tucker; and from unpublished materials by Gauthier, which he kindly sent me. I also wish to thank Cynthia Langille for redrawing my diagrams.

* A paper presented in a symposium with Gauthier at the meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Halifax, May 30, 1981.