I want to enquire into the relationship between the normative claims of a society and the normative stances of its members. I shall develop a contractarian perspective, as the only one available to persons who may neither expect nor require their fellows to share their own orientation to values and norms.
Political Contractarianism
by David Gauthier
(1997)
How Hume and Kant Reconstruct Natural Law
Justifying Strict Objectivity without Debating Moral Realism
by Kenneth R. Westphal
According to Gauthier’s contractarianism, social institutions and practices are justifiable only in terms of an hypothetical agreement among mutually independent agents rationally deliberating about their conditions of interaction to the effect that it would make sense for each of them to agree to certain such conditions.