TITLE:
Democratized Morality. Formal Preliminaries to Contractualist Ethics
AUTHORS:
Christian J. Feldbacher
KEYWORDS:
Contractualism; Moral Opinion Pooling; Problem of Imperfect Community; Criteria of Rationality; Tolerance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.2 No.2,
May
22,
2012
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses one of the advantages of applying formal methods in ethics. First, an approach from democratic morality—which is a special case of contractualist ethics that brings together theories of legal and moral philosophy—will be adopted, in order to argue for the non-trivial thesis that moral norms are increasingly democratically motivated. To accept this thesis also as a desired way of justifying ethical principles raises some issues, such as the problem of providing adequate principles for moral opinion pooling. Secondly, it is therefore shown how formal criteria of rationality provide at least a partial solution to such problems. In a broad context this results can be seen as formal preliminaries to contractualist ethics.