Contractualism and the new and improved redundancy objection
T. M. Scanlon's contractualism holds that for an action to be wrong in the most central sense of 'wrong' is for it to be forbidden by any set of principles nobody could reasonably reject for informed, unforced general agreement (Scanlon 1998: 153). Perhaps the most frequently raised objection to Scanlon's contractualism is that the appeal to reasonable rejectability is simply redundant. The objection goes roughly as follows. Whenever principles allowing an action are reasonably rejectable because that action has some feature (or set of features) F, the action is wrong simply in virtue of being F and not because its being F makes principles allowing it reasonably rejectable.1 The appeal to reasonable rejectability seems otiose when we could apparently understand wrongness more directly in terms of the grounds for reasonable rejection. Call this the 'redundancy objection'. It has been pressed by Simon Blackburn (1999), Colin McGinn (1999) and