The Real Grice and the Real Scanlon on real contracts

by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club

I'M PUNNING STUPIDLY on the real Mc! (The fact that there is ANOTHER Grice, G. R. Grice, who also worked on contracts -- in his book on the moral judgement).

KRAMER, in "Grice and Grice on contracts and contracts" (commentary), this blog:

"I don't know why contractualism should be
popular in moral theory, and I'd need persuading that
it does not merely infer the cause of things
from their shape."

I should confess that the popularity of the thing, on which Kramer was commenting sprang from a comment elsewhere, made publicly my Walter Okshevsky. We were analysing meta-ethical claims. Suppose we say:

contract theory postulates that doing A is the moral thing to do.

--- HELM, this blog, had been pointing to inconsistencies in action and thought. So, the issue of metaethics has to be taken into account. Perhaps a contractualist cannot think MORALLY, but only metaethically. Okshevsky reacted:

"Could Kant cogently maintain that the categorical imperative is a morally wrong test of moral permissibility? Could Habermas maintain, or could his Discourse Ethics allow for the possibility, that discursive agreement under conditions of symmetry and reciprocity is a morally wrong criterion for moral deliberation and judgement? Could Tom Scanlon claim that his contractualist position on what makes something morally wrong is itself morally wrong? Surely that would be a self-contradiction."

I'm not sure, and surely we shouldn't be discussing particular phrasings posted elsewhere, but you get my drift. Among those boring authors (Kant, and Habermas) we have a good old Anglo-Saxon first name ("Tom") and second name "Scanlon", and so I thought I would bring contractualism to the forum more often!

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Next thing would be to find how Scanlon makes use of Grice, and he if he don't [sic], imagine why he SHOULD! Or not!