PEA Soup

A (Modestly Deflationary) Contractualist Accommodation of Interpersonal Aggregation?

A great deal of ink has been spilled attempting to show that contractualism, alternately, can or cannot accommodate “numbers” in a plausible way. Contractualism aspires to provide an attractive and theoretically robust alternative to consequentialism and the unrestricted interpersonal aggregation that it implies (foundationally anyway), but the abiding worry about the contractualist approach to aggregation has been that it proves too much: while it rejects appealing to numbers in some cases where that rejection seems correct, it also rejects appealing to numbers where numbers seem clearly relevant or even dispositive. What I want to suggest here is a modestly deflationary way that contractualism might be able to accommodate the relevance of numbers.

Rutgers conference: Human Rights in Theory and Practice

Conference: Human Rights in Theory and Practice
Date: Friday, October 3rd, 2008
Location: Rutgers University School of Law-Camden

Description:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, and in recognition of the UDHR’s 60th anniversary, the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy will host a one-day conference featuring panels on a range of philosophical and legal aspects of human rights.