This seminar explores the role of contracts (real and hypothetical) in law, morality and political theory. The basic question on the table is: What are contracts good for? What problems can they solve and what problems should they be deployed to solve?
Among the topics considered are: the liberal (contractualist) and conservative (contractarian) versions of the social contract tradition in political thought; the role of distributive justice and other fairness concerns in private contracts; the limits of consent; the relationship between promissory obligations in the legal and moral realms; the normative force of hypothetical contracts; and ex ante/ex post perspectives and the problem of incomplete knowledge or changed circumstances. Readings in social contract will likely include excerpts from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Buchanan and Tullock, Gauthier, Tiebout, Harsanyi, Rawls and Scanlon. Readings in private contract and promising will be drawn from recent scholarship from both an economic and philosophical perspective.