Contractualism as Restricted Constructivism

Contractualism and Justification

T. M. Scanlon I first began thinking of contractualism as a moral theory 38 years ago, in May of 1979. The idea was not entirely original. I was of course familiar with Rawls’ theory of justice, and influenced by it. A more direct source for the idea of justifiability to others as the basis of morality lay in remarks of Tom Nagel’s in Moral Questions. Rawls and Nagel had, perhaps, the wisdom no...

The Artist as Producer : Russian Constructivism

Contractualism and the Moral Status of Animals

While contractualism seems to solve some of the more pressing concerns of other moral theories, it does not conclusively address the moral status of non-human animals. Peter Carruthers claims that contractualism excludes animals from having full moral status. I argue that Carruthers’ arguments are fatally flawed due to his reliance on contradictory claims, unlikely assumptions, and flagrant vio...

Applying Constructivism: A Test for the Learner-as-Scientist

Constructivist learning theory predicts that knowledge encoded from data by learners themselves will be more flexible, transferable, and useful than knowledge encoded for them by experts and transmitted to them by an instructor or other delivery agent. If this prediction is correct, then learners should be modeled as scientists and use the reasoning and technologies of scientists to construct t...

Info-computational constructivism in modelling of life as cognition

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