Thejustificatory question “why be moral?” is transformed intothe less troubling question “why be rational?” Second,even if we recognize that moral reasons are, in some sense, genuine,contractarians like Kavka also want to show that prudent individuals,not independently motivated by morality would have reason toreflectively endorse morality. Rawlsfamously imposes severe doxastic constraints on his parties to thesocial contract by imposing a thick veil of ignorance that eliminatesinformation about the specific details of each individual and theworld they live in. There is reason to conclude that if we wish todiscover social contracts that best achieve a set of interrelatednormative desiderata (e.g., liberty, equality, welfare, etc. This does not, however, distinguishthe social contract from other approaches in moral and politicalphilosophy, all of which attempt to show that moral and politicalrules are rationally justifiable in some sense. Choice in the contractual model inthe broadest sense, is an attempt by the parties to choose a set ofrules that they expect will be better than in some baseline condition,such as “generalized egoism” (Rawls, 1999: 127) a“state of nature” (Hobbes 1651) or the rules that theycurrently have (Binmore, 2005; Buchanan 2000 [1975]). The traditional, axiomatic, approach to the bargainingproblem going back to John Nash, codified by John Harsanyi, andpopularized by R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa (1957). Of course, those same individuals may careabout what they perceive to be the impartial good or some othernon-individualistic notion—they need not be egoists—butwhat they care about, and so their reasons will differ from oneanother. Surely wewould want reasons independent of history for reflectively endorsingsome equilibrium. Gauthier,however, famously pursued this approach, building his Morals byAgreement on the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution (see also Gaus1990, Ch. Indeed, Thomas Schelling (1959) was an early critic of thesymmetry assumption in bargaining theory and more recently, JohnThrasher (2014) has argued that the symmetry assumption isinconsistent with the traditional model of the social contract.Symmetry is necessary to generate a unique solution to the bargainingproblem, however. They must be able to rank theoptions on the basis of their values, whatever those may be. Theiranalyses shed light both on the justificatory problem—what arethe characteristics of a cooperative social order that people freelyfollow?—while also explaining how such orders may comeabout.Moehler’s (2017) “multi-level” contract has severalaspects. This point, as Rawls highlights in his later work, is crucialto understanding political justification in a diverse society wheremembers of a society cannot reasonably be expected to have similarconceptions of the good (Rawls 1996). The problem then becomeshow to select one unique equilibrium from a set of possible ones. Since theseearly experiments, considerable experimental work has been done onbargaining problems and cooperative agreement in economics. If we exclude “knowledge of thosecontingencies which set men at odds …. Normalizing theperspectives of the parties assumes that there is one stable point ofview that has all of the relevant information necessary for generatinga stable and determinate set of social rules. A topic we will explore more in §3 below.If we think in terms of decision theory, the doxastic specificationindividuates the initial state of affairs and the outcomes of thecontractual model, while the specification of the evaluative elementsgives each representative party a ranking of the outcomes expected toresult from the choice of any given set of rules. How the theory doesthis depends on the assumptions made and the specification of theparameters.The problem is this. We thus get Figure1View this site from another server:In multi-level contract theories such as Buchanan’s (2000 [1975]and Michael Moehler’s (forthcoming), each stage has its ownunique object.