Morals and Consent: Contractarian Solutions to Ethical Woes by Malcolm Murray

In this engaging and inventive book, Murray defends a contractarian ethical theory and applies it to many contemporary moral issues. According to Murray the point of morality is to enable the coexistence of people with varying interests. It is supposed to serve the individual aims of those who follow it. Unlike other contractarians who see morality as a creation of reason, Murray looks to evolutionary theory and identifies morality as the trait concerning our interactions with others that has conferred fitness, reciprocal cooperation. When their actions involve others, reciprocal cooperators do only what others consent or would consent to in return for others doing what the cooperators consent or would consent to. This idea is the basis of Murray's fundamental moral principle, the applied consent principle, "Any act is morally permissible if and only if all concerned parties (or their proxies) are competent and suitably informed, and voluntarily, or would voluntarily, consent." He contends that his naturalistic account of morality enjoys advantages over other ethical theories because it has a straightforward account of moral motivation and does not rely on questionable metaphysics. We are moral because it is in our interest to be reciprocal cooperators. Generally, the cost of not treating others only in ways they consent to is worth the benefit of others treating us only in ways we consent to. Rather than relying on so-called queer objective concepts like intrinsic goodness, morality on Murray's view is a trait selected for by evolution.

In the large majority of the book, Murray applies his contractarianism, taking distinctive positions on a wide range of issues in applied ethics. The book thereby fills a gap in the literature, where contractarian analyses of ethical issue debates are uncommon compared with applications of utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics. The applied consent principle allows any activity to which the participants have fully given meaningful consent. This includes euthanasia, pornography, prostitution, organ selling, cloning, and gene therapy. While forcible rape obviously violates the applied consent principle, a lewd proposition that can be voluntarily declined does not. The principle protects only reciprocal cooperators. Defectors are appropriately subject to any punishment that self-interested contractors in the state of nature would endorse. Nevertheless, Murray claims the death penalty is not justified because the contractarian purpose of punishment—protection of members of society from harm without their consent—can be carried out just as well by life imprisonment. Torture is ruled out unless and until we have mechanisms to identify actual terrorists from whom we could obtain valuable information only through torture.

Murray certainly does not avoid taking controversial positions. On his view we have no general duties to alleviate the suffering of other people. Indifference to others' suffering does not directly violate their consent, and agreeing to such duties would not serve many contractors' self-interest, given the massive number of people in the world who are suffering. Our inability to enter into reciprocal relationships with either nonhuman animals or future generations limits our obligations with respect to them. On Murray's analysis we can have duties toward beings we do not have duties to, if those beings would be protected by the agreements of self-interested contractors. Since people generally care about animals, there is an obligation not to be unnecessarily cruel to them, but no obligation not to use them. This distinction ensures that our obligations toward animals do not impose heavy costs on humans. Abortion is permitted. Sentience is a necessary condition for having rights and, even granting fetuses the right to life, abortion does not violate that right, owing largely to the onerous burdens of pregnancy. Murray rejects even modest affirmative action proposals on the grounds that self-interested contractors would endorse a policy of equal opportunity. In a provocative final chapter he argues that blackmail itself is not impermissible: when blackmail is wrong it is so for reasons independent of what is characteristic of blackmail.

Murray notes that some environmentalists reject contractarianism based on its failure to establish duties to future generations to fight climate change but maintains that "the fact that a moral theory fails to give you what you want is not necessarily a mark against the theory, particularly when contractarianism is a cure for those moral theories relying on sketchy metaphysics." Such reasoning underscores the way that many of Murray's positions ultimately rely on a denial of the objectivity of morality, which may inspire some readers to reexamine the queerness critique in the first part of the book. Nonetheless, even skeptics of contractarianism will find worthwhile Murray's rich treatment of each ethical issue that he considers. Much of his insightful criticism of other views on those issues does not require accepting contractarianism.