David Gauthier

David Gauthier (born 1932) is a Canadian-American philosopher best known for his neo-Hobbesian social contract (contractarian) theory of morality, as laid out in his book Morals by Agreement.

Biography

Gauthier was born in Toronto in 1932 and educated at the University of Toronto (B.A. Hons., 1954), Harvard University (A.M., 1955), and the University of Oxford (B. Phil., 1957; D. Phil., 1961). In 1979, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (F.R.S.C.).

From 1958 to 1980, he was a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, serving as Chairman from 1974 to 1979. Since 1980, he has been a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He served as Chairman from 1983 to 1987, and was appointed a Distinguished Service Professor in 1986. He has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science. He has held visiting appointments at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Princeton, UC Irvine, and the University of Waterloo. Gauthier is the author of numerous articles, some of the most important of which are collected in Moral Dealing, and several books including Practical Reasoning, The Logic of Leviathan, Morals by Agreement, and Rousseau: The Social and the Solitary.

In addition to systematic work in moral theory, Gauthier's main philosophical interests are in the history of political philosophy, with special attention to Hobbes and Rousseau, and in the theory of practical rationality, where he begins from an attempt to understand economic rationality, rather than from Kantian or Aristotelian antecedents.

His principal nonphilosophical interest, arising from his observation of trolley cars beginning at an early age, is in what is now called light rail transit. When much younger, he was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Canadian House of Commons, an occasional newspaper columnist, and a writer on public affairs.

Asteroid (15911) Davidgauthier is named after him.

Contributions to political and moral philosophy

Gauthier understands value as a matter of individuals' subjective preferences, and argues that moral constraints on straightforward utility-maximizing are prudentially justified. He argues that it is most prudent to give up straightforward maximizing and instead adopt a disposition of constrained maximization, according to which one resolves to cooperate with all similarly disposed persons (those disposed towards cooperation) and defect on the rest (straightforward maximizers), since repeated cooperation provides greater yields than repeated mutual defection from contracts (as is seen in a basic Prisoner's Dilemma game). In other words, moral constraints are justified because they make us all better off, in terms of our preferences (whatever they may be). A consequence is that good moral thinking is just an elevated and subtly strategic version of means-end reasoning.

Gauthier argued, in a letter to the Toronto Globe and Mail published in 1978, that homosexuals should not be allowed to teach in schools.^[1]

References