Question

What is Blackburn's issue with the contract view of ethics?

		The contract is not written down anywhere and none of us has agreed verbally to it.
		He has no problem with contract ethics. This is his favorite.
		The contract does not apply to everyone.
		You have to have the right values going into the process to get the right kind arrangement in the end.

Answer 1

* Simon Blackburn is a quasi-realist about both moral and modal discourse. His position is realist because he accepts that we sometimes speak truly when we say that some things are right and others wrong.

* Moral and modal truth is not about moral or modal facts, it is about our attitudes regarding actions, events, objects, and the like.

* Blackburn’s argument works at a very high level of generality. He is not concerned with some paradox that is peculiar to David Lewis’s specific realism about modality, which involves the claim that there is a plurality of concrete worlds that are the truth conditions for true modal claims.

* The fundamental problem that Blackburn thinks he has identified is the inevitable failure of explanation that will attend any “direct” theory of modality. A dilemma akin to the Euthryphro dilemma is posed. On one horn is a problem something like circularity.