Libenter quibus nos vincant epulamur

David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, chapter VIII “The Archimedean Point.” The eponymous Archimedean Point is Rawls’s term for a viewpoint of moral objectivity. Gauthier characterizes it as the position one must occupy to have the “moral capacity to shape society.” Capacity, not authority: the Archimedean point is not a moral dictator or paterfamilias, but rather someone who is competent and qualified to participate in moral deliberation with others about the forms society should or should not take.

Frankly, I don’t understand what role this concept is meant to play in Gauthier’s system. The chapter seems to be addressed to readers who expect there to be something like an Archimedean point in a viable theory of justice. Gauthier’s strategy for providing one is to show that, when we correctly specify the qualities and conditions that the occupant of the Archimedean point must have, its own practical reasoning will yield the whole edifice of morals by agreement that we’ve been discussing up to this point in the book—not only the procedural content but also the Lockean proviso. To a current reader like me, this seems superfluous, since the whole thrust of the project has been to offer a putatively objective moral theory from first principles.

The chapter is largely devoted to contesting Rawls’s and John Harsanyi’s respective characterizations of the Archimedean point and its ideal occupant. He is especially concerned to distance his view from any whiff of a Kantian noumenon, which Rawls identifies as a “real self” underlying the contingent, empirically and historically conditioned features of an individual’s identity and circumstances, a moral personality “defined by a concern with justice and the good.” Gauthier is too Humean for anything like that: “A person’s identity is in all respects a contingent matter. But this contingency is not morally arbitrary, for morality is and can be found only in the interaction of real persons individuated by their capacities, attitudes, and preferences” (257).