Moral Puzzles and the Contractarian View of Morality: Malcolm Murray’s Fix

Most moral puzzles are built to trap you. A runaway trolley, a ring that makes its wearer invisible, a choice between lying and watching harm unfold — each one assumes morality is a fixed code waiting to be applied, and each one jams when the code gives two answers at once. In Moral Puzzles: Contractarian Fix, launched at the University of Prince Edward Island on 19 October 2026, philosopher Malcolm Murray argues the trap is in the assumption. His contractarian view of morality treats moral rules not as eternal truths but as an evolved system of conditional cooperation — and on that basis, he says, the puzzles dissolve.

The book was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in September 2026 and runs to 294 pages, with chapters on supererogation, trolley problems, moral luck, blackmail, the is-ought problem and the ring of Gyges. Information verified through 30 October 2026.

The contractarian view of morality: a social contract, not a stone tablet

Murray states the contrast himself in a guest post for his publisher. If people mean by morality something real, objective and categorical, they will be beset by puzzles galore; if they mean something practical and relative to social circumstances, the puzzles dissolve. His summary of the alternative is compact: a society of people inclined to reciprocate cooperation will tend to do better, in self-interest terms, than a society of people who pursue self-interest with no concern for others.

The university’s launch notice makes the same point in plainer language. In Murray’s view, morality is not a set of enduring truths but the outcome of human evolution and natural selection — a social contract of rules that rational, self-interested agents follow because those rules enable a safer, more co-operative life.

That is a deliberately unglamorous foundation. No highest good — Murray notes contractarianism rejects a summum bonum outright — and no divine backing. He is blunt about the second point in his publisher’s post, arguing that the fear driving many readers, that morality must crumble without an authority behind it, rests on a picture of relativism as anarchy that does not follow from his account. Morality on his telling is relative to circumstances, not to individual whim.

The trolley problem consent test

The trolley chapter shows what changes in practice. The publisher’s summary reports Murray’s verdict: diverting a trolley to kill one person rather than five is unjustified without that person’s consent. The arithmetic of five against one, which settles the case for a straightforward consequentialist, does not settle it here, because the one person on the side track never agreed to be used as the cost of the rescue.

Consent does similar work elsewhere in the book. Murray argues, per the same summary, that disgust toward consensual acts such as incest cannot by itself support condemnation — a conclusion many readers will resist, which is rather the point. If moral rules are agreements among cooperating agents, then a reaction, however widely shared, is not yet an argument.

His route into these questions was personal before it was technical. In the publisher’s post he traces his metaethics to reading Kafka’s The Trial as a teenager and to a nagging question about punishment: what separates criminals from citizens except, in part, the luck of the draw? That thread runs straight into the book’s chapter on moral luck, listed in the table of contents alongside the dilemma chapter and a treatment of blackmail that asks whether it is immoral or merely imprudent.

The is-ought problem and ring of Gyges: puzzles turned back on the theory

Murray does not only aim contractarianism at other people’s puzzles. Part two of the book confronts challenges to contractarianism itself, including the is-ought problem — whether statements about what ought to be can be built from statements about what is — and the ring of Gyges, Plato’s test of whether anyone stays just when injustice carries no consequences. A closing chapter is titled, without flinching, “A Toxin for Contractarians.”

Two early endorsements quoted by the publisher suggest the provocation has landed with peers. Andrew I. Cohen of Georgia State University calls the book an honest and unapologetic examination of contractarian theory, advancing a compelling error theory, while Duncan MacIntosh of Dalhousie University praises its treatments of supererogation — acts held to be good but not required.

Analysis: The strength of Murray’s move is also its exposure. Dissolving a puzzle by shrinking what morality claims to be works only if readers accept the smaller claim — and many people consult moral rules precisely when cooperation has broken down, which is where a cooperation-based account has the least to say. Murray knows this; a philosopher who ends his book with a chapter on the toxin in his own theory is not selling certainty. What he offers instead is a test readers can run themselves: take a puzzle that has bothered you, ask what agreement among the people involved could actually sustain, and see whether the knot loosens. For the trolley, at least, the consent answer has a clarity the head-count answer never quite achieves.

Moral Puzzles is Murray’s seventh philosophy book, following Morals and Consent: Contractarian Solutions to Ethical Woes. The questions it reopens — why be moral, who agreed, who pays — are old. The suggestion that they were malformed all along is the new part, and it deserves a hearing even from readers who end up rejecting it.

Photo: Unknown author, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Sources

1. https://www.mqup.ca/Recent-News/2026/09/Moral-Puzzles-by-Malcolm-Murray
2. https://www.mqup.ca/Books/M/Moral-Puzzles
3. https://www.upei.ca/communications/news/2026/10/launch-new-book-dr-malcolm-murray-october-19