Our central concern with the target article is its omission of how moral standards are employed in reasoning and decision-making. At the source of this omission is the same treatment of two philosophically distinct traditions – contractarianism and contractualism – under the broad label of “contractualism.” Normative contractarianism begins from an amoral standpoint, with self-interested parties seeking mutual benefit through strategic cooperation, from which moral principles are expected to emerge. In contrast, normative contractualism relies on moral reasoning to assess the fairness of bargains, using moral standards to guide decisions (Cudd and Eftekhari, Reference Cudd, Eftekhari and Zalta2021). Since the authors emphasize mutual benefit among self-interested agents and downplay the reasonableness of bargains, their view seems to align more with contractarianism and carries little inherent moral content. The authors’ theory, stripped of moral content, remains a theory of rational behavior – focused on how self-interested agents pursue mutual advantage – not a theory of how moral standards are weighed or compared in a bargain.

By the virtue of this conflation, authors’ triple theory of moral cognition inherits contractarianism’s theoretical limitations. Normative contractarianism struggles to justify agreements formed under unequal bargaining power, where one party dictates terms that violate moral intuitions about fairness – such as a wealthy baker refusing bread to a starving person (see Pateman and Mills, Reference Pateman and Mills2007). While both parties may gain something, the distribution reflects power rather than moral considerations. To circumvent this issue, normative contractarians typically assume fair initial conditions, but these rarely hold in practice. We don’t expect the wealthy to be generous without incentive or those in authority to contribute equitably unless fairness is socially enforced (for example, see Le Pargneux & Cushman, Reference Le Pargneux and Cushman2024). While this aligns with the target article’s prediction that asymmetric bargains disfavor those with fewer outside options, it merely describes existing power dynamics without explaining why such agreements oftentimes strike us as morally objectionable despite being agreed upon mutually.

We suggest two ways to remedy the current account. First, while contractarian agreements are ostensibly reached, their justifications require systematic inspection to determine when they are deemed fair or unfair. Whether perspective-taking from positions of fewer or greater outside options changes fairness judgments can be examined empirically. This approach would illuminate how adopting different viewpoints within asymmetric bargaining situations affects moral evaluations of the resulting agreements. Crucially, we must distinguish between moral decisions and judgments about those decisions – the current theory may explain what people find permissible or choose to do, but not what they consider fair, just, or morally praiseworthy. This distinction aligns with Malle’s (Reference Malle2021) framework, which argues that while norm judgments such as permissibility indicate what is allowed, deeper appraisals of fairness and moral worth are captured by wrongness and blame judgments that account for intent and justification.

Relatedly, to rescue contractarian theory from the criticism that it legitimizes agreements based solely on relative advantage rather than ethical considerations, normative contractualism’s force of argument relies on inspecting the justifiability of reasons leading up to decisions. Especially when we consider the emphasis of the contractualist on justifiability of principles, and insofar as that constitutes a motivation that is beyond rational self-interest, it can serve as an independent generative cause of the welfare-based and rule-based dispositions rendering untenable any scheme that purports to derive both of these dimensions of human morality solely as resource rational approximations of ad hoc negotiations unregulated by any standard whatsoever. The moral principles that parties appeal to in any bargaining context – such as demands for fairness, justice, and egalitarian concerns – are necessary reference values on which bargains are evaluated as fair and reasonable or otherwise by appealing to the principle of “mutual recognition,” the central moral value preserved in philosophical contractualism.

Moral values, indeed, seem to serve as relatively stable indicators of what specific individuals would endorse or reject across different bargaining contexts, making individual-level differences in moral priorities informative for predicting which agreements will be deemed acceptable versus objectionable. Some empirical findings in support of such a view demonstrate that personality differences systematically predict moral judgment patterns across diverse scenarios (Conway and Gawronski, Reference Conway and Gawronski2013; Sampaio et al., Reference Sampaio, Freitas, Rêgo, Morello and Boggio2023). Further, studies also show that who your partner is in economic games and what you believe about them influences how one will bargain or cooperate over time (e.g., Slembeck, Reference Slembeck2003). These findings suggest that any adequate theory of moral bargaining is compelled to account for how individual variations in moral foundations, values, and personality traits shape both the agreements people are willing to make and their evaluations of agreements made by others.

In conclusion, we argue that the current theory is heavily contractarian in its orientation and suffers from the same theoretical disadvantages in its quest to be a theory about moral behavior. We claim that the current theory is inadequate to account for the motivation to be fair in making and keeping agreements. To account for that, one would need to employ some sort of value, even at the base level of ad hoc negotiations, which parties can appeal to while putting forward their claims without which all the agreements backed by this framework devolve into agreements based on nothing else but the asymmetric threat advantage that one of the parties possesses.

In essence, we argue that a comprehensive theory of moral cognition must adequately explain both what people do and what they believe they ought to do. While the target article emphasizes the former, the latter concerns are those that aid in predicting behaviors when continued and multi-shot interactions among agents are involved. By incorporating individual differences and personal moral leanings in reasoning, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of how people navigate the intersections of self-interest and ethical standards in bargaining contexts. Only through this more complete approach can we hope to capture both the strategic and genuinely moral dimensions of human bargaining behavior.