“It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit,” write Levine and colleagues (p. 1), as they laudably launch contractualism back into moral psychology. We challenge the authors, however, to see morality as more than a means to mutual benefit. Calls for rights and justice are not predictions about what others will do but demands for what others ought to do.

Children, youth, and adults judge that individuals deserve rights and justice, whether they expect agreement or not (Killen & Dahl, Reference Killen and Dahl2021; Rutland, Cameron, & Killen, Reference Rutland, Cameron and Killen2024). For instance, many women in patriarchal communities judge it unfair for men to restrict their driving or spending, but – expecting men to disagree – they agree to obey the men’s restrictions (Turiel & Wainryb, Reference Turiel and Wainryb2000). Everyday moral resistance against oppression involves deception because the oppressed do not expect their oppressors to agree to compromise (Scott, Reference Scott1985; Turiel, Reference Turiel2002). People who saved Jews during the Holocaust operated in secret because they knew the Nazis did not share their moral views – they neither expected nor sought any mutually beneficial agreements with the perpetrators of genocide (Kochanski, Reference Kochanski2022; Oliner & Oliner, Reference Oliner and Oliner1988).

Disagreements about rights and justice also show up in the “dyadic and small-group interactions” (p. 15) that form the focus of the target article. The authors restrict their account to bargaining situations in which “parties can walk away freely” and “neither party can unilaterally back out,” and they leave out phenomena such as “universal human rights,” the “duty to provide for one’s children,” and “victimless crimes” (p. 5). But even in what remains of morality – the interdependent choices that the theory purports to explain – morality is more than the pursuit of mutually beneficial agreements.

Early on, the authors imagine a rich baker and a poor, hungry buyer. They write that the agreement that the baker and buyer should expect to reach, under ideal conditions, “would likely involve the customer paying at least something for the bread – a solution that achieves mutual benefit” (p. 4). This, the authors propose, would strike both baker and buyer as fair. Depending on what that “something” is, though, the agreed-upon price may not be everyone’s idea of fairness.

An exchange of cash and bread is never only an exchange of cash and bread. The exchange happens within a specific economy, social hierarchy, and intergroup context. Using a similar dilemma – the Heinz dilemma – Kohlberg (Reference Kohlberg and Mischel1971) found that many people judged, in a life-or-death decision, that it was morally right to steal instead of paying an unfair price. And what if those who control the grains and breads have conspired to make bread unaffordable to the masses? In the 1780s, outrage at the price of bread in Paris helped spark the French Revolution (Schama, Reference Schama1989). Or what if the buyers are a same-sex couple ordering bread for their wedding, and the baker is an Evangelical Christian who opposes same-sex marriage? Or if a White baker refuses to serve Black buyers at the counter? When cases like these reached the US Supreme Court, as they have in the past decades, the court’s careful deliberations were not only about which agreements of mutual benefit the parties might have reached, but about which rights and obligations the parties had toward each other.

The authors hint at complexities at the bakery when they acknowledge, in a footnote, that “there are those in society who have little or no bargaining power, yet many people have the moral intuition that they are nonetheless owed basic rights” (n. 4). We believe those basic rights deserve more than a footnote. By sidestepping basic rights and the social hierarchies where the rights operate, the proposed theory misses an opportunity to address both everyday and revolutionary morality.

Later, the authors suggest that such “moral intuitions” about rights come from “blind” evolutionary or cultural selection (p. 8). The intuitions are supposed to be “blind” in the sense that they are “not due to any reasoning or explicit bargaining on the part of the agents themselves” (p. 4). Elsewhere, the authors also argue that intuitions about rights are “resource-rational approximations to mutually beneficial agreements” (p. 2): heuristics people rely on when they lack the time or information to think or talk their way to mutually beneficial agreements. The authors do not consider that judgments about rights and justice might stem from neither blind adaptations nor heuristic approximations but from non-contractualist reasons.

Left out of the proposed theory is the reality – shown by over 40 years of research – that children, youth, and adults make moral judgments based on intrinsic concerns with rights, justice, and others’ welfare (Dahl & Waltzer, Reference Dahl and Waltzer2020; Elenbaas, Reference Elenbaas2019; Helwig, Reference Helwig, Killen and Smetana2006; Killen & Smetana, Reference Killen, Smetana, Lerner and Lamb2015; Rizzo et al., Reference Rizzo, Cooley, Elenbaas and Killen2018; Turiel, Reference Turiel2002). These judgments are neither blind nor mere approximations: They are judgments based on reasons that people can articulate and endorse. They are judgments that – unlike heuristic shortcuts – people still explain and stand by when they have the time and information to think them through (Dahl et al., Reference Dahl, Gingo, Uttich and Turiel2018).

Moral judgments can point toward mutually beneficial agreements: They can also point toward changes in the social conditions where agreements are made (Sen, Reference Sen2009). A buyer of bread might agree to a price they deem fair. They might also pragmatically agree to a price they deem unfair – and later seek to overthrow the rigged system. If a theory of moral cognition cannot explain how humans evaluate social inequalities and injustices, it cannot explain how people challenge existing conditions on moral grounds (Killen & Dahl, Reference Killen and Dahl2021; Turiel, Reference Turiel2002). We do agree with the authors that morality is unified (p. 30; see Dahl, Reference Dahl2023), but we disagree that it is unified by a resource-rational contractualism.

Not all contractualisms share the limitations we highlight here. The philosophical tradition of contractualism – of John Locke, Thomas Scanlon, and the American Declaration of Independence – has not just been about which contracts we expect people to accept. It has been about which agreements people ought to accept and which contracts they should refuse or revoke, for reasons of welfare, justice, or certain inalienable rights.