They Don’t Really Care About Us: The Virtuous Agent and Efficient Breach

Edited by Jasneet Butter

Abstract

The relationship between law and morality is a rich and complicated topic. Seana Shiffrin argues that contract law and promissory morality diverge in some significant ways. Given the divergence, there is a question of how an agent ought to navigate areas of tension between the norms of contract law and the norms of promissory morality. Shiffrin argues that when tensions are problematic for an agent to cultivate moral virtues, contract law should at least carve out a space for the virtuous agent’s flourishing. This is the foundation that this paper builds on.