 In Rawls’ scheme, the function of the veil of ignorance is necessary to prevent rational self-interested persons from using their knowledge of their own positions to win unfair advantages over others. (Whether such an approach can provide genuine impartiality between competing conceptions of the good is a difficult question that will be further considered in section 5.) An alternative approach abandons both the veil of ignorance and the assumption that the bargaining parties are primarily self-interested. This is the strategy favored by T.M. Scanlon, whose contractors are motivated not by self-interest but by ‘the desire for reasonable agreement’ (Scanlon 1982, 115 n. 10; see also Scanlon 1978, 1998; Barry 1995). On the resulting account of moral permissibility, “an act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any system of rules for the general regulation of behavior which no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement” (Scanlon, 1982, 110). The requirement of impartiality is captured here by the basic fact that the question is whether everyone who is to live under the selected rules can reasonably accept them. As in Rawls’ theory, however, the principles of second-order impartiality accepted at the contract level allow for considerable first-order partiality at the level of agent-choice. Somewhat similarly, Gert (1998) argues for a list of moral rules which “all impartial rational persons would favor including […] as part of the moral system” (158).