 The core idea of social contract theories, we have been stressing, is that the deliberation of the parties is supposed to model the justificatory problem of ordinary moral agents and citizens. Now this pulls social contract theories in two opposing directions. On the one hand, if the deliberations of the hypothetical parties are to model our problem and their conclusions are to be of relevance to us, the parties must be similar to us. The closer the parties are to “you and me” the better their deliberations will model you and me, and be of relevance to us. On the other hand, the point of contract theories is to make headway on our justificatory problem by constructing parties that are models of you and me, suggesting that some idealization is necessary and salutary in constructing a model of justification. To recognize that some forms of idealization are problematic does not imply that we should embrace what Gaus has called “justificatory populism” that every person in society must actually assent to the social and moral institutions in question (Gaus 1996, 130–131). Such a standard would take us back to the older social contract tradition based on direct consent and as we argue in §3, modern contract theories are concerned with appeals to our reason, not our self-binding power of consent.