 According to the impartiality objection, all human persons are owed certain duties regardless of their powers or abilities, and because it relies on an instrumental and subjective conception of practical reason, contractarianism cannot explain how this would be so. Contractarianism, on the contrary, holds it to be irrational to treat truly powerless persons equally, since it is not mutually advantageous to do so. This problem, which is similar to the exclusion problem discussed above and in section 6 below, is a serious problem. Gauthier’s Lockean Proviso was meant to rule out taking historical patterns of dominance into account, but even if all such dominance relations were eliminated and bargaining were conditioned on undominated assets, the inequality in natural talents and abilities would reintroduce the possibility of dominance.