 The agreement of the parties in the deliberative model is certainly counterfactual in the two-fold sense we have analyzed: a counterfactual agreement among counterfactual parties. But the point of the deliberative model is to help us (i.e., “you and me”) solve our justificatory problem—what social arrangements we can all accept as “free persons who have no authority over one another” (Rawls 1958, 33). The parties’ deliberations and the conditions under which they deliberate, then, model our actual convictions about justice and justification. As Rawls says (1999, 514), the reasoning of the counterfactual parties matters to us because “the conditions embodied in the description of this situation are ones that we do in fact accept.” Unless the counterfactual models the actual, the upshot of the agreement could not provide us with reasons. Gaus describes this process as a “testing conception” of the social contract (2011a, 425). We use the counterfactual deliberative device of the contract to “test” our social institutions. In this way, the contemporary social contract is meant to be a model of the justificatory situation that all individuals face. The counterfactual and abstracted (see §2) nature of the contract is needed to highlight the relevant features of the parties to show what reasons they have.