are to govern the conduct of contracting parties, while the Principles of Responsive
Adjudication are concerned with the legal resolution of contract disputes.

The Principles of Common Decency are well-known but often disregarded moral
principles. We are living in a new Dark Age, ¹ an age of moral crisis in which
morality and law are increasingly flouted, ² an age of selfishness, hedonism, dishon-
esty, and lack of concern for others. In 1987, Americans spent almost as much
money on drugs as on public schools. ³ A recent poll indicated that 53% of yuppies
complete their own income tax returns because they cannot find accountants willing
to accommodate the desired level of cheating. ⁴ If we are to recreate a decent and
civilized society, our legal institutions must teach and enforce certain basic moral
principles. Contract law must thus perform a moral education function. In this
respect, and in many other ways, my approach to contract law draws upon the
insights of Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and other thinkers in a very old natural
law tradition.

My approach is a natural law approach only in a broad and somewhat loose
sense. Although many of my basic premises concerning law and morality are drawn
from the natural law tradition, the details of my proposals do not follow Aristotle,
Aquinas, or any other natural law thinker. Most of the great natural law theorists
lived amidst social, economic, and legal institutions very different from our own.
They also lacked our more sophisticated understanding of the economics of
contracting. Thus, if I sometimes diverge from such thinkers on specifics, that is to
be expected. If my divergence occasionally corrects defects in their theoretical
vision, that is not a reason for pride on my part. "We are dwarfs perched on the
shoulders of giants. We therefore see more and farther than they, not because we
have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and born [sic]
aloft on their gigantic stature." ⁵

In Chapters 4 through 7, the theoretical approach presented in Chapters 1 and 3
is applied to selected contract law issues. With respect to each issue, I summarize
the prevailing law and then evaluate it. Sometimes I favor the current legal posture;
sometimes I recommend changes. Chapter 4 deals with the question of which
promises should be legally enforced. Chapter 5 is concerned with remedies.
Chapter 6 analyzes offer-and-acceptance issues. Chapter 7 is a somewhat tentative
and incomplete attempt to resolve the fraudulent nondisclosure problem.

The final chapter, Chapter 8, provides some concluding remarks intended to
justify a natural law approach to contracts. The reader may wonder why this
justification is not presented near the beginning of the book, before my own natural
law approach is worked out in detail. My reason is that the reader should be better
able to assess my justification if the approach being justified has already been fully
presented and applied. One cannot intelligently evaluate an approach to contract
law before seeing the specific conclusions it leads to when it is applied. In this kind
of intellectual journey, it is the destination that justifies the starting point.

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