Scanlon suggests that no one could reasonably deny a remedy that protects the expectations of the promisor, given the significant benefits to promises and the low cost to the promisors (Scanlon 2001: 105-111). But the cost to publishers of a principle that requires compensation for expectations may not be too low. Scanlon envisions that the promisers can easily circumvent special remedies by calling their deliberate representations “Of course, I`m not promising.” But such a warning undermines the credibility of the communicated intent in the context of a regime that enforces promises. A person who wants to credibly signal his intention to occur, while hoping to avoid being responsible for the expectations of his promisor, seems to be disempowered by the Scanlon regime. Contract law is based on the model (or idealization) of “voluntary exchange”. between autonomous individuals” (Radin 2007:196). Contracts are executed on the assumption that the parties have the necessary competence for an informed and voluntary decision (R2: § 15), while fraud, coercion and various forms of pressure in negotiations constitute grounds for resolution (R2: §§ 164, 175, 177). A preliminary question is why the law should be so concerned with freedom and autonomy in contractual exchange. As mentioned above, the transformation of private property may be justified on grounds of efficiency or general welfare (see § 1.3). The guiding principle of the law could be hypothetical or reasonable consent – which the parties would or should accept – rather than actual consent. The meaning of real consent seems quite clear when exchanges interfere with areas over which individuals retain particular sovereignty, including their own bodies and minds (Mill 1859; Hill, 1991; Enoch 2017).

However, not all contractual exchanges affect physical or mental integrity, and the importance of real consent to contracts as a whole is therefore not obvious. Most jurist-economists adopt an openly revisionist attitude towards certain legal rules. Some argue that in the absence of consideration – in particular the use of pre-contractual insurance – the law should take into account greater consideration than permitted by orthodox contractual doctrine (see, for example, Bebchuk & Ben-Shahar 2001:427; Ben-Shahar, 2004; Craswell, 1996; Johnston, 1999; Katz, 1996). Moreover, regardless of the categorical preference for wait-based claims in orthodox contract law, the economic approach rejects. These remedies may or may not promote optimal confidence; but in both cases, the promise idea of securing the promises of the promisor “played no role in the analysis leading to the conclusion” of the optimal remedy (Craswell 2000:107). In other words, a priming type, where the law creates expectations of performance, which it considers grounds for performance, is essential in the contract. Instead of protecting the parties to a contract, as other conventional defences do, defences of illegality and breach of public order seek to protect the common good and the integrity of the courts by refusing to enforce certain types of contracts. Contracts for illegal or immoral conduct would not be enforced by the courts. In this impasse, the “pluralist” finds reason to question whether contract law is guided by an objective or guiding principle of valuation rather than a multitude of independent and perhaps even immeasurable evaluation objectives. Pluralism is more often assumed in literature than directly defended, and the defence in literature usually takes the form of a critique of monistic views (see, for example, Hillman 1998). However, the criticism is nuanced because monistic views are presented as real, albeit incomplete, overviews of contract law, which contributes to the taxonomic project of mapping its underlying values (Hillman 1998; Klass, 2008; Kreitner, 2012).

For pluralism to be more than a negative thesis, pluralists have a lot of work ahead of them to explain the plural obligations of contract law, and ideally offer more than a list of values to promote (Lucy 2007). Contractual obligations, according to these theories, are based on the value of a common perspective. In one version, this value lies in the recognition inherent in perspective, since promises and promises treat each other as independent persons, imbued with the special normative status implied by the assertion of contractual authority.