What We Owe to Each Other

T. M. Scanlon is the Emeritus Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Politics at Harvard. He is the author of What We Owe to Each Other, one of the best books on ethics.

How do we determine whether an action is morally correct or not? What reason does it give us not to do something if it is wrong? Why should we prioritize such reasons over our other concerns and values? T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions in this book, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to one another. Thinking about right and wrong, in his contractualist view, is thinking about what we do in terms that others can justify but cannot reasonably reject. He demonstrates how the value of being related to others in this way gives rise to the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong, and he demonstrates how familiar moral ideas like fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism.

Scanlon's contractualism is based on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges conventional wisdom about these critical concepts. He contends that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs do not bear primary value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as is commonly assumed. Scanlon believes in both moral and non-moral values. Taking this plurality of values into account, he claims that contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements claimed by relativists while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong.

Author: T. M. Scanlon

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