T. M. Scanlon
Encyclopedia
Thomas Michael Scanlon (born 1940) is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's
Department of Philosophy
. He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana
; earned his Ph.D.
in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben
; studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship; and taught for many years at Princeton University
, where he had been an undergraduate student. His early work was in proof theory
, but he soon made his name in ethics
and political philosophy
, where he developed a version of contractualism
in the line of John Rawls
, Immanuel Kant
, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, and human rights.
Professor Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching in the department has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book, What We Owe to Each Other, was published by Harvard University Press
in 1998; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Other recent publications include "Moral Theory, Understanding and Disagreement", Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 55 (1995) pp. 343–356, and "Intention and Permissibility I," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 74 (2000), pp. 301–317.
Scanlon is the father-in-law of philosopher and scholar of African American studies
Tommie Shelby
, and was a close friend to professors G.A.Cohen and John Rawls
.
We can begin our description of Scanlon’s contractualism by noting that judgements about right and wrong, unlike empirical judgements, are not theoretical claims about the nature of the spatiotemporal world but rather practical claims about what we have reason to do. Further, they are a particularly important class of practical claims in that the judgement that an action is wrong is taken to provide reasons to not do that action which are most often considered to be decisive against competing reasons. Following this point, Scanlon takes questions about the reason-giving force of moral judgements to be prior to questions about the subject matter of the morality of right and wrong. More explicitly, he thinks that if we provide an account of the extraordinary reason-giving force of moral judgements then this account could largely form the basis for a characterisation of the subject matter of what we owe to each other.
Scanlon grounds the reason-giving force of judgements about right and wrong in ‘the positive value of a way of living with others’. A way of living with others which is typified by an ideal of mutual recognition between rational agents, where mutual recognition demands that moral agents acknowledge the value of human life and respond to this value in the right ways.
How ought we to value human, or rational, life? Scanlon argues persuasively that different valuable things require different ways of valuing. In contrast to teleological accounts of value, often to take something to be of value is not only to see reason to bring about a maximal amount of that thing. This is especially true when we come to consider the value of human life. When we value human life we do not see this as a reason to create as much human life as we can. Rather, we tend to see reason to respect other human beings, to protect them from death and other forms of harm and, in general, to want their lives to go well. More important for Scanlon, to value rational life is to recognise the features which distinguish rational life from other valuable things, specifically, the ability of rational creatures to assess reasons and judgements, and to govern their lives in accordance with these assessments. Scanlon asserts that the proper response to the recognition of these distinctive features is to treat rational creatures in terms of principles which they could not reasonably reject.
From this point, Scanlon’s account of the value of rational life provides a locus around which his account of the reason-giving force of moral judgements dovetails quite neatly with a characterisation of the method of reasoning which we use to arrive at judgements of right and wrong, a method, moreover, which seems to be phenomenologically plausible. The reason-giving force of moral judgements is grounded in an ideal of mutual recognition which requires treating others in accordance with principles that they could not reasonably reject. Because mutual recognition requires that these other people are also appropriately motivated, this entails Scanlon’s formulation of wrongness: ‘An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject’. I will call this the contractualist formulation. An act is right, quite simply, if a principle permitting it could not reasonably be rejected in terms of the aforementioned formulation.
A few, rather discordant, summary comments are needed regarding how moral principles are derived from the contractualist formulation. When considering whether a principle can be rejected we must take into account the consequences, in general, of its being accepted, not only the consequences of the particular actions that it allows. Because we cannot be sure about who will be affected by a principle, and how they will be affected, we must draw on our experience of life and consider the ‘generic reasons’ which individuals are likely to have, as a result of their general circumstances, to reject a principle. In order to determine whether a principle is reasonably rejectable we must impartially weigh these generic reasons against each other and, exercising our judgement, draw a conclusion about what the weight of reasons support. Given the motivation of finding principles for the general regulation of society that no-one could reasonably reject, if the weight of reasons support a certain conclusion then it would be unreasonable to reject that conclusion. Importantly, principles can only be rejected by individuals; aggregation of reasons across individuals is not allowed. So if the generic reasons of an individual carry more weight then any other individual’s generic reasons then his generic reasons are (for the most part)decisive in determining principles.
The generic reasons which are open to consideration under the contractualist formulation are any reasons which we judge as relevant to reasonable rejectability. This requires that we exercise our judgement in determining whether such reasons would be suitable grounds for mutual recognition. Therefore, that a principle would negatively affect a person’s well-being is not the only kind of reason which may be brought against a principle. Other considerations, such how a burden would be imposed by a principle, can serve as reasonable grounds for rejection.
Finally, while contractualism only provides an account of that central part of morality which deals with what we owe to each other, Scanlon observes that this part of morality is related to the broader realm of morality in complex ways. There is pressure for the morality of what we owe to each other to acknowledge the values included in the broader realm of morality insofar as principles which don’t make room for these values could be reasonably rejected. In turn, these values must accommodate the dictates of what we owe to each other to the extent that they involve relations with others, who have separate moral standing.
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
Department of Philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
MacArthur Fellows Program
The MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...
. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana
Indianapolis, Indiana
Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...
; earned his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben
Burton Dreben
Burton Spencer Dreben was an American philosopher specializing in mathematical logic. A Harvard graduate who taught at his alma mater for most of his career, he published little but was highly influential as a teacher and as a critic of the work of his colleagues .-The logician:Dreben was a rare...
; studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship; and taught for many years at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, where he had been an undergraduate student. His early work was in proof theory
Proof theory
Proof theory is a branch of mathematical logic that represents proofs as formal mathematical objects, facilitating their analysis by mathematical techniques. Proofs are typically presented as inductively-defined data structures such as plain lists, boxed lists, or trees, which are constructed...
, but he soon made his name in ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
and political philosophy
Political philosophy
Political philosophy is the study of such topics as liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why they are needed, what, if anything, makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect and why, what form it...
, where he developed a version of contractualism
Contractualism
Contractualism can refer to two different positions. First, it can to refer to moral theories based on social contract theory, also known as contractarianism, which argue that what people ought to do is determined by contracts or agreements reached between those people. Second, the term was used by...
in the line of John Rawls
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
, Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, and human rights.
Professor Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, but the bulk of his teaching and writing has been in moral and political philosophy. He has published papers on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory. His teaching in the department has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book, What We Owe to Each Other, was published by Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. In 2005, it published 220 new titles. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Its current director is William P...
in 1998; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Other recent publications include "Moral Theory, Understanding and Disagreement", Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 55 (1995) pp. 343–356, and "Intention and Permissibility I," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 74 (2000), pp. 301–317.
Scanlon is the father-in-law of philosopher and scholar of African American studies
African American studies
African American studies is a subset of Black studies or Africana studies. It is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of the history, culture, and politics of African Americans...
Tommie Shelby
Tommie Shelby
Tommie Shelby is a philosopher and writer. Shelby is currently Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the second black scholar to be tenured in the Philosophy Department at Harvard...
, and was a close friend to professors G.A.Cohen and John Rawls
John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University....
.
Contractualism
Contractualism is an attempt at providing a unified account of the subject matter of a central part of morality which Scanlon calls ‘what we owe to each other’. The normative domain of what we owe to each other is meant to encompass those duties to other people which we bear in virtue of their standing as rational creatures. A broader conception of morality includes whatever else we may owe to specific people, such as the special obligations we bear in relations with friends and family, or whatever else morality may require of us, such as the way in which we treat ourselves or nature. Scanlon believes that what we owe to each other, or what we could loosely call ‘the morality of right and wrong’, is distinct from this broader conception of morality in that contractualism provides a unified account of its contentWe can begin our description of Scanlon’s contractualism by noting that judgements about right and wrong, unlike empirical judgements, are not theoretical claims about the nature of the spatiotemporal world but rather practical claims about what we have reason to do. Further, they are a particularly important class of practical claims in that the judgement that an action is wrong is taken to provide reasons to not do that action which are most often considered to be decisive against competing reasons. Following this point, Scanlon takes questions about the reason-giving force of moral judgements to be prior to questions about the subject matter of the morality of right and wrong. More explicitly, he thinks that if we provide an account of the extraordinary reason-giving force of moral judgements then this account could largely form the basis for a characterisation of the subject matter of what we owe to each other.
Scanlon grounds the reason-giving force of judgements about right and wrong in ‘the positive value of a way of living with others’. A way of living with others which is typified by an ideal of mutual recognition between rational agents, where mutual recognition demands that moral agents acknowledge the value of human life and respond to this value in the right ways.
How ought we to value human, or rational, life? Scanlon argues persuasively that different valuable things require different ways of valuing. In contrast to teleological accounts of value, often to take something to be of value is not only to see reason to bring about a maximal amount of that thing. This is especially true when we come to consider the value of human life. When we value human life we do not see this as a reason to create as much human life as we can. Rather, we tend to see reason to respect other human beings, to protect them from death and other forms of harm and, in general, to want their lives to go well. More important for Scanlon, to value rational life is to recognise the features which distinguish rational life from other valuable things, specifically, the ability of rational creatures to assess reasons and judgements, and to govern their lives in accordance with these assessments. Scanlon asserts that the proper response to the recognition of these distinctive features is to treat rational creatures in terms of principles which they could not reasonably reject.
From this point, Scanlon’s account of the value of rational life provides a locus around which his account of the reason-giving force of moral judgements dovetails quite neatly with a characterisation of the method of reasoning which we use to arrive at judgements of right and wrong, a method, moreover, which seems to be phenomenologically plausible. The reason-giving force of moral judgements is grounded in an ideal of mutual recognition which requires treating others in accordance with principles that they could not reasonably reject. Because mutual recognition requires that these other people are also appropriately motivated, this entails Scanlon’s formulation of wrongness: ‘An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject’. I will call this the contractualist formulation. An act is right, quite simply, if a principle permitting it could not reasonably be rejected in terms of the aforementioned formulation.
A few, rather discordant, summary comments are needed regarding how moral principles are derived from the contractualist formulation. When considering whether a principle can be rejected we must take into account the consequences, in general, of its being accepted, not only the consequences of the particular actions that it allows. Because we cannot be sure about who will be affected by a principle, and how they will be affected, we must draw on our experience of life and consider the ‘generic reasons’ which individuals are likely to have, as a result of their general circumstances, to reject a principle. In order to determine whether a principle is reasonably rejectable we must impartially weigh these generic reasons against each other and, exercising our judgement, draw a conclusion about what the weight of reasons support. Given the motivation of finding principles for the general regulation of society that no-one could reasonably reject, if the weight of reasons support a certain conclusion then it would be unreasonable to reject that conclusion. Importantly, principles can only be rejected by individuals; aggregation of reasons across individuals is not allowed. So if the generic reasons of an individual carry more weight then any other individual’s generic reasons then his generic reasons are (for the most part)decisive in determining principles.
The generic reasons which are open to consideration under the contractualist formulation are any reasons which we judge as relevant to reasonable rejectability. This requires that we exercise our judgement in determining whether such reasons would be suitable grounds for mutual recognition. Therefore, that a principle would negatively affect a person’s well-being is not the only kind of reason which may be brought against a principle. Other considerations, such how a burden would be imposed by a principle, can serve as reasonable grounds for rejection.
Finally, while contractualism only provides an account of that central part of morality which deals with what we owe to each other, Scanlon observes that this part of morality is related to the broader realm of morality in complex ways. There is pressure for the morality of what we owe to each other to acknowledge the values included in the broader realm of morality insofar as principles which don’t make room for these values could be reasonably rejected. In turn, these values must accommodate the dictates of what we owe to each other to the extent that they involve relations with others, who have separate moral standing.
Selected works
- What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press (1998)
- The Difficulty of Tolerance, Cambridge University Press (2003)
- Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, Harvard University Press (2008)
Interviews with Scanlon
- 'The Kingdom of Ends on the Cheap' in in Alex Voorhoeve Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-921537-9
- On ethics of blame: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urJcZf--wds