Content area
Full Text
The central topic of What We Owe to Each Other1-the (interpersonal) morality of "right and wrong"-is denoted by its title, but the range of the book is much more extensive than this. Scanlon takes up and illuminates along the way an interrelated array of questions about reasons and values broadly construed. Consequently, the importance of the book does not hang entirely on the fate of its contractualist project; its subtle treatment of these broader issues will have, I expect, a lasting impact on moral philosophy in general. Here I want to try to bring out some of this richness and breadth, and to set the contractualist project in the context of some of these wider questions of value.
1. Scanlon and Kant
Let me begin by noting some of the book's most important claims and assumptions.
(1) The concept of a reason is taken to be the most fundamental normative category.
(2) In particular, the notion of value is to be construed in terms of the notion of reasons, not the other way around.
(3) The part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other is to be understood in terms of the idea of what we can justify to one another as a basis for interpersonal relations. This idea indicates a reason of a distinctive kind, which expresses the value of "mutual recognition."
(4) We should not expect to be able to articulate a systematic theory of reasons (or values) relating moral reasons to reasons of different kinds.
(5) Nor should we expect to be able to ground moral reasons in something normatively more basic (prudence or self-interest, or rationality).
(6) Nor is there a reasonable prospect of finding a "foundation" for normativity itself (of "naturalizing" normativity).
Morality is contractualist, on Scanlon's account, in just the sense that it seeks an accommodation among our disparate and conflicting ends and interests to which it would be unreasonable for us not to subscribe as a framework for common life. This end shapes both the form of reasoning to which moral judgment is constrained and the motivational basis for our concern for morality. Moral judgment is the outcome of reasoning about which principles for interpersonal affairs no one could reasonably reject, and moral concern is...