What We Owe to Each Other.

SCANLON, T.M.

Item Number: 100032

Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

First edition of this influential text. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed and dated by the author on the half-title page, “For John Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task Tim Scanlon May 13, 2016.” The inscription is the final line of the work on page 361. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket painting by Giorgio Morandi. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not to do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? In this book, T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other. According to his contractualist view, thinking about right and wrong is thinking about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject. He shows how the special authority of conclusions about right and wrong arises from the value of being related to others in this way, and he shows how familiar moral ideas such as fairness and responsibility can be understood through their role in this process of mutual justification and criticism. Scanlon bases his contractualism on a broader account of reasons, value, and individual well-being that challenges standard views about these crucial notions. He argues that desires do not provide us with reasons, that states of affairs are not the primary bearers of value, and that well-being is not as important for rational decision-making as it is commonly held to be. Scanlon is a pluralist about both moral and non-moral values. He argues that, taking this plurality of values into account, contractualism allows for most of the variability in moral requirements that relativists have claimed, while still accounting for the full force of our judgments of right and wrong. “Thomas Scanlon's understanding of [morality's] complexity and of its sources in the variety of human relations and values is one of the virtues of this illuminating book. To say that it is long awaited would be an understatement. Scanlon has been one of the most influential contributors to moral and political philosophy for years...The appearance of his first book, a complex and powerful argument for the moral theory first sketched in his essay Contractualism and Utilitarianism, is a philosophical event" (Thomas Nagel).