What We Owe to Each Other

The fullest statement of Scanlon's contractualism. Part One is about reasons and value. Scanlon takes reasons as basic: a reason is a consideration that counts in favour of something. He argues that desires do not give us reasons in the way often assumed, and proposes a "buck-passing" account of value, on which to call something good is to say it has properties that give us reason to respond to it. He also argues that well-being is not the master value in practical thinking. Part Two applies this to the morality of right and wrong. An act is wrong, on his view, if any set of principles for regulating behaviour that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement would disallow it. Morality is thus a matter of being able to justify ourselves to others. Scanlon goes on to treat responsibility and the value of choice, promises, and moral relativism.

It is the classic modern alternative to utilitarianism, built on the idea that wrongness is a failure of justifiability to others, and its account of reasons has been widely adopted.