On What We Owe to Each Other

T.M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other is one of the most significant works in moral philosophy of recent years. It presents distinctive views on reasons, value, and well–being, and offers a contractualist account of moral wrongness and significance. It has initiated debates on the nature of value, the role of well–being, how numbers matter in deciding what we should do, and the role justifiability plays in our moral thinking. In On What We Owe to Each Other , five leading moral philosophers assess various aspects of Scanlon’s moral theory as laid out in this seminal work. Topics discussed include Scanlon’s contractualism, his view on well–being, aggregation, the nature of moral properties, moral reasoning, and relativism. The book also includes a response by T.M. Scanlon in which he clarifies and develops his views.

Introduction. 1. Constructivism vs. Contractualism. (Onora O’Neill). 2. Scanlon on Well–Being. (Jonathan Wolff). 3. Numbers, With and Without Contractualism. (Joseph Raz). 4. Justifiability to Each Person. (Derek Parfit). 5. The Limits of Moral Constructivism. (Mark Timmons). 6. Replies. (T. M. Scanlon). Index.

Philip Stratton–Lake is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading. He has published widely on Kant, intuitionism and metaethics. He is the author of Kant, Duty and Moral Worth (2000) and editor of Ethical Intuitionism: Re–evaluations (2002).