T. M. Scanlon is one of the most influential moral philosophers of recent years. In Morality and Responsibility, a collection that brings together essays written between 2001 and 2021, it is easy to see why. Here, as elsewhere, Scanlon engages with foundational questions in moral philosophy – e.g., about the nature of morality, moral justification, moral responsibility, and blame – in disarmingly straightforward prose with both deep insight and creativity.

Scanlon is probably most well-known for his contractualist moral theory of right and wrong, the canonical statement of which remains What We Owe to Each Other (Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998). The first part of Morality and Responsibility includes four chapters that, despite significant differences in aim, are unified by the fact that they restate and re-examine important features of the contractualist framework. The first chapter, ‘What is Morality?’, is somewhat unique in being a summary of an introductory course on moral philosophy that Scanlon taught at Harvard (a piece I found to be of interest from both a philosophical and pedagogical point of view). Chapters 2–4 then consider important challenges that have been raised against contractualism; examine the question of whether and how the fact that an action is wrong provides us with a reason not to act; and provide an insightful discussion of notions of the individual good in moral and political philosophy, drawing interesting parallels between the work of Henry Sidgwick, Karl Marx, John Rawls, and Bernard Williams. The second part of the book then shifts gear to focus on questions of moral wrongdoing and accountability. It consists of eight chapters on the topics of moral responsibility, blame, moral desert, and the value of choice. This second part also includes three chapters engaging closely with the work of other leading thinkers on these topics: Harry Frankfurt, Christine Korsgaard, and Gary Watson (originally published in their respective festschriften).

As this summary suggests, the volume covers a lot of ground, and I cannot do justice to its full contents here. Nevertheless, one thing I enjoyed when reading the book was that, by bringing these pieces together – written with quite different aims and audiences in mind – it brought out some central themes in Scanlon’s work. These concern both his approach to moral theorising (one might even say, his methodology), the content of his views, and the way these inform one another. For example, throughout part one of the book (on ‘Morality’), Scanlon repeatedly returns to the idea that a moral theory needs an answer to two questions. First, it needs a characterization of the subject matter of morality and a way of thinking about its first-order content (e.g., 36, 75ff.).Footnote ¹ Second, it needs an answer to the question of acceptance. That is, it needs ‘an explanation of why people should care about morality as the theory has characterized it’, and therefore, ‘regard the conclusions reached through the reasoning that the theory describes as normally settling the question of what to do; (36–37; see also 63, 77). Whatever one thinks of these as starting points, this kind of explicitness about what moral theory should aim to provide is refreshing, and surprisingly hard to come by in contemporary moral philosophy.

It comes as no shock that Scanlon sees his contractualism as well positioned to address these questions. Before examining why, it pays to introduce two theoretical desiderata that emerge as important for understanding Scanlon’s views. On one hand, Scanlon thinks that a good account of right and wrong will be systematic. That is, it should provide some way of thinking about what individual rights or moral principles are valid and why these rights or principles appropriately set limits on how we should treat one another (31). On the other hand, Scanlon sees it as a virtue of a moral theory that its account of right and wrong be what he calls normatively reductive. This is not an attempt to reduce normative ideas to something non-normative, but rather, an attempt ‘to explain principles concerning right and wrong in terms of other normative ideas, held to be more fundamental’ (33; see also 2, 57, 76), such as the fact that some action will harm or benefit a person, provide them with an opportunity to pursue a valuable career, or limit their ability to engage in close personal relationships.

Consequentialist moral theories appear to score well on their systematicity and normative reductionism. Deontic notions – of obligation and permission – are not foundational but are explained in terms of actions that promote the good, impersonally conceived. Moreover, in demanding that we ought to maximize the good, consequentialist views are in at least one respect systematic. The central problem, of course, is that the first-order content of such views seems unacceptable to many of us (as when, for example, we would be required to kill one healthy person to save five others). This first-order unacceptability might also prompt us to consider the acceptability of consequentialism at a deeper level. Do we have good reason to care about ‘morality’ if what morality dictates is just that we maximize the impersonal good, from the point of view of the universe?

For these reasons, one of Scanlon’s central aims has been to develop a systematic alternative to consequentialism. Interestingly, however, Scanlon’s attraction to both systematicity and normative reductionism mean that his approach to non-consequentialism occupies an intermediary position between two popular non-consequentialist approaches. The first approach focuses primarily on our intuitive responses to examples, both real and imagined (as exemplified by, among others, Scanlon’s Harvard colleague, Frances Kamm). Through reflection on such examples, we seek to articulate general moral principles that spell out how individuals ought to be treated, using something like the methodology of reflective equilibrium. Scanlon is by no means adverse to the use of examples to test moral principles. But an approach that relies solely on this kind of theorising does not provide, Scanlon points out, ‘a more general account of why these principles are correct, and a method of arriving at them’ (33). This might be interpreted as saying that, while thought experiment driven methodologies might seem to provide an account of the content of morality (addressing Scanlon’s first question), it would not provide an answer to the question of acceptance, of why we should endorse and act on these principles. The second approach, by contrast, takes certain deontic claims – for example certain basic rights, such as a right to freedom – as foundational (an approach taken by contemporary Kantian philosophers such as Arthur Ripstein). From such a starting point one may seek to derive further moral and political principles. Yet such an appeal to foundational rights is, at least to many, explanatorily unsatisfying. One reason for this, as Scanlon puts it, is that ‘it seems possible to give reasons for our judgments about moral right and wrong’ (76). Another is that moral rights or principles are often complex and admit of exceptions, and these call out for explanation.

How, then, does contractualism address the questions of content and acceptance? The answer to both questions lies in the idea that we have good reason to be concerned with whether our actions are justifiable to others. This, Scanlon suggests, amounts to the ‘identifying mark’ of contractualism (74). First, a concern with justifiability to others provides a way of thinking about the content of moral principles, through reflection on whether a candidate principle would be acceptable or reasonably rejected by those to whom we seek to justify our actions (assuming that they are likewise committed to the project of finding moral principles) (see Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998: 153). At the same time, it offers an answer to the question of acceptance simply because we have good reason to care about whether we can justify our actions to one another. Indeed, Scanlon claims that relating to others in a way that is justifiable to them instantiates a valuable form of moral relationship, participation in which itself makes our lives go better (93; see further 121ff.). Moreover, our concern with this interpersonal relation can explain the distinctive form of remorse that we feel when we believe ourselves to have violated a valid moral principle, in such a way that others can reasonably object to our actions (40, 43, 62, 76). This is not just a matter of having caused something bad to happen, but of having wronged someone, who, just like us, have reasons to want their lives to go in some ways rather than others. (It also helps to account for the nature and significance of moral blame, as Scanlon argues in Chapter 6.)

These personal reasons, as Scanlon labels them, are also key to his normative reductionism. When thinking about the reasonable rejectability of a candidate moral principle, we are not concerned with all or any effects that accepting the principle might have, but only on its effects for those individuals who might object to the forms of treatment that would be allowed by such a principle. For instance, I might reasonably object to a principle because it would permit others to cause me significant harm, or because it would forbid me from giving my friends and spouse any special attention. Unlike consequentialist views, however, I could not object that a principle would permit actions that disregard impersonal reasons (such as the impersonal value of a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon), or because it would lead to a large aggregate harm (such as millions of people suffering a short minor headache) (42–43). The exclusion of these reasons traces back to the fundamental concern with the justifiability of our actions to one another as individuals, each of whom has their own life to lead.

As Scanlon observes, while these restrictions allow us to explain some noteworthy intuitive judgments (as in his famous Transmitter Room case – Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998: 235), it may also provide a basis for some significant objections. One concern is that the contractualist procedure yields principles that seem overly demanding. For instance, if the process of determining which principles we should accept is a matter of comparing the strengths of individuals’ personal reasons, in terms of the benefits or harms that would accrue to them, it would appear to generate counterintuitive verdicts. For example, if another person would gain more years of life than I would from having one of my organs it might seem that I must give it to them, since their reasons to reject a principle allowing me to keep it are stronger than my reasons to reject a principle that requires me to give it to them (36). One is tempted to say that I have a right over my body. But this would seem to abandon the reductionist strategy. The challenge for contractualism is whether it can explain why we think that individuals have such claims without simply relying on independently given rights (56). A second objection, concerning which there is a growing literature, is that contractualism cannot explain intuitive verdicts about cases in which aggregation seems relevant. For instance, what explains why we should save a group of twenty people rather than a group of five if we can only save one of the groups? After all, the individuals’ reasons for wanting to be saved are, we can assume, identical – that they want to continue to live and benefit from what life has to offer. And, crucially, these reasons cannot be aggregated (43). Scanlon considers several interesting lines of response to these challenges. But regardless of whether they succeed, much clearly remains to be said.

All of this still only scratches the surface. I have said nothing of the idea that ‘What We Owe to Each Other’ is one among a plurality of morality values; of the under-explored question of the relationship between Scanlon’s contractualism and social and political philosophy (though see Wallace Reference Wallace2019: Ch. 3); of how we should think of those humans (and non-human animals) who are not capable of recognising and responding to reasons, though who clearly have reasons to want their lives to go in some ways rather than others (e.g., not to be harmed). Nevertheless, in the unlikely event that anyone reading this review needed convincing, I hope that the foregoing makes clear that articles collected in Morality and Responsibility are a testament to the richness and insight of Scanlon’s work, and a sign that it will continue to have a significant influence on analytic moral philosophy for a long time to come.