Thomas Scanlon

This is a contribution to the symposium on Tim Scanlon's Being Realistic about Reasons (2014). We have two aims here: First, we ask for more details about Scanlon's meta-metaphysical view (about his notion of a domain, his criterion of existence, his ambition to remain ontologically thin, and on the role of pragmatic considerations in Scanlon's pictures), showing problems with salient clarifications. And second, we raise independent objections to the view - to its explanatory productivity, its distinctness, and the argumentative support it enjoys.

I reconstruct a plot in the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon ethical discussion. I discuss first the reasons why in the first half of the twentieth  century the claim of a neutral character of metaethics vis-a-vis normative ethics was generally accepted; then I discuss the reasons for a U-turn that took place in 1958, which brought back to the forefront two traditional schools of normative ethics, Kantian and Utilitarian, and the reasons for criticism from the new school of virtue ethics. I end by claiming that intuitionism and Kantian ethics will still be on the agenda for some time.

1. Fog on the Channell
2. 1903-1949: when people believed that philosophy needed to be depurated from cant 2.1. Cognitivism and non-cognitivismo 2.2. The naturalistic fallacy  2.3  Hume’ss law 2.4 Hume’s fork 2.5 Intuitionism, naturalism, emotivism
3. 1949-1958: when ethics was depurated from the ‘third person’
3.1 Hampshire’s diagnosis  3.2. Criticism to the The naturalistic fallacy  3.3. Criticism to Hume’s law
4. 1958-1980:  Kantian elements
4.1 The Kantian element in the good reasons approach: Kurt Baier  4.2. The Kantian element in pragmatism: Clarence Lewis  4.3. The Kantian element in utilitarianism: Harrod, Hare, Brandt  4.4. The Kantian element in post-intuitionism
5. 1971-2002: Kantian normative ethics
5.1 Reasons for the normative-ethics revival5.2 Gewirth  5.3 Donagan  5.4 Nagel  5.5 Kantian constructivism 5.6 Kantian contractualism
6. The recent Kant and Aristotle rediscovery and the forthcoming Price and Whewell rehabilitation
7. Provisional concluding remarks: analytic philosophy from Hume to Kant

Epistemologists have long worried that the willingness of open-minded people to reconsider their beliefs in light of new evidence is both a condition of improving their beliefs and a risk factor for losing their grip on what they already know. In this paper I introduce and attempt to resolve a moral variation of this puzzle: A willingness to engage people having strange or (to us) repugnant moral ideals looks like a condition of broadening our moral horizons, but also a risk factor for doing the wrong thing or becoming bad. I pursue a contractualist line according to which such hazardous engagement is a virtue only when it matters to our interlocutors whether they can justify themselves to us on terms we can accept—and for our sake or for the sake of their own virtue, not instrumentally or to get something out of us. When it does not so matter, openness can be unintelligent or gullible, i.e. not virtuous.

There is, on Scanlon’s view, a great deal more to the normative significance of equality. We don’t just want to see equal distribution of some thing. We want to live together, on terms of equal recognition, in ways that avoid interpersonal domination, prevent the emergence of stigmatizing differences in status, allow people to retain the self-respect that comes with seeing themselves as equal to others, and preserve the kind of background equality that can be a precondition for fair competition in the political and economic domains.

Scanlon’s account of equality isn’t simple; it resists capture in a one-line slogan. It is, one might say, frustratingly complicated. But that is completely right and proper, because the normative reality of our political lives just is frustratingly complicated. Our philosophical thinking about political values should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.

In this book, Charles Larmore develops an account of morality, freedom, and reason that rejects the naturalistic metaphysics shaping much of modern thought. Reason, Larmore argues, is responsiveness to reasons, and reasons themselves are essentially normative in character, consisting in the way that physical and psychological factsfacts about the world of nature-count in favor of possibilities of thought and action that we can take up. Moral judgments are true or false in virtue of the moral reasons there are. We need therefore a more comprehensive metaphysics that recognizes a normative dimension to reality as well. Though taking its point of departure in the analysis of moral judgment, this book branches widely into related topics such as freedom and the causal order of the world, textual interpretation, the nature of the self, self-knowledge, and the concept of duties to ourselves.

This dissertation analyses the capacity of contractualism and natural law to justify environmental intergenerational duties.


For three decades, climate change has been a major political concern. As a fundamental threat to environmental sustainability, climate change is believed to threaten the long-term welfare of humankind. It thus seems imperative to affirm long-term duties regarding future people’s environment. Furthermore, contractualism and natural law are two important moral theories in contemporary political life. While the former seems influential among political liberals, natural law seems more appealing to political conservatives. It is thus of interest how both of these theories can be used to argue for environmental intergenerational duties. Yet, natural law has been particularly understudied in this regard.


The point of departure of the study is the so-called non-identity problem, formulated by Derek Parfit. As concerns future generations, what we do not only affects the quality of people’s lives, but also who will come to exist. If future people come to exist as a consequence of how we live our lives, including the choice of living unsustainably, a degraded environment will be worse for no one. For so-called person-affecting theory, such as contractualism, non-identity seems to imply that there is nothing morally objectionable about leaving future people with an unsustainable environment.


First, the dissertation demonstrates recent attempts in contractualism, in the vein of John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon, to solve the non-identity problem on person-affecting terms. It is shown that these attempts either fail to affirm environmental intergenerational duties or implicitly abandon a person-affecting view.


Second, the dissertation explores a natural law approach to the non-identity problem, employing a recent account of natural law suggested by John Finnis. While natural law can be considered of import in contemporary political decision-making, it has hardly ever been used to ground environmental intergenerational duties. This dissertation shows how an impersonal application of natural law could be used in attempts to circumvent the non-identity problem, i.e. to affirm environmental intergenerational duties, and treats possible objections to such an account. It is argued that the requirement to consider so-called basic values, also in cases when no individual would be worse off by one’s act, should render it at least morally objectionable to leave future generations with an unsustainable environment.


Third, a new kind of objection to environmental intergenerational duties is discussed in depth. The objection applies to theories that, although they may accept an impersonal view in morals, subscribe to a person-affecting restriction in politics. On some interpretations, this limited restriction can be ascribed to both contractualism and natural law. This may imply a specifically institutional non-identity problem. It conveys the possibly paralysing conclusion that, even if there are environmental intergenerational duties in a moral sense, we are not permitted to use political institutions to enforce them.


Again, contractualism is used to demonstrate the possible difficulties in overcoming this kind of problem. With regard to natural law, the dissertation explores how the use of institutions could be justified impersonally by reference to the common good and the idea of intergenerational community. In this view, experiences that link us to previous generations justify institutional responsibility for the future.

Abstract: «The Open Texture of the Concept of Moral Blame». This article explores moral blame as a social practice. Its main thesis is that the concept of blame presents a non-univocal open texture, and thus we cannot expect to reach a concise definition of (the act of) blaming. In order to clarify what do we do when we blame, we need to heed an appropriate methodology capable of bringing together this multivocity of meanings. Hart and Finnis's theory of central and borderline cases is presented as a valuable analytical tool so as to offer a differentiated but general description of all instances of blaming. As a starting point to develop this analysis, Thomas M. Scanlon's relational approach of moral blame is considered.

Resumen: Contra el "sentido ordinario" de que la justicia implica, entre otras cosas, dar a cada quien lo que se merece, en su teoría de la justicia como equidad John Rawls adopta una perspectiva normativa radicalmente anti-meritocrática al considerar que nadie merece su lugar inicial en la sociedad y, por lo tanto, los factores contingentes no pueden tener incidencia distributiva. Desde el comunitarismo, se argumenta que la concepción rawlsiana del sujeto-despojado de casi toda particularidad-impide abordar la cuestión del mérito en tanto bien social propio de la esfera del reconocimiento. El libertarismo de derecha nozickeano, en tanto, recusa las pretensiones rawlsianas ya que desconoce la validez de la regla contractual que impide sacar provecho total de los atributos moralmente arbitrarios. Desde el igualitarismo relacional, Thomas Scanlon procura una rehabilitación limitada del mérito, en la medida en que sea o bien institucionalmente dependiente o merecimiento puro. Así, en lo que sigue, examinaremos la propuesta rawlsiana y la de sus críticos, para mostrar que, en definitiva, la anti-meritocracia de Rawls sale airosa de los embates más radicales y, en cierta medida, puede alojar la posición de Scanlon pero al precio de volverse menos exigente.

[This is for an author-meets-critics symposium on Thomas Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons, with replies from Scanlon, Canadian Journal of Philosophy.]

One of the key aims of Scanlon's Being Realistic about Reasons is to demystify knowledge of normative and mathematical truths. In this paper, I develop an epistemological challenge that Scanlon fails to explicitly address. I argue that Scanlon’s “metaphysical pluralism” can be understood as a response to that challenge. However, it affords an answer to the challenge only to the extent that it undermines the objectivity of normative and mathematical inquiry.

Brands are widely regarded as a constellation of shared associations surrounding a company and its offerings. On the traditional view of brands, these associations are regarded as perceptions and attitudes in consumers' minds in relation to a company. We argue that this traditional framing of brands faces an explanatory problem: the inability to satisfactorily explain why certain branding activism initiatives elicit the moralized reactive attitudes that are paradigmatic responses to wrongdoing. In this paper, we argue for a reframing of brands that calls for viewing brands as a series of normatively binding expectations that are ethically akin to promises. Our promissory framing of brands avoids the explanatory problem, illuminates a number of ethical requirements on branding, and reconceptualizes the role of brand managers.

It is a familiar feature of our ethical discourse that the strength of a moral argument often depends on more than its content. Presented interpersonally, its justificatory force may also depend on the identity of the speaker. An argument may serve to justify an action or policy when uttered by one speaker, while others lack the standing to offer the same argument as a justification for the action in question. I argue that this “speaker-relativity” of moral justification has not received the attention from moral philosophers that it merits. Amongst other things, it raises novel problems for a number of prominent moral theories, most interestingly for Scanlonian contractualism. Contractualists hold that an action is morally right if and because it is justifiable to each person (or, in the terms of Scanlon’s formula, because it is ‘licensed by a principle that no-one could reasonably reject’). Like attempts at justification, however, grounds for rejection must be presented in the form of arguments, addressed to the agent by those individuals who are adversely affected by his action. I argue that there are cases in which an action is intuitively wrong on account of its foreseeably bad consequences, yet none of those adversely affected have the standing to reasonably reject the principle that licenses its performance. This finding threatens to drive a wedge between our moral intuitions and contractualism’s account of moral rightness. It suggests that the supposed analysans (justifiability to each person) and the analysandum (moral rightness) can sometimes come apart.

T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism is a meta-ethical theory that explains moral motivation and also provides a conception of how to carry out moral deliberation. It supports non-consequentialism – the theory that both consequences and deontological considerations are morally significant in moral deliberation. Regarding the issue of punishment, non-consequentialism allows us to take account of the need for deterrence as well as principles of fairness, justice, and even desert. Moreover, Scanlonian contractualism accounts for permissibility in terms of justifiability: An act is permissible if and only if it can be justified to everyone affected by it. This contractualist thesis explains why it is always impermissible to frame an innocent person, why vicarious punishment is impermissible, and why there has to be a cap on sentences. Contractualism therefore allows us to take deterrence as a goal of punishment without the excess of utilitarianism. This paper further argues that the resulting view is superior to pure retributivism. Finally, it shows why legal excuses and mitigation can be justified in terms of the notion of negative desert.

T. M. Scanlon’s work on the value of equality provides the resources for developing a powerful and distinctive contractualist egalitarian view. This view acknowledges a range of egalitarian concerns, of a diverse nature, and points us towards a picture of the place of equality in the normative landscape that is richer and more complex than some other alternative views. I describe the outlines of this contractualist egalitarian view, addressing questions regarding its strength and scope. I then discuss the relationship of equality to other values, such as fairness and community (or fraternity), and examine the contrast between contractualist egalitarian and luck egalitarian views. I conclude with a sketch of some of the practical implications that might follow from further pursuit of Scanlon’s insights on the value of equality, in the hope that this may suggest an interesting direction of travel for further work.

This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of constructing our moral intuitions in the regards of playing video games. The methodology will incorporate a theoretical description of the moral position known as constructivism which is based on the views of the philosophers such as John Rawls and Thomas Scanlon. After the overall outlook, I would like to share the worry that Eric Sheng proposes – Why do we feel morally disquiet when looking at the horrendous acts that the players are doing in the video games which provide the means of free acts? Sheng is concerned about the players committing acts of violence when the game does not require a player to do so. Even though the player is, very well indeed, not providing any harm to others and his acts are designated towards an NPC, the act itself may be very problematic. Following from that, it would be very beneficial to look at the “field data” provided to us by Jaroslav Švelch. The research that he provides is the questionnaire data in which we can see a point which sets up this paper – players play differently when someone else is watching them; that is to say, they are much more reluctant to commit violent acts while being under the gaze of another person. Using this method of thought, constructivist procedure of guiding our moral intuitions takes place. The overall claim of this paper is as it follows – video games are a medium which provide us a great experiment in which we can test our moral intuitions by the “third person” procedure. In this regard, this re-configuration of our moral intuitions can be described by the moral constructivism, for which, I argue, has a lot of explanatory power when it comes to the actions in video games.

In this essay, I will argue that between Scanlon and Parfit's versions of contractualism, Scanlon's version of contractualism is the better theory. I will then assess Scanlon's version of contractualism and conclude that out of the normative ethical theories which I consider, Scanlon's contractualism offers the best account of morality.

The aim of this paper is to compare Mill’s and Dworkin’s theoretical frameworks in dealing with the applied case of pornography. The issue is of great interest, insofar it challenges liberalist theorists due to its dualistic nature: on one hand pornography should in fact benefit from all the advantages granted by the freedom of expression; on the other hand it can be considered harmful for women.

One of the defining characteristics of much contemporary nonconsequentialist thought is skepticism about interpersonal aggregation. Aggregative moral reasoning frequently yields counterintuitive implications, especially in cases where it enjoins us to let a few people suffer large losses so that many people can enjoy smaller benefits. To avoid these implications, leading nonconsequentialists have put forward “competing claims” models of moral rightness, according to which morality requires us to determine, by a series of pairwise comparisons, that action or policy which satisfies the strongest individual claim or generates the weakest individual complaint. The fullest development of this anti-aggregative approach is the contractualist moral theory defended by T.M. Scanlon. My paper examines a problem for the competing claims model: Outside the context of crime and war, most instances of serious harm don’t occur in situations where someone trades off certain harms to known individuals against certain benefits to other known individuals. Rather, most harm to others results from risks that some agent imposed on them in pursuit of some benefit for them, for the agent, or for others. The question is whether contractualists can provide a plausible account of such risky actions while honoring their anti-aggregative commitments. I focus on one class of risky actions – what I call instances of social risk – which are pervasive, indeed ineliminable from the conduct of large-scale public policy, yet prima facie troubling for the contractualist. They are characterized by the following four features: (1) The risky action will affect a large number of individuals. Because of this, it is virtually certain that some people will end up being burdened by it. (2) The individual losses to those who are burdened are considerably greater than the individual gains for those who are benefited. (3) The action-type in question is rare, or rarely affects the same people twice; as a result, we cannot assume that over time almost everyone will benefit from a principle that permits actions of this type to be performed. (4) The risky action is intuitively permissible. I submit that many actions in public policy, particularly in the domains of public health and of risk management, share these four features. The problem of social risk forces the contractualist to confront a question about his theory that, I argue, has not received a fully satisfactory answer to date: Are an individual’s personal reasons for rejecting a principle permitting the imposition of a given social risk a function of the prospect that the risky action gives to each person ex ante, allowing us to discount both benefits and harms by their improbability of occurring? Or is justifiability to each person a function of the action’s outcomes ex post? In that case, what would matter morally isn’t the ex ante likelihood of any given individual’s being benefited or harmed by the action, but rather the near certainty that, ex post, some persons will turn out to have been harmed by the action while others are benefited. The contractualist faces an apparent dilemma: if he rejects the ex ante view of justification, as Scanlon explicitly does in What We Owe to Each Other, and appeals instead to an ex post view, he seems committed to the intuitively unappealing conclusion that most instances of social risk are unjustifiable. On the other hand, if he embraces an ex ante view, Scanlon fears that this will move his contractualist theory too close to those aggregative views that he wished to escape from in the first place. In my paper, I elaborate a version of contractualism, what I call stage-wise ex ante contractualism, that solves the problem of social risk without resorting to interpersonal aggregation. My solution, however, comes at a price: Contractualism can no longer claim to be the correct account of what it is for an action to be morally wrong, all things considered. Instead, contractualism can at most claim to capture one class of moral considerations that contribute to making actions right or wrong all things considered.

T.M. Scanlon has recently proposed what I term a 'double attitude' account of blame, wherein blame is the revision of one's attitudes in light of another person's conduct, conduct that we believe reveals that the individual lacks the normative attitudes we judge essential to our relationship with her. Scanlon proposes that this account justifies differences in blame that in turn reflect differences in outcome luck. Here I argue that although the double attitude account can justify blame's being sensitive to outcome
luck, it cannot justify allocating blame differently when agents with the same attitudes differ only with respect to the luck-based outcomes of their actions. However, Scanlon's own contractualist theory of morality can be invoked to show that the double
attitude account is compatible with blame-based sanctions (e.g., compensation mandated when negligence or reckless result in harm) being sensitive to outcome luck. The resultant view of blame and luck remains desert-based while making sense of the common intuition that differences in outcome luck can matter to how lucky and unlucky individuals are justifiably treated.

"`Due recognition is a vital human need', argues Charles Taylor. In this article I explore this oft-quoted claim from two complementary and equally appealing perspectives. The bottom—up approach is constructed around Axel Honneth's theory of recognition, and the top—down approach is exemplified by T. M. Scanlon's brief remarks about mutual recognition. The former can be summed up in the slogan `wronging by misrecognizing', the latter in the slogan `misrecognizing by wronging'. Together they provide two complementary readings of the claim that due recognition is a vital human need: one starts from needs, shows how we have a multifarious need for adequate recognition and builds up to a view about wronging; the other starts from wronging and discusses the kind of interest or need that we have of standing in relations where wronging is absent.


Key Words: esteem • harm • Honneth • misrecognition • moral motivation • need for recognition • respect • Scanlon
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The predominant message of the 2010s was that people should be ashamed of themselves. Accordingly, shame in its nature is maybe the most complex feeling we can share and demand from each other. In this paper, I will argue that shame is not a justified mean as a moral criticism or state sanction. Using T.M. Scanlon's definition of blame and moral criticism I conclude that even if shame in some cases can be constructive, shaming is unjustified in principle as we do not owe it to each other to express such emotions.

According to T.M. Scanlon, the core idea of contractualism consists in the claim that what we are morally required to do is conceptually grounded in the value of living in "relations of mutual recognition" with others. Specifically, Scanlon's contractualist idea of "living in relations of mutual recognition with others" requires that one act only in ways that cannot be reasonably rejected by all of those affected, according to the results of a hypothetical reflection conducted within one's own mind. I claim, however, that Scanlon is mistaken to rely on a single individual's hypothetical reflection (monological reflection) to determine what no one affected could reasonably reject. Instead, following Jürgen Habermas, I claim that we must engage in actual dialogue with all who stand to be affected, in order to live in relations of mutual recognition with others.

The idea of equality features in a number of competing accounts of the demands of justice, and does so in a variety of different ways. In what follows here I first examine the background role of a formal idea of equality in all plausible accounts of justice, before then moving on to describe the place of a more substantive idea of equality in the best known and most influential account of justice, that of John Rawls. I then consider a number of post-Rawlsian accounts of the place of equality as an ideal of justice, including an examination of the " equality of resources " view of Ronald Dworkin, and the " luck egalitarianism " of Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen, before discussing the contrast between 'distributive' and 'social' (or 'relational') approaches to equality.

In “Interpreting Blame” and in the last chapter of Moral Dimensions: Meaning, Permissibility, and Blame, T.M. Scanlon argues that blame is not a negative evaluation or a kind of punishment. Rather Scanlon interprets blame as involving “a modified understanding of one’s relationship with a person, which has been impaired by that person’s actions or attitudes (Scanlon 2012, 16).” In both texts, Scanlon claims that the strength of his account of blame fits naturally with a “plausible view” of forgiveness. In this paper, I will argue that the relation between Scanlon’s account of blame and forgiveness is not as explicit as he claims. I understand Scanlon’s use of the term “explicit” to refer to the comprehensive connection between his account of blame and a “plausible view” of forgiveness. I will use the term going forward to refer to this interpretation. I object to his claim based on several reasons. First, Scanlon’s account of blame does not fit with how we intuitively view partial relationships and thus forgiveness as an affective response to wrongdoing. Second, his Scanlonian attitudes involved in blame and forgiveness are not more “forward looking” as other accounts. Third, his account of blame and forgiveness raises problems of when and if forgiveness can take place in certain cases. Through my objections, I intend to show that an account of the relation between blame and forgiveness is more comprehensive when considering emotions.

This article offers a new formulation of the Socratic principle known as the Principle of the Sovereignty of Virtue (PSV). It is divided in three sections. In the first section I criticize Vlastos' formulation of the PSV. In the second section I present the weighing model of practical deliberation, introduce the concepts of reason for action, simple reason, sufficient reason and conclusive reason that were offered by Thomas Scanlon in Being realistic about reasons (2014), and then I adapt these concepts so as to render them apt to be used in the formulation I intend to offer. In the third section I present my formulation of the PSV using the concepts introduced in the second section and explain why I believe this formulation is better than the one offered by Vlastos.

T.M. Scanlon's work on contractualism and ethics have in many ways brought forward new insights and progress for the Kantian view. The narrow range of blame and permissibility of an action is however something that for att proclaimed common sense philosopher as Scanlon may have some difficulties with. This paper criticize Scanlons approach when it comes to blame of strangers in his book ​ Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. ​ I mean that it is necessary to make a moral difference between people who we have near us and strangers. In the end it is the struggle with which roll ​ resentment ​ take in our lives and if blame is compatible with it.

This paper argues for the permissibility of Physician-Assisted Suicide. First, based on the Thomson/Scanlon thesis on permissibility, it argues against the Doctrine of Double Effect. Second, it argues against the view held by Kant and David Velleman that because one has dignity it is impermissible to commit suicide under any circumstances. Third, it argues against both the theoretical and practical versions of the Slippery Slope Argument. Finally, it explains why the argument from abuse is not a good one. If contractualism is correct, the claims to PAS held by terminally ill patients who are in excruciating pain and want to die should override the claims of patients who would be pressurized into accepting PAS.

Este artículo está dedicado a eliminar numerosas confusiones posibles acerca del pensamiento igualitarista. Comienzo por mostrar que las formas más plau-sibles de igualitarismo no se adecuan bien en ninguno de los lados de la distin-ción entre igualitarismo télico e igualitarismo deóntico. Prosigo argumentando que la pregunta referida al alcance de los principios distributivos igualitaristas no puede ser respondida en abstracto, sino que, en cambio, supone proveer pre-viamente una explicación acerca de las distintas maneras en que la desigualdad en la distribución puede ser algo malo. Luego, discuto algunas comprensiones  erradas de la “objeción de nivelar hacia abajo” y de la relación entre igualitarismo y prioritarismo. Al hacer esto, mi propósito es ofrecer una explicación más plausible acerca de lo que los igualitaristas deberían creer.

Theories of happiness usually consider happiness as something that matters to us from a first-person perspective. In this paper, I defend a conception of public happiness that is distinct from private or first-person happiness. Public happiness is presented as a feature of the system of right that defines the political relationship between citizens, as opposed to their personal mental states, desires or well-being. I begin by outlining the main features of public happiness as an Enlightenment ideal. Next, I relate the distinction between the political and the personal to the distinction between having normative reasons for a particular political arrangement and merely having a ‘pro-attitude’ towards a state of affairs that accords with one's preferred definition of happiness. Following this, I demonstrate why well-being, understood as a normative rather than a purely descriptive conception of personal happiness, nevertheless cannot serve as a normative reason in the political domain. In the final section, I show why normative reason-giving matters for the relationship between citizens, and how such reason-giving relates to public happiness.

In this paper I argue that equal respect-based accounts of the normative basis of tolerance are self-defeating, insofar as they are unable to specify the limits of tolerance in a way that is consistent with their own commitment to the equal treatment of all conceptions of the good. I show how this argument is a variant of the longstanding ‘conflict of freedoms’ objection to Kantian-inspired, freedom-based accounts of the justification of systems of norms. I criticise Thomas Scanlon’s defence of ‘pure tolerance’, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti’s work on the relationship between tolerance, equal respect and recognition, and Arthur Ripstein’s recent response to the ‘conflict of freedoms’ objection. The upshot of my argument is that, while valuing tolerance for its own sake may be an appealing ideal, it is not a feasible way of grounding a system of norms. I close with a thumbnail sketch of two alternative, instrumental (i.e. non-Kantian) approaches to the normative foundations of tolerance.

In their debate as vice-presidential hopefuls in 2012, Paul Ryan and Joe Biden responded differently to a question as to how their religions have influenced their personal views about abortion. Ryan said that he did not see how a person can separate their public life from their private life and religious faith. He further said that life begins at birth, and that although he respected people who do not agree with his pro-life view, the policy of a Romney administration would be against abortion, except for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Biden, however, responded that his Catholic faith defined who he was, and that he personally _____________________________ I am grateful to Tom Nagel for a discussion on some of the issues raised in Part A of this chapter. I am indebted to Tim Scanlon for showing me his unpublished paper, "Some Main Points in Rawls' Theory of Justice," and for discussing some issues via emails. I thank Bonnie Steinbock, Alexandre Erler, Peter Chau, Michael Campbell, and Win-chiat Lee for commenting on earlier drafts. I thank Carolyn P. Neuhaus for a discussion and the Hastings Center for hosting me in May 2019, as well as the CUHK Centre for Bioethics for making this trip to Hastings possible. A version of this chapter was presented as the Featured Speech at a philosophy conference hosted by the National Taiwan University on December 15, 2020.

T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism is a meta-ethical theory that explains moral motivation and also provides a conception of how to carry out moral deliberation. It supports non-consequentialism – the theory that both consequences and deontological considerations are morally significant in moral deliberation. Regarding the issue of punishment, non-consequentialism allows us to take account of the need for deterrence as well as principles of fairness, justice, and even desert. Moreover, Scanlonian contractualism accounts for permissibility in terms of justifiability: An act is permissible if and only if it can be justified to everyone affected by it. This contractualist thesis explains why it is always impermissible to frame an innocent person, why vicarious punishment is impermissible, and why there has to be a cap on sentences. Contractualism therefore allows us to take deterrence as a goal of punishment without the excess of utilitarianism. This paper further argues that the resulting view is superior to pure retributivism. Finally, it shows why legal excuses and mitigation can be justified in terms of the notion of negative desert.

This paper outlines a new conative theory of blame. I argue that the best-known conative approaches to blame (Scanlon 1998, 2008, Sher 2006a) misrepresent the cognitive and dispositional components of blame. Section 1 argues, against Scanlon and Sher, that blaming involves the judgment that an act or state is the fault of the blamed. I also propose an alternative dispositional condition on which blaming only occurs if it matters to the blamer whether the blamed gets the punishment that she deserves. In Section 2, I discuss objections to judgment-based accounts of blame (that they cannot tell the difference between blaming and judging to be blameworthy, that they cannot explain why blame is often accompanied by emotion, and that they cannot make sense of irrational blame), and I argue that my proposal can handle all of them.

This chapter collects a number of arguments for a robust distinction between the justifying weight and requiring weight of a given normative practical reason.  It then presents a new form of argument for such a distinction: a demonstration that it is already latent in the very different accounts of such reasons supported by Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star, T. M. Scanlon, and Joseph Raz.  That the justifying/requiring distinction shows up in views that are so different in other ways – views that, moreover, did not set out explicitly set out to capture or even allow for it – suggests that it is a genuine feature of the practical normative domain.  The chapter also shows how a more explicit recognition of a robust justifying/requiring distinction would provide important benefits for proponents of all three views.  This too provides some reason to accept it.