Thomas Michael Scanlon

Life and Academic Career

Thomas Michael Scanlon was born on 28 June 1940 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He studied philosophy at Princeton University, receiving his A.B. in 1962, and pursued graduate work at Oxford University and Harvard University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1968. His early training placed him within the emerging post-war tradition of analytic moral and political philosophy, influenced by figures such as John Rawls and the later work of Henry Sidgwick and T. M. Scanlon’s contemporaries.

Scanlon taught for many years at Princeton University before moving to Harvard University, where he became one of the central figures in the Department of Philosophy. At Harvard he held the Alford Professorship of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, a chair historically associated with moral and political thought. He retired as professor emeritus but remained active in philosophical discussion and publication.

Beyond his institutional roles, Scanlon has been a central participant in Anglophone debates on morality, political justification, and the nature of practical reason. His students and interlocutors occupy prominent positions in contemporary philosophy, and his works are widely taught in courses on ethical theory, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

Contractualism and Moral Theory

Scanlon is best known for his defense of contractualism in moral philosophy, developed most systematically in What We Owe to Each Other (1998). There he advances a distinctive account of moral wrongness and interpersonal justification.

The core idea of Scanlon’s contractualism is that the central subject of morality is what we owe to other people, understood in terms of principles that no one could reasonably reject. On this view, an act is wrong if it would be ruled out by any system of principles for the general regulation of behavior that no person, motivated to find principles for mutual recognition and respect, could reasonably reject. Moral assessment is thus structured around the standpoint of persons seeking principles that others, similarly situated, can be asked to accept.

Several features distinguish Scanlon’s contractualism:

• Individualist restriction: The justifiability of a principle depends on the complaints of individuals about being subject to it, rather than on impersonal aggregates of welfare. This is often contrasted with consequentialist approaches that weigh total or average outcomes.
• Reasonableness standard: The relevant test is whether a reason for rejecting a principle is reasonable, given the aim of finding principles others can endorse. Scanlon emphasizes that this is not a simple appeal to preferences but to considerations that can be offered to others as part of mutual justification.
• Priority of the right over the good: While values and the good matter, the structure of morality is given by principles of right that can be justified to each person. We do not first define the good and then derive what is right from it by maximizing; rather, what we may permissibly do is fixed by which principles people cannot reasonably reject.

Scanlon presents contractualism as an alternative to dominant moral theories:

• Against act utilitarianism, contractualism denies that the permissibility of an act is determined solely by its aggregate consequences. An individual may reasonably reject a principle that regularly sacrifices her vital interests, even if doing so would marginally improve overall welfare.
• Compared with Kantian ethics, contractualism shares the focus on justifiability to persons and the rejection of pure aggregation, but formulates the test in terms of reasonable non-rejectability of principles rather than in terms of universalizable maxims or the Formula of Humanity.

A central topic in Scanlon’s ethical work is the nature of wrongness and moral motivation. He resists both pure internalism (that moral judgment necessarily motivates) and purely external accounts, arguing for a nuanced understanding of how recognizing reasons given by others can shape our commitments and actions.

Critics have raised several challenges:

• Some argue that contractualism cannot avoid implicit aggregation, since assessing which complaints are “stronger” may reintroduce comparative and quasi-aggregative judgments.
• Others question whether the notion of “reasonable rejection” can be given a non-circular, determinate content that avoids collapsing into existing moral theories.
• There is also debate over how contractualism handles cases involving very many people with minor complaints versus a few with grave complaints.

Supporters reply that contractualism captures deep intuitions about respect for persons, fairness in distribution of burdens, and the centrality of interpersonal justification, and that it illuminates moral domains such as promises, fairness, and risk imposition where purely outcome-based views struggle.

Reasons, Value, and Other Contributions

In later work, especially Being Realistic About Reasons (2014) and The Difficulty of Tolerance (2003), Scanlon extends his approach beyond contractualism to broader issues in value theory and practical reason.

He defends a “reasons fundamentalist” view: normative reasons are taken as basic rather than analyzed in terms of desire, preference, or some non-normative property. According to Scanlon, to say that one has a reason to act is to make a genuinely normative claim, not reducible to facts about psychology or social practice. He thus aligns with a family of views sometimes called non-naturalist or quietist realism about the normative.

In value theory, Scanlon is known for his “buck-passing account of value,” articulated in earlier articles and widely discussed in metaethics. On this view, to say that something is good is not to ascribe a special property to it, but to say that it has features that provide reasons for certain attitudes or responses. Talk of value “passes the buck” to the more fundamental notion of reasons. This position has generated extensive debate about whether it can accommodate intrinsic value and about how it interacts with accounts of moral obligation.

Scanlon has also written influentially on freedom of expression and liberal rights. In essays collected in The Difficulty of Tolerance, he explores how a liberal state can justify restrictions on speech, the nature of toleration among citizens with deep moral and religious disagreements, and the limits of state neutrality. His approach is consistently contractualist: the legitimacy of coercive laws depends on whether the system of legal principles can be justified to each citizen as free and equal.

Other significant contributions include:

• Analyses of promising, consent, and contractual obligation, emphasizing how these practices are grounded in mutual expectations that must be justifiable to the parties involved.
• Discussions of equality and distributive justice, including the moral significance of what people can reasonably object to in patterns of distribution, and how these relate to luck egalitarian and Rawlsian approaches.
• Work on the structure of moral motivation and blame, including the idea that blame is centrally about modifying and expressing a relationship, rather than merely about emotional reaction or sanction.

Reception and Influence

Scanlon’s work has had a substantial impact on contemporary Anglo-American ethics and political philosophy. What We Owe to Each Other became a focal point for debates on contractualism, spawning an extensive secondary literature and critical engagement from consequentialists, Kantians, and virtue ethicists. The book’s central test—what principles no one could reasonably reject—has become a standard point of reference in discussions of interpersonal justification and moral respect.

His ideas on reasons and value have shaped current metaethical debates, particularly around:

• The autonomy of the normative (whether moral and other normative truths are reducible to natural or psychological facts).
• The relationship between value and reasons, where his buck-passing view is one of the main contemporary options.
• The nature of practical rationality, as his non-instrumentalist approach challenges accounts that ground all reasons in desire or preference.

In political philosophy, Scanlon’s contractualist framework has been used to examine issues ranging from distributive justice to democratic legitimacy. His writings on freedom of expression and tolerance are cited in legal and political theory discussions about hate speech, pornography, and the limits of state regulation.

While some philosophers argue that contractualism is ultimately unstable or incomplete—either too vague in its test of reasonableness or too narrow in focusing on what we owe to each other rather than all moral concerns—others contend that Scanlon offers one of the most sophisticated and humane articulations of a morality grounded in mutual recognition and respect for persons.

Across these debates, Scanlon’s work is widely regarded as exemplary of careful, analytically rigorous moral philosophy that seeks to clarify the demands we place on one another as responsible agents in a shared social world.