Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Vol. LxVI, No. I , January 2003

Precis of What We Owe to Each

Other*
T. M. SCANLON
Harvard Univesity

What W e Owe to Each Orher is concerned with three successively narrower

normative domains: reasons, value, and moral right and wrong. Here is a list
of its main points.
1. The idea of a reason should be taken as the central notion for under-
standing desire, motivation, value, and morality. The argument of the book
takes the idea of a reason (a consideration that counts in favor of some action
or attitude) as primitive. Nothing I go on to claim depends on the thesis that
this notion cannot be explained in other terms, but I do not see how this
could be done. It is often held that in all, or at least most, cases in which a
person has a reason for some action this is so because acting in this way
would promote the satisfaction of some desire that the agent has. I argue that
this is almost never the case. (The thesis under attack here-that desires
provide reasons for actiondoes not itself offer an explanation of what it is
to have a reason for acting. It is, rather, a substantive thesis about what
reasons we have.) I argue that while the reasons a person has may depend on
subjective factors (such as what he or she is likely to enjoy), desires almost
never provide reasons for action in the way that the desire-satisfaction model
suggests. Desires are best understood not as states that provide reasons but
rather as states that involve seeing other considerations as a reasons.
2. Being valuable is not always a matter of being “to be promoted.” In
some cases we have reason to promote what is valuable, or to insure its
survival. But we also have reason to respond to what is valuable in other
ways, such as to admire it, to respect it, or to be guided by it. The kind of
response that value calls for varies from case to case, and understanding the
value of something is a matter of understanding the particular ways in which
we have reason to respond to it.

~~~ ~~ ~ ~ ~~ ~

T.M Scanlon,Whar We Owe fo Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press, 1998)

BOOK SYMPOSIUM 159

 3. These reasons are not provided by the goodness or value of the things
in question. Rather, being valuable, or good, is a matter of having other
properties that provide reasons for reacting to it in certain ways.
4. The special value of human, or rational, life lies in our having reason
to treat rational creatures only in ways that would be allowed by principles
that they could not reasonably reject.
5. A central element in what makes a person’s life go better is success in
his or her main aims, insofar as these are ones it is rational to have. But a
person’s reasons for having and pursuing many aims reflect the value of those
aims themselves rather than the contribution that they make to that person’s
well-being. It follows that from a person’s own point of view the boundary
between his or her well-being and the other things he or she values is porous,
and less important than it is often held to be.
6. The boundaries of well-being are clearer, and more significant, from a
third person point of view, or from the point of view of morality. But the
conceptions of well-being commonly employed in moral theories and theories
of justice are distinctively moral notions, which should not be expected to
coincide with the idea of well-being appropriate to a person’s own point of
view.
7. An action is wrong just in case any principle that permitted it would be
one that someone could reasonably reject. This thesis has implications both
for the content of moral requirements and for the reasons we have for being
concerned with these requirements.
8. We should be specially concerned with moral requirements because we
have reason to act only in ways that can be justified to others. Moral motiva-
tion is sometimes discussed as if it were something that comes into play and
moves us to act a certain way when we recognize that morality requires it.
But the idea of justifiability to others, which in my view provides the norma-
tive basis of right and wrong, does not move us only, or primarily, in this
way, as a reason for specific actions. It also, and more commonly, shapes our
thinking about when other more specific reasons-such as avoiding harm to
others-are relevant, or even compelling grounds for action.
9. A concern with the justifiability of our actions to others is of great
significance for our relations with each of them, and is a crucial part of
special relations such as friendship. This significance helps to explain the
special importance of moral requirements and to explain how it can make
sense to give these requirements priority over other considerations.
10. The value of justifiability to others is the unifying idea underlying
that part of morality that has to do with our duties to others. But not every-
thing commonly called “moral” can plausibly be accounted for on this basis.
Ideals of moral purity, objections to the destruction of nature, and the wrong-
fulness of failing to respect and develop our talents, for example, cannot be

160 T. M. SCANLON
fully explained as parts of “what we owe to each other.” So one consequence
of my view is the fragmentation of the moral: the thesis that morality in the
broadest sense is not a unified normative domain, but a collection of diverse
values.
11. The idea of reasonable rejectability provides a framework within which
we can explain the moral significance of diverse considerations, including not
only factors contributing to people’s welfare, but also fairness, choice, and
responsibility. According to the version of contractualism I present, however,
grounds for rejection must be based on the claims of individuals. Impersonal
values and aggregate gains and losses are thus not determinants of right and
wrong in their own right. But impersonal values are relevant to the assess-
ment of individual claims, and some of the conclusions naturally supported
by aggregative reasoning can be derived within this individualistic framework.
12. Individuals are responsible for all of their judgment-sensitive attitudes
in a way that they are not responsible for other facts about them, such as
their height or eye color. That is, they can be asked to defend these attitudes
and to modify or retract them in the light of criticism. Moral criticism is one
kind of criticism of judgment-sensitive attitudes. It has special force because
of the significance of the attitudes in question for the person’s relations with
others. But the form of responsibility that is a precondition for moral criti-
cism of an action or attitude is just the more general responsibility that a
person has for any judgment-sensitive attitudes that are correctly attributed to
him or her. In this sense a person is responsible for any choice that he or she
has actually made.
13. There is, however, a different sense of responsibility in which to say
that a person is responsible for a certain choice is to say that he or she can be
fairly asked to bear the consequences of having made it. These two senses of
responsibility should be clearly distinguished. The latter depends, in a way
that the former does not, on the value of the alternatives that were available
to the person.
14. The account of right and wrong defended in this book is not a relativ-
istic doctrine. But it does allow for the possibility that standards of right and
wrong may vary if individuals in different circumstances have good reasons
for rejecting different principles of conduct.

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