Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other: Contractualist Ethics

Suppose you promise a friend a lift and then receive a more enjoyable invitation. Keeping the promise has become inconvenient, but your friend has arranged the evening around your assurance. Saying that you would prefer to cancel does not yet explain why your friend should accept a principle allowing you to do so. The question is what reasons you can offer to someone whose plans you have helped shape.

That question gives us an entry into T. M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other, published in 1998. Scanlon develops contractualism as an account of a central part of morality: the conduct we must be able to justify to other people. His proposal directs attention to principles that no one could reasonably reject, rather than treating actual agreement as the measure of rightness.

The proposal is easy to repeat and harder to use accurately. Reasonable rejection is not a personal veto. A principle must be compared with alternatives, and objections must be assessed as reasons. Understanding the view requires examining what principles permit, what they demand, and how their demands affect people occupying different positions.

Scanlon distinguishes what we owe to other people from morality understood more broadly. His contractualism is not meant to explain every kind of value. Appreciation of nature, artistic excellence and the goods of a worthwhile life raise questions beyond whether one person's conduct is justifiable to another. Recognizing those questions does not make the interpersonal domain unimportant; it makes the account's intended scope clearer.

Within that domain, the book addresses familiar requirements concerning assistance, harm, deception and assurances. These concern how we may treat one another. A theory of wrongness must explain both how we identify such requirements and why they give us reasons to act. Scanlon connects their authority to the value of standing in a relation of mutual justification.

That is broader than a negotiation over political institutions. An individual's conduct can owe a justification to someone even when no law or institutional arrangement is being negotiated. Equally, calling the theory contractualist does not mean that people first make a literal agreement that creates all their moral obligations. The contractual language identifies a form of justification.

This distinction matters for people who cannot bargain effectively. If an objection mattered only when its holder could secure a better deal, weakness would reduce moral standing. Scanlon's question concerns what someone could reasonably reject, rather than what they could force others to concede. A person's inability to punish wrongdoing does not make the reasons against mistreating them disappear.

Scanlon takes the idea of a reason as basic. In the relevant normative sense, a reason is a consideration that counts in favor of something. We can ask for reasons for an action, but also for a belief or an attitude. The book begins with reasons before developing its treatment of values, well-being and interpersonal morality.

A person's actual motive and a good reason can come apart. Someone might keep a promise mainly to protect a reputation. The other's reliance may nevertheless supply a reason to keep it. Conversely, the strength of a desire to break the promise does not establish that the desire supplies an adequate justification for doing so.

The distinction prevents a confusion about moral motivation. Scanlon is concerned with why justifiability gives us reasons, not simply with predicting what will move every person. Someone can fail to care about a reason they have. An account of moral authority need not claim that presenting its argument will reliably persuade an indifferent person to change their behavior.

This also explains why contractualism is not a way of constructing moral reasons out of preferences alone. Reasonableness is a normative standard: it concerns which objections deserve weight. Describing an objection accurately is part of deliberation, but its mere existence cannot determine the answer. Otherwise, an unreasonable demand would become decisive merely because someone insisted on it.

For the part of morality at issue, Scanlon's formula says that an act is wrong if every principle permitting it could reasonably be rejected by people seeking principles that others could not reasonably reject. The quantifier matters. Finding one objectionable principle that permits an act does not prove that the act is wrong; a different, more carefully qualified principle might permit it without being reasonably rejectable.

Think about a principle allowing promises to be broken whenever convenient. Someone might reasonably reject that principle while accepting one allowing departure when keeping the promise would prevent an urgent rescue. Both principles permit some promise breaking. We need to determine whether a defensible principle permits the particular act in the particular circumstances.

Principles are general standards governing conduct and deliberation. They are not descriptions tailored to name the person we want to favor. A purported principle saying that this individual may abandon this commitment because they would enjoy doing something else would need a defense of its exceptions. Merely placing an exception inside a sentence called a principle does not justify it.

Nor is the test a poll. Many people may accept a principle because they lack information or have learned not to complain. Others may reject a defensible principle because it blocks an unfair advantage. Actual acceptance and reasonable acceptability are different. The moral work is in examining the reasons, rather than converting responses into a vote.

The formula therefore does not make a person's objection automatically decisive. Everyone's standpoint deserves consideration, but not every consideration provides a reasonable ground for rejection. A demand to exploit someone else's vulnerability cannot gain authority simply because the exploiter would be disappointed by a prohibition.

Any principle can impose burdens. A rule permitting one person to cancel an assurance may burden the person relying on it. A rule requiring performance may burden the person who gave it. Asking only whether a principle has costs would leave us unable to choose anything. Scanlon instead considers objections in light of the alternatives and the burdens those alternatives would impose.

In the lift example, the friend loses the assurance around which they planned. The promiser gives up a more enjoyable evening. Those descriptions start the comparison, but they do not finish it. The seriousness of the reliance, the nature of the assurance and the costs of keeping it all matter to a defensible judgment.

Change the circumstances and the reasons can change. If the promiser needs to respond to an emergency, a principle requiring performance without exceptions would impose a different burden. The friend's original expectation still matters, but it need not settle the result. Contractualist reasoning asks what qualifications each side could reasonably require.

This is a structure for moral assessment, not a single numerical measure of complaints. Calling one objection stronger requires a substantive judgment about the reasons involved. The theory cannot avoid that judgment by assigning an arbitrary score to each person and selecting the largest number. Precision about the comparison is more useful than the appearance of a calculation.

Scanlon appeals to generic reasons: reasons people have in virtue of their situation, described in general terms. Avoiding bodily injury, being able to rely on assurances and having control over one's body are examples. A reason can be generic even when only a small number of people occupy the relevant position. Generic does not mean average or shared by the majority.

This lets us consider principles without depending on the identities of the people who happen to be affected today. A permission to disregard assurances would affect potential recipients of assurances. Their reasons can be assessed as reasons attaching to a position. The comparison need not wait until a particular person has already suffered the consequences.

At the same time, describing positions generally must not erase important differences. Someone who needs help with a serious disability may have an objection that a more fortunate person does not share. A general description can include that need. Treating everyone as if they had the same capabilities would remove information relevant to justification.

The distinction helps explain how a universal principle can take differing circumstances into account. Equal standing concerns whose reasons count in the assessment; it does not require that every person have identical reasons or receive identical treatment. We still need to justify which differences matter for the principle being considered.

Scanlon's chapter on promises develops an account centered on assurance. His Principle F describes conditions involving intentionally creating an expectation, the other's desire for assurance, the aim of giving that assurance, and the parties' knowledge of the relevant intentions and beliefs. Under its conditions, and absent special justification, performance is required unless the recipient consents to release.

The detailed conditions show why predicting an action and promising it differ. Saying that you expect to visit on Friday can give someone information without necessarily undertaking a commitment to seek their release before changing plans. A promise supplies a different kind of assurance. An account that treated every voluntarily created expectation as equally binding would restrict ordinary communication too severely.

Return to the lift. If you offered it precisely so that your friend could stop worrying about transport, your assurance has given them something they wanted. The moral reason is not limited to the money or minutes eventually lost if you cancel. The ability to settle a practical question through another person's undertaking is itself part of the issue.

This does not make promises absolute. The account includes the possibility of special justification and release. But “I now prefer something else” is not automatically such a justification. The difference between an assurance and an unenforced intention explains why changing a preference does not simply erase a commitment.

The example also shows why contractualism should not be presented as hostile to duties. It offers an account of how particular duties can be justified. Disagreement with another theory may concern the explanation of the duty rather than whether a duty exists at all.

Consider a hypothetical rescue in which you can prevent a serious injury to another person at a modest inconvenience to yourself. The case is stipulated to avoid difficult questions about danger, uncertainty and competing emergencies. It illustrates a comparison of reasons rather than reporting an actual rescue or reproducing a specific case from Scanlon.

A principle allowing indifference would expose someone in the endangered person's position to a severe loss. A principle requiring assistance imposes the stipulated modest cost on the helper. These descriptions make a reason for rejecting permission visible. They also identify the objection that a requirement must answer.

The conclusion depends on the conditions. If providing assistance instead endangered the helper's life, the comparison would change. If a person repeatedly faced demands that collectively consumed their life, considering each demand in isolation might conceal the burden. The example teaches us to identify what a principle asks of a person, rather than assume that the word help settles every case.

A contractualist analysis can therefore recognize costs to the agent without making personal convenience supreme. It asks whether a proposed requirement is defensible to someone who must bear it, while also assessing the objection of the person who would otherwise be left unaided. Both positions are part of the moral inquiry.

An important pressure on the view concerns numbers. If objections are assessed from individual standpoints, how should several people's comparable claims affect a decision? And could enough minor benefits justify imposing a severe injury on one person? These are distinct questions. Answering one does not automatically answer the other.

Scanlon's discussion resists aggregating small benefits across many people to outweigh one person's much more serious burden. The structure protects an individual's claim from being submerged in a sum of advantages. It does not follow that the number of people with comparable claims is always irrelevant. The book considers how numbers can matter within the individualist structure.

A useful test is to distinguish comparable claims from a combination of very different burdens. Saving several people rather than one, where the competing claims are otherwise alike, raises one kind of issue. Inflicting a grave injury so that many people can avoid minor inconvenience raises another. Calling both cases “one against many” would conceal what needs to be justified.

These questions reveal work the theory must do. A general commitment to justification to each person is not yet a complete account of permissible trade-offs. A reader should examine the particular argument about numbers, rather than assume that contractualism either prohibits every collective benefit or reproduces a calculation of total welfare under another name.

Another challenge concerns the normative content of reasonableness. If determining whether an objection is reasonable requires moral judgment, has contractualism explained anything? The challenge has force against a promise to derive all moral conclusions from wholly nonmoral facts. Scanlon's account does not make that promise.

An explanation can identify a structure within moral reasoning without eliminating substantive judgments from it. Comparing objections can show which features of a case need attention and which justifications fail to address someone's claim. That contribution still needs assessment: a label for the conclusion would not be enough.

The test is whether the account organizes our reasoning in an informative way. Does it explain why actual consent is insufficient? Does it distinguish a serious burden from an unjust demand? Does it reveal where a principle requires qualification? If the phrase reasonably rejectable merely repeats an unexamined verdict, the explanation has not yet earned its role.

This leaves room for criticism without dismissing the project at the outset. A reader can accept the importance of justification while questioning whether the contractualist formula captures all of the relevant considerations. The disagreement then concerns how the reasons fit together, rather than whether being considerate is generally desirable.

The question of who is owed justification is especially important for those unable to articulate a complaint. Scanlon discusses the scope of his account and distinguishes it from the broader range of moral values. We should not infer from a creature's inability to reason with us that its suffering has no moral importance.

Nor should we assume that extending the interpersonal model to every moral question is straightforward. Relations with future people, dependent people and nonhuman animals raise questions about representation and the basis of standing. The framework must address those questions explicitly. Calling contractualism inclusive would not establish a particular answer.

The same care applies when using the view to assess institutions. An organization might offer affected people a forum to object yet ignore their strongest reasons. Hearing objections is useful, but actual participation does not establish that the governing principle is justifiable. We need an assessment of the principle and its alternatives, rather than a record that consultation occurred.

These are applications and tests of the theory. They are not evidence that Scanlon supplied a complete decision procedure for every institutional or personal dilemma. The philosophical subject remains the reasons people can press against standards governing how they are treated.

Choose a disagreement and state the relevant permission or requirement in general terms. Describe the positions of those it affects and the reasons each has to object. Then formulate an alternative and ask which burdens that alternative would impose. This keeps the inquiry comparative instead of stopping at the first complaint.

Keep three distinctions visible: an actual objection and a reasonable one; a principle and a convenient exception; a claim about one part of morality and a claim about every value. None of these distinctions produces an answer by itself. Together they make it harder to substitute agreement, power or personal preference for a justification.

Scanlon's central demand is that a defense of conduct answer to other people as holders of reasons. The promise example makes that demand concrete. Your preference for another evening matters, but it has to be considered alongside what you invited your friend to rely on. Moral reasoning begins when both positions receive an answer.

• T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other. Chapters 1–3 develop reasons and values; chapters 4–5 introduce the interpersonal account and its structure.
• Chapter 7, “Promises,” for the account of assurance and the qualifications in Principle F.
• Chapter 5, “The Structure of Contractualism,” for generic reasons, individual standpoints and aggregation.
• Derek Parfit, On What Matters. Its treatment of contractualism asks how Scanlonian reasonable rejection relates to other proposed moral tests.