Contractualism: Scanlon on What We Owe to Each Other

T.M. Scanlon, a philosopher at Harvard University, developed the most influential contemporary version of moral contractualism in his 1998 book What We Owe to Each Other. Scanlon's central formula holds that an act is wrong if its performance under the circumstances would be disallowed by any principle for the general regulation of behavior that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced general agreement. Unlike political social-contract theories, which ask what arrangements rational, self-interested parties would agree to for mutual advantage, Scanlon's contractualism is specifically a theory of the interpersonal morality of right and wrong — what he calls the "morality of what we owe to each other" — and it evaluates principles not by whether real people would actually accept them, but by whether it would be reasonable for anyone, from their own individual standpoint, to reject them.