A world-renowned moral and political philosopher, T. M. Scanlon spent over 35 years at Harvard (and before that, 18 years at Princeton) as a scholar, teacher, and writer dedicated to addressing some of the most elemental questions of morality, justice, and rights. In fact, one of his books, What We Owe to Each Other, became the basis of moral contractualism, a theory that has shaped contemporary thinking on everything from public health, to economic equality, to how we think about the fundamental social and political contracts that sustain our democracy. It also framed a four-season hit show on NBC called The Good Place, in which characters actively deploy the philosophy to redesign the afterlife.
Ariella Reynolds: In 1998, you published your seminal treatise on contractualism, What We Owe to Each Other, in which you say the judgments of right and wrong are “judgments about what would be permitted by principles that could not reasonably be rejected, by people who were moved to find principles for the general regulation of behavior that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject.” As kind of a baseline for all of our readers, could you walk us through what that means for each of us? What do I owe you? Do I owe you something different from what I owe my family?
Tim Scanlon: When I first wrote an article called “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” in 1980, which came out in ‘82, I said that I was going to give an account of morality. But by 1998, I’d narrowed my focus. I said in an early part of chapter four that contractualism wasn’t everything you called morality: That is, you could try to justify on the basis of contractualist principles the duty to take care of your children. It just falls under a general principle: If you intentionally put people in a position where they’re going to need your help and you don’t provide it, it’s like dropping people off in the desert where you know they’re going to need water and then never taking them to any water. That would be wrong according to contractualism. But if you use that to explain why you took care of your children, people would regard you as a monster, and say you don’t love your children, right?
And I thought, there are other things that are clearly part of the morality of right or wrong in a general sense, and I wasn’t giving an account of all of that. I thought that by reflecting on this distinction, I’d learned something: That morality, as people commonly use it, doesn’t refer to a single subject. There are different subjects that fall under that term as it’s commonly used, and their difference comes out in the fact that we have different reasons to care about them. And I discovered that I wasn’t giving an account of morality, so I just redefined the subject as what we owe to each other. That was why I called the book, “What We Owe to Each Other.” It characterizes the subject, what we owe to each other in general.
AR: In a podcast with Yascha Mounk, you said that even people who believe that they don’t owe anything to anybody, like right-wingers who rip masks off people’s faces, do have the sense that they probably should owe something. But how do we know that these people haven’t simply formed a contractual relationship with each other based on a different set of principles? And could that explain the hyperpolarization in our society today?
TS: I’m inclined to think that it does have something to do with our society. But if the people who were ripping masks off each other thought they only owed things to other people that they had contractual relations with, okay, number one, that’s itself a moral view: That’s a view about what they owe to each other. Number two, it explains why they would think that they weren’t obligated to wear masks: Because they didn’t owe it to others. Maybe they’d be obligated to wear masks if they were protecting other people with whom they had this contract and the contract required wearing masks. So, that would explain why they thought they didn’t have any obligation to wear masks.
But that doesn’t explain why they would rip masks off other people’s faces. Why would they do that? I think they would do that because they feel criticized by the fact that people are wearing masks. That is, to some degree, they feel some force of the challenge. And so that makes them angry. I think people who think that nobody has any obligation to wear a mask, think that other people who are wearing masks are just being dumb. But that wouldn’t explain the level of anger there. I think there’s some sensitivity to the idea. My view is that those people probably agree that we can owe it to other people to participate in, say, cooperation for mutual benefit. So they do accept that principle to some level, but they just think it doesn’t apply in this case. And so it makes them angry that people are telling them that it does.
In Robert Nozick’s famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, there’s a famous example of this. Nozick was particularly brilliant at coming up with examples that really grabbed you and made a point. So, after he showed that there could be an absolutely minimal state, he asked whether there were any arguments that showed that there could be more than a minimal state. The thing that was really good about that example was that it zeroed in on an intuition that is really going to set libertarians on fire. Nozick used this example of neighborhood people who are going to set up this public address system, in which each person must operate it on a given day. Whether they consent to it or not, the neighborhood is going to demand that they participate in it because it’s for the neighborhood’s mutual benefit. I think that the people who are ripping masks off each other’s faces are sort of in that position. They’re saying, you know, Dr. Fauci has said this thing, which there’s no good reason for, and they’re trying to force us to go along with it. So you could see why that would make people angry.
AR: You’ve said in other interviews that Mike Schur, creator of The Good Place, got to you and contractualism by way of one of your grad students, Pamela Hieronymi, who was working on a paper about whether it was possible for human beings to improve, to work to become good people. Do you think we, meaning the global ‘we,’ are improving as human beings? And to what extent do you think we’re trying?
TS: First, let me just say one thing about The Good Place. I thought Mike Schur did a terrific job. It’s a wonderful show. And I was, of course, flattered that he liked my book. But he describes the kind of justification involved in contractualism as something like a real-time attempt to actually convince people. Whereas I want to say an act is wrong if people would have good reason to reject any principle that permitted it, which isn’t a matter of whether they would agree to it in fact or not. So he moves it into a kind of debate-like format that isn’t exactly what I had in mind, although I’m really glad that he was moved by the idea.
But to answer your question, I’m not a sociologist or a social psychologist, so I can only guess. But I’m inclined to think that an awful lot of people, maybe even most people, care about being good human beings by some standard of goodness, although they have very different standards of goodness in mind. I mean, part of the appeal of many different religious doctrines is that they provide a model in which people can feel that they’re good people. And that’s a good instinct and a general one that is pretty widely shared.
AR: Do you believe that if we subscribe to a partisan label, it can cause us to abandon some of our prior moral principles in the long run so that we can more accurately fit the mold of what we believe our party should be?
TS: Well, I certainly think, and I don’t exempt myself from this, that when you see something you haven’t clicked on yet, where if you click on it, it would present an argument that would make your party look worse, you have a tendency not to click on it. That’s something that’s true of all of us: We’re defensive. We’re not seeking criticism. And that’s understandable. So, yeah, there is that tendency, that’s certainly true. In one of Plato’s really early dialogues, “Gorgias,” Socrates is arguing with a bunch of spin doctors, basically, who think all you have to know is how to persuade people. And along the way, he produces a lot of really great arguments. One thing he says is that if you’re defeated in an argument, if somebody produces an objection to what you’ve generally thought was right and you become convinced that you can’t answer the objection, you shouldn’t be unhappy or angry because you’ve actually benefited. You’ve learned something.
AR: It seems to me that the need for moral clarity came into sharp focus in headlines recently when three university presidents were unable to condemn open calls on campus for genocide against Jews. What does moral clarity require here? Did these presidents own their responsibility to it?
TS: Well, I think that that illustrates the point I was just making about Socrates. The presidents were actually trying to answer the question. And I thought they gave the right answer. I thought that what they said was, it’s contrary to the idea of a university that university discipline should be brought down on people just because something they say is very seriously morally wrong. People have to be able to debate about what’s morally right and morally wrong. But the basis of university discipline has to be immediate harm to other people. If I’m threatening you or I’m saying things that genuinely cause you to feel your life’s in danger, then that’s a different matter. But the mere hatefulness of a person’s position isn’t by itself grounds for university discipline. I actually think that that’s the correct position, and they basically said that. They were trying to have an actual discussion with Elise Stefanik and she wasn’t interested in having a discussion with them. She was interested in scoring points and making them look bad, making herself look good to her particular preferred audience. So, she went on to this sort of outraged ticket and they were made to look foolish. And that’s my view about it. The presidents should have been more skillful. Here’s a case where having thought carefully about the question isn’t enough. Also, if you’re to appeal in the public forum, you also have to have the persuasive skills that Socrates is arguing against, but that the people think are important. That is, you have to understand what needs to be said in that context.
AR: So ultimately, you believe that this sort of open discourse is what we owe to each other in this case.
TS: In that case, yes. Not that there aren’t limits, but as they said – and they were ridiculed for saying it, I thought unfairly – whether something has an effect that makes it subject to university discipline depends on the context. If I’m in your face in the quad, shouting at you that you’re a hateful person, and you’re a murderer, or you’re supporting murderers or something like that, you could reasonably reject a principle that would permit people to treat you that way. But, just the fact that I wrote an editorial in the paper saying that Israel’s invasion of Gaza wasn’t justified by what Hamas did, is a different story. Or there’s even the case of people saying what struck me as just wildly, crazily false and awful, that what Hamas did was somehow justified. I don’t see how anybody could think that. But even if a person says that in an editorial, I don’t think they should be bounced out of Harvard. People have to argue with them and so on, but arguing that just having that in the paper somehow puts people in reasonable fear of harm, seems like a stretch to me.
AR: What about a case in which a certain group of people were to feel very, very strongly about the issue versus the entire world not caring as much? Do you believe that the contract between that small set of people is less important than that between people that don’t feel that strongly about it?
TS: Well, this goes back to my minor dissent from Mike Schur. I think that what’s permitted by principles that people could or couldn’t reasonably reject depends upon what reasons people actually have. I’m a so-called realist about reasons; that is, I think there are facts about what people have a reason to do, which is just different from what they desire to do. For people to desire to do things is for them to believe that they have a reason to do it right, or to feel at least the force of what they take to be a reason to do it, and they might be wrong. So whether people feel strongly or don’t feel strongly about something doesn’t affect, I think, the reasonableness of rejecting a principle that would permit them to do it.
AR: What if the people are more or less informed? Does that change the equation?
TS: No, that might explain why they’re right or wrong, but it doesn’t explain whether they have reason to reject it. So maybe what you’re getting at is one of the many unfortunate ambiguities in the word “reasonable.” Often, what’s reasonable for a person to do depends upon what they have reason to do given some circumscribed set of considerations, which are kind of contextually specified. There’s one sense of “reasonable,” what it’s reasonable for someone to believe given the information that they have. That’s not the sense of “reasonable” that I’m talking about. My idea of “reasonable” is what is reasonable given a desire to justify yourself to others. So that depends on what reason you have for objecting to being treated in a certain way, and it depends on what reasons other people have to be permitted to behave that way. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what it’s reasonable for somebody to believe in this sense about whether they’re well-informed or not well-informed.
AR: The Founding Fathers obviously relied on Enlightenment philosophers, but it doesn’t seem like our government still does. Yet, I interviewed Tom Nichols, a writer for The Atlantic, who said that our democracy is hanging by a thread. So you’d think now would be the time to bring back the philosophers. So why aren’t we engaging them in this formal way to help us understand where democracy stands and how it might stand better? Why aren’t they getting a seat at the table?
TS: Well, I do think philosophers have something to say about these things, but in the case of this debate about Elise Stefanik and her co-conspirators vs. the three university presidents, some politicians did basically try to state the principles of free speech, but mostly they didn’t, and it wasn’t because they weren’t interested in philosophy, but because they were interested in damage control or something like that. It’s understandable that people are not just doing philosophy. And this is a point that Socrates makes in that dialogue: Often people think of philosophical argument as being something that’s successful if it can be used to persuade other people, and that’s what we hope for. We’d like to persuade other people. But one of the points that Socrates makes is, look, even if you have the ability to persuade other people – suppose you have a Harry Potter magic wand which can get them to go along – and that’s all you have, you still have to decide what you’re going to persuade them of. Philosophy is about deciding what to think and finding an answer to that question. But I think that a lot of people in this debate think they’ve already got their minds made up. They aren’t feeling any uncertainty about that, and they’re just trying to persuade other people or prevent other people from persuading third parties or something like that.
AR: You were part of a discussion group of maybe 10 to 12 people back in your Princeton days, with luminaries such as Tom Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Nozick, and many others. In an interview with The Utopian, you called this the most important thing in your philosophical development. What made it so important?
TS: Well, it was like having this gang of great teachers, for one thing. In my career, I was mainly doing logic, philosophy, mathematics, things like that, although I was interested in moral and political philosophy, and I got more drawn into it because I was doing a lot of teaching in that area. So this was partly a way of developing more expertise in the field because I was just in the process of getting into it. Second, it was something that provided me with confidence in two ways: One, there really was a subject matter there that you could learn more about because in the 1950s, moral philosophy had a kind of skeptical air to it. It was sort of conventionalist or emotivist, non-cognitivist, and so on, and so we were drawn together by the fact that most of us in the group tended to think that there were real facts about right and wrong, and that just by thinking really hard and clearly about them, you could make progress, and that wasn’t what was going on in most of philosophy at the time. It wasn’t where the action was in philosophy; it was mostly in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, things like that.
So the group gave me confidence that there were other people who think that we’re not just banging things up, that there’s something there. And second, that gave me confidence in myself, because these people were willing to talk to me, and so I could be a member of this group, which was amazingly flattering. I was kind of a junior partner in the group, so I felt, wow, this is amazing. So it really was important in my philosophical development in those ways, giving me confidence in the subject, and, to some degree, confidence in myself.
AR: What sorts of things are you working on now?
TS: Well, I guess in the last couple of years or so, one of the main things I’ve been doing is trying to figure out what seems to be really defensible about contractualism. How does it need to be refined in order to be defensible, and what’s really mistaken or maybe confused about it? That’s not much fun. But that’s been the dominant thing I’ve been doing in the last year or so. I was also writing a sequel to a sequel to an old paper of mine on tolerance, “The Difficulty of Tolerance,” which I keep coming back to. I was partially quoting that when I was talking about the three presidents, and Elise Stefanik and her friends.
AR: I can imagine that it’s difficult having to almost pick apart your own philosophy.
TS: It’s not much fun. But on the other hand, you feel that you owe it to other people to do it. If you put these misleading ideas out there and somebody even made a television program out of them, then you have to do some damage control, right?
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.