Thomas Nagel on TM Scanlon

Sifting through my bookmarks, I ran across Nagel's review of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other, and read it profitably once again:

On occasion we are faced with acute moral choices – whether to join the Resistance or stay at home and care for our widowed mother; whether to run off with Vronsky or remain with Karenin. But largely, morality shapes our lives in ways we don’t even think about, in fact it does so partly by excluding certain options from our thoughts. Most of us, for instance, wouldn’t even consider (a) threatening to expose a colleague’s adulterous affair to his wife unless he votes our way on a contested appointment or policy issue; (b) extracting some cash from the pocketbook of an interior decorator as she inspects our house, because we think she is overcharging us; (c) stealing a kidney for a friend who needs a transplant; (d) selling all we have and giving it to the poor. It isn’t that we weigh the pros and cons and determine that the cons outweigh the pros. These things are not on the menu of options among which we feel we must choose. Such exclusions, as well as restrictions on what may legitimately be taken into account in some decisions but not others (prohibitions against nepotism, for instance), typify the complexity of moral standards and suggest that an accurate account of morality and its role in life will not be simple.

Thomas Scanlon’s understanding of this complexity and of its sources in the variety of human relations and values is one of the virtues of this illuminating book.... The book is about morality rather than politics, though its general method can be applied to the political domain, where some of the most heated moral arguments and controversies take place. Recent work in political theory is more widely known, but moral philosophy has been an intensely active field over the past three decades, and Scanlon’s theory addresses a number of its central questions: first, the question of the objectivity or truth of moral claims, their relation to reason, and whether or not they should be regarded as in some sense relative or subjective; second, the question of the kind of concern or respect for persons that is at the foundation of morality – what kinds of motive it calls on when it requires us to forgo certain means that would advance our personal aims, and how much it can ask that we sacrifice for the sake of others; third, the question of how, and to what extent, individual rights, liberties and prerogatives are morally shielded from encroachment in the name of the general good; fourth, the question whether modest advantages to each of a large number of people can be aggregated to outweigh a large cost to each of a much smaller number, for purposes of moral justification – a besetting problem for the intuitive acceptability of utilitarianism.

More here. If the review piques your interest, consider watching this 54 min interview with Scanlon.