Ethics without Metaphysics? Thomas Scanlon’s Moral Contractualism

Abstract

In What We Owe to Each Other, Thomas Scanlon offers an account of both the content and the normative basis of the morality of right and wrong, by which he means that part of morality concerned with what we owe to each other. I examine the reasons why Scanlon maintains that his account is not metaphysical but practical. I trace the meaning of “practical” back to some of John Rawls’s writings as well as Kant’s, and I hold that, in fact, moral metaphysics is not incompatible with morality’s practical character. In my view, Scanlon’s rejection of metaphysics is motivated by his conception of morality as being not categorical.