What We Owe to Each Other (review)

T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 420 pp.

Scanlon's is the most sophisticated attempt to rethink the idea of a social contract since John Rawls invented the veil of ignorance. Scanlon's contract is a set of 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." Aside from supplying moral guidance, these principles are supposed to explain what it is that our judgments of right and wrong are about. But if Scanlon has underestimated the range of principles that a properly motivated person might have reason to reject, the whole project is in jeopardy. Could there not be some reasonable person whose religious commitments counted heavily against any principles that Scanlon might propose as candidates for the social contract?