Wikipedia Profile: Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon, Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity
excerpts from Wikipedia
Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon (born 1940) is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy. He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. He grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana; earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben; studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship; and taught for many years at Princeton University, where he had been an undergraduate student.
His dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, where his main concern was in proof theory, but he soon made his name in ethics and political philosophy, where he developed a version of contractualism in the line of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, human rights, conceptions of welfare, theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory...
Contractualism
Contractualism is an attempt at providing a unified account of the subject matter of a central part of morality which Scanlon calls ‘what we owe to each other’...
Scanlon grounds the reason-giving force of judgements about right and wrong in ‘the positive value of a way of living with others’.A way of living with others which is typified by an ideal of mutual recognition between rational agents, where mutual recognition demands that moral agents acknowledge the value of human life and respond to this value in the right ways.
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