Books by T. M. Scanlon

Scanlon reframes current philosophical debates as he explores the moral permissibility of an action. Blame, he argues, is a response to the meaning of an action rather than its permissibility. This analysis leads to a novel account of the conditions of moral responsibility and to important conclusions about the ethics of blame.

How do we judge whether an action is morally right or wrong? If an action is wrong, what reason does that give us not do it? Why should we give such reasons priority over our other concerns and values? T. M. Scanlon offers new answers to these questions, as they apply to the central part of morality that concerns what we owe to each other.