Here. An excerpt:
Scanlon: I think that the largest number of people really do care about the aspect of morality that I'm talking about: that is, the ability to justify their actions to others. And I think this is illustrated by my analysis of our contemporary politics. There was a symposium on my book at the American Philosophical Association. One of the commentators was David Gauthier, a philosopher who wrote a book that was similar, but defended a much more right-wing, libertarian view. He's a friend, and he loves exaggerating. When he started, he said, “Everything in this book is mistaken. Even the title is false; we don't owe anybody anything.” That might seem to be an expression of the view that you mentioned [i.e., egoism].
But in fact, it seems to me, people do sense that they owe other people something, although they're very sensitive about it. They don't want to be accused of behaving wrongly. If you look at a lot of the controversies that are out there today having to do with global warming, Black Lives Matter, wearing masks and getting vaccinated—there's a lot of passion there. And it seems to me we have one party that is basically being very successful by taking Gauthier’s remark as their party platform: We don't owe anybody anything. At some level, they recognize that they do owe people something. They really don't think that it's okay to have unarmed young men shot in the back when they're not violently attacking the policeman. They feel vulnerable to criticism on this point, but they really don't want to accept it. They don't want to accept that they ought to be doing something about global warming or the police, or that they need to be paying higher taxes. Their very sensitivity to criticism reveals that they aren't like the person you mentioned, who really sincerely all the way down thought, “I don't owe anybody anything.” They wouldn't be bothered by that criticism.
Mounk: How do we actually think about what we owe to people in concrete situations? I agree with you that this question animates people a lot. One of my favorite pieces of reading when I'm, you know, on public transport with 10 minutes to kill is to read “Am I the Asshole?” which is a community on Reddit, where people really are trying to figure out, “hey, in this situation, I did something, I think it's okay. But people around me are telling me I'm being an asshole”... which is colloquial for acting immorally. How should people go about answering those questions according to the substantive views you've developed in your work?
Scanlon: I want to analyze everything down to the idea of “a reason” at the most basic level. If I want to say something that any person on the receiving end of my conduct would reasonably reject, I have to ask, “What reason do they have to object to what I'm doing, and what's my counter?” That's familiar to the old golden rule, but it’s just not what the person actually likes, or would enjoy. It’s also: “What reason do they really have (given how they would be affected) to object to what I'm doing?” And what reason do I have? There's a crucial difference there between how I feel while I would like to be treated, on the one hand, and the question of what reasons I have to not want to be treated that way, on the other. That's the kind of thinking that we should engage in and (it seems to me) we often do engage in, although I may be kidding myself.
(Thanks to Richard Marshall for the pointer.)
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