The Philosophers' Philosopher: An interview with T.M. Scanlon

Interview by Julian Baggini

TM Scanlon has the dubious distinction of being the Anglophone philosopher who has the worst ratio between professional importance and public recognition. His peers regard him as one of the most important moral and political philosophers working today, and he is virtually unknown outside academe.

The occasion which gave me the chance to talk to Scanlon highlighted this disconnect. Scanlon was in London to give the Royal Institute of Philosophy annual lecture, following such predecessors as Thomas Nagel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, John Searle, Mary Warnock, Jürgen Habermas, Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor. To be included among these names by his peers is testament to his professional standing, but he is probably the least well-known of them all.

However, unlike many obscure academics who are baffled by the mass media’s failure to phone them, Scanlon blames his relative obscurity entirely on himself, as in this characteristically self-deprecating anecdote:

“My father, who really got me interested in philosophy, was a lawyer, dedicated to the legal system, philosophy of law, the American constitution, and was really interested in philosophy from his days in university. He really looked forward to reading my book and then was terribly disappointed when he found it was unreadable. It is in a way unreadable. One of the reader’s reports for the press when it was published said ‘This book is written ordinary English - there are no symbols, little of what could be called technical terminology - but this appearance is entirely misleading’.”

It’s a shame, because if you cut through the density of his academic prose, what Scanlon has to say is potentially of very wide interest indeed. A good case in point is the focus of my discussion with him, a chapter on blame in his forthcoming book Moral Dimensions. Scanlon starts with what at first appears to be a dry, potentially sterile distinction between notions of blame and blameworthiness.

“I’ve come to think that to judge someone to be blameworthy is a neutral judgement that anybody can make no matter what his relationship to the person is,” he explains. “I can say Julius Caesar, Brutus or Mark Anthony was blameworthy even though I have nothing to do with them. A judgement of blameworthiness is a judgement that what the person did shows something about them that impairs the relations that person could have with people who actually interact with him in any one of a number of different ways.

“On the other hand, to blame somebody involves actually understanding your relationship with him in some non-standard way, that is some way that doesn’t fit the ideal model of being a friend, a co-worker, a co-operative stranger, or whatever the relationship might be. So blame is a personal reaction, whereas blameworthiness is a judgement about the appropriateness of certain kinds of personal reactions, different ones in different cases depending on how a person might be related to another person.”

What makes this distinction of more than scholastic interest is that it exemplifies a broader way of understanding ethics which has the potential to radically transform the way people think about morality. The key here is the word “relationship”, one which Scanlon seems almost apologetic about using. Yet the idea was there in his first book, What We Owe to Each Other, which, as the title suggests, argued that morality should be understood as primarily about how we justify ourselves to others.

I think the basic moral idea is continuous,” says Scanlon of his latest work’s relation to his first. “There I emphasised the desirability of being able to justify yourself to others, and I didn’t describe this as a relationship and I didn’t talk much about the attitude we have towards others when those conditions are violated. In writing the book I very much focussed on the feeling we have ourselves when we feel that we have violated them. A large part of what led me to take the view of moral philosophy that I described in my book was a kind of self-analysis, thinking about what I am feeling when I feel that I’ve done something wrong. My sense was one of estrangement from other people, an inability to justify myself to them. So I moved from the experience of believing that we’ve acted wrongly to an answer to the question of what is it for an act to be wrong. I didn’t ask the question, when someone else has done something wrong, what does blame of the person consist in? In this chapter of the new book, I did get into that, but you’re right, it’s a piece that would fit comfortably with that larger part.

I use this California, new-age word ‘relationships’. But I do try to define what I mean by it, which is that a relationship is defined by a set of intentions and expectations about how the two of you are going to interact with each other, should you encounter one another in a variety of different ways. In that sense of relationship it’s definitely right that What We Owe To Each Other took morality to be about relationships, because when we’re justifying ourselves to each other, what we’re justifying is principles that define the expectations we can have about how each other is going to behave and the intentions we ought to have to each other. So in that’s sense it’s giving a slightly different, more emotional, label to that idea.”

Scanlon argues that putting relationships at the heart of ethics transforms the way we see the relationship between blame and free will. Traditionally, it has been believed that to blame people requires that they be free in at least two ways. These Scanlon labels the requirements of psychological accuracy and fair opportunity to avoid.

“Traditional compatibilists like Hume allowed that things like force and coercion are kinds of unfreedom which undermine blame,” says Scanlon, explaining the requirement of psychological accuracy. “It’s one thing for me to do something willingly; it’s another thing for me to do it only because I’m being coerced. So what attitudes you can attribute to me, with respect to my concern for the victim, or whatever, are different depending on whether I did it freely and willingly and thought it was fun or whether I did it only because people were holding my children hostage or something like that.”

On this account, as long as my actions proceed from true beliefs and intentions, I can be blamed for them. However, “that leaves it open for the incompatibilist to say, well that’s not enough. Was the person free in having that character? So the question is why ask that question? We have to come up with some further explanation of why freedom is needed, and I think the most natural thing is fair opportunity to avoid. If you think of blame as some kind of sanction that involves doing something to a person that can’t be justified unless, among other things, they could have avoided letting themselves in for it, then we get a second requirement.”

This is where it gets difficult to save blame, since for all sorts of reasons, it can be argued that if you dig deep enough, you’ll find that people do not have a fair opportunity to avoid being the people they are, and hence doing the things they do. Between nature and nurture, neurology and society, the gap for an autonomous free will to intervene becomes vanishingly small. However, by putting relationships at the heart of ethics, Scanlon believes he can retain blame while rejecting the requirement of fair opportunity to avoid.

“I don’t think the requirement of fair opportunity to avoid applies to blame, because blame, as I understand it, doesn’t involve withholding something from a person that we unconditionally owe them. If we were condemning them to eternal damnation or doing something really nasty to them, then maybe we couldn’t justify blame without fair opportunity to avoid, but I think it’s a mistake to think that further freedom is required for that reason.”

If this is right, however, why is it so commonly believed that fair blame does require opportunity to avoid?

“First, I think that the idea that blame is essentially a kind of evaluation is very strong in its influence, and it shows, for example, in the common pairing of praise and blame. I think setting that aside would be a good thing.

“Where my view is different from the evaluative view is in what’s going on in the person who is doing the blaming. In one case the person is just deciding that the person is bad or good, or ranking them or whatever; in the other case the person is making an adjustment in his or her intentions and expectations about how people are going to go along. So the crucial point as far as freedom is concerned is that the range of variability, the kind of re-evaluation of intentions and expectations that blaming involves, is not something that requires fair opportunity to avoid to make it morally permissible. It can be made appropriate simply by the way the person is.

“In that sense my view is a kind of desert view. I want to say, to go back to the friendship case, if the person treats me like this, then it isn’t appropriate to go on confiding in him, trusting him and so on. That idea of appropriateness can seem overly intuitionistic or aesthetic or something, but I think the idea of a relationship gives it a little bit of structure. The reason I call it a desert-based view is that it holds that certain reactions, certain changes in our expectations and intentions for how to treat a person, are justified simply by what the person is like and how that is expressed in their action. It doesn’t require instrumental justifications, that it will make them better; nor does it require that they had fair opportunity to avoid my changing this, so they can’t complain, because they are like that. They didn’t choose to be like that, but they are like that, and now I see they are like that it gives new meaning to what’s going on with us.”

So central to this argument is the idea that blame isn’t punitive?

“It isn’t punitive no. It’s not intended to change people, I mean, maybe sometimes it is, but that’s not the fundamental idea.”

I for one could certainly imagine such thoughts being written up almost as self-help. Would it surprise, please or worry Scanlon to think that someone struggling personally with whether or not they are right to blame another may actually be helped by reading him?

“That would please me. I guess I think they ought to think ‘what do I have to decide when I’m deciding whether to blame somebody?’ I think the thought that I have to decide how I am going to understand my interactions with this person going down the road is a better way to understand it than just ‘Am I going to feel angry?’ or ‘Am I going to think that he ought to be punished?’ I’d be pleased if people found that in some way helpful.”

But Scanlon’s ideas about blame are not confined to the personal realm: there is also a political dimension. When it comes to legal blame, and with it punishment, “I want to say that’s based on the assumption that we all stand in some civic relation with one another, and recognise other people as citizens in good standing who are entitled to be treated in certain ways, reacted to, trusted and so on. Punishment is the official announcement that that isn’t so.

“Here I was effected very much by a personal experience. I went to Argentina with a group of philosophers just after the fall of the junta, and trials were going on of the junta members for terrible crimes. The Plaza de Mayo was filled with these mothers who had family members who had disappeared. Reading what those people were writing and other people were saying, it was clear that many of them wanted the members of the junta and the torturers who worked for them to suffer terrible punishments. But it also seemed, first and foremost, that these people, these generals, couldn’t be allowed to simply retire and be ordinary, retired citizens who are respected members of the community. There was something unacceptable about a public consensus that didn’t acknowledge the fact that they weren’t just perfectly honourable, retired gentlemen. So that’s an example of citizenship as a kind of relationship. It involves a kind of standing, and people feel that certain kinds of crimes mark people as people with whom we can’t think of ourselves as standing in that relationship anymore. And that’s different from questions of whether they should be sent to jail, or into exile, or whatever.”

Given his dry, analytic style, it is perhaps surprising that I find Scanlon to be an insightful psychologist in a non-technical sense. However, having a good sense of human psychology now seems to be quite unusual in Anglophone philosophy. To what extent does Scanlon think there is a need to have some sensitivity to the reality of human psychology if you’re going to do moral or political philosophy?

“I don’t know if I’d want to say that to do moral philosophy in general you need to be in touch with emotions, but I do think, for me, with an awful lot of philosophy, I find myself thinking this: why do I think that, and what more exactly am I thinking when I think that? That’s very first-personal and I often think that you make progress by correcting your understanding of what you’re thinking about. So in the case of blame, it came to seem to me that thinking about that wasn’t guided very much by a very clear idea about what was going on when we were blaming someone. So I tried to think about what the possibilities are. As I say in that chapter, the standard possibilities seem to be, on the one hand, an evaluation of the other person - are they good or bad? And on the other hand, some kind of sanction, doing something unpleasant that they won’t like because they don’t like it. It seemed to me that those two didn’t really fit what I thought, so I spent a lot of time trying to find something in between. So that’s a particular case where there’s an everyday concept that we use – blame – and trying to imagine the possibilities for how to understand it made me do a kind of psychology on myself.”

One reason why Scanlon is able to bring things like emotional understanding and introspective psychology into his work is that he does not see a sharp distinction between reason and emotion in the first place.

“I think that the category of emotion causes a lot of problems. It’s a basket into which people put things as a way of saying you can’t argue about it any more, or it’s arbitrary or something. I think to experience most emotions, such as anger or resentment, is to see oneself as having reasons to do various things. That’s not to say that those emotions necessarily are themselves rationally justified, just that having them involves taking things as reasons; and in so far as it involves taking things as reasons, it opens itself to criticism. You know, I resent something, I take myself as having a reason to take revenge. Well do I? So the emotion itself involves, I think, a tendency to see certain things as reasons. So I think the idea of a province of reason that’s more logical, and emotion which is independent, personal or something, is something we should get away from.”

Scanlon’s receptivity to thoughts about emotions and relationships is possibly also in part due to his willingness to accept the limitations of rational argument. This is perhaps surprising, because Scanlon actually came to philosophy through the hard end of mathematics and logic - “and have lost my rigour altogether,” he interjects, when I remind him of this. “All this talk about relationships, I mean, how far can you go?”

His intellectual journey was a gradual one, which came via working on game-theoretical approaches to moral philosophy, encountering Kant, and then, perhaps most critically, entering John Rawls’s orbit at Harvard. “Gradually I stopped working in logic because I just didn’t have any creativity in the subject. I could master the techniques pretty well and I liked doing that, but what to prove next? And I was teaching more and more moral and political philosophy because there was more of that to be taught, and so I was having ideas about that. So I kind of seamlessly made the transition without ever having said I’m giving up this and doing this.”

Many with a background in the more deductive, hard logical side of philosophy get frustrated with what they see as the less determinate aspects of moral philosophy.

“It’s very interesting you should say that,” replies Scanlon. “I’m somewhat surprised and maybe I should be ashamed that I haven’t had that feeling. To do any kind of serious philosophy you have to have a high tolerance for frustration and incompleteness: things don’t become philosophical questions if they can be answered pretty easily.”

Despite Scanlon’s confessing that his writing remains impenetrable to all but the most determined layperson, he has been instrumental in trying to get philosophy more connected with issues of public concern. He was one of the philosophers behind the launch of the now leading journal Philosophy and Public Affairs and was also one of the authors of an amicus brief on assisted suicide: a piece of expert evidence submitted to the Supreme Court when it was deciding on a critical case in 1997. In some ways, however, that brief provided a cautionary tale about how hard it is to bridge the academic-public divide.

“Of any of the things I’ve written, that amicus brief was the one that got the most unsolicited feedback. I was interviewed by some people from magazines and other press people called me up on the phone, but - and this was actually quite irritating - nobody asked, what was your argument or why did you say this? I don’t think I got a single question about that. The questions were all about, where do you guys get off? Philosophers – why do you think somebody should listen to you? This is a very unusual thing for a philosopher to do. It’s kind of uppity for you guys to write to the courts saying here’s our opinion, folks.”

The same problem potentially arises whenever a philosopher tries to contribute to public life. “It’s a problem of how to deal with the uptake side. It’s not just what we would say or what we’d be in a position to say, but what the people we speak to would make of it, or how we should think about what they would make of it. This is what makes it in many cases difficult to write for the broader public, because most people, who have lots of other things to think about, aren’t interested in trying to figure out why I think, for example, that blame presupposes freedom. It’s a hard sell to try to get people to move very far down that road, even if you’ve thought about it and have got something to say about it.”

Perhaps the most successful way philosophers have got involved is by serving on ethics committees, commissions and so forth. John Harris, Mary Warnock and Onora O’Neill are very active in this regard in the UK, while in the states, Michael Sandel is on the President’s Commission on Bioethics. Is this a better way for philosophers to actually get involved, as informed citizens rather than philosophers offering their wisdom? Scanlon certainly thinks this could be worthwhile, but he expresses some reservations.

“One worries about something like the President’s Commission on Bioethics which is a political body. It was set up by a particular president for a particular reason and staffed in a particular way. If you’re going to get into that sort of thing you can’t just think of it as being like being in a seminar, where we’re all just trying to figure it out. So that raises the question of a different kind of skill. Before we were talking about the distinction between the skill of doing philosophy and the skill of being able to explain it in a way that might engage people. This has maybe got those two things but it’s also got the skill of political savvy. I think Michael Sandel has really entered into that and I think probably he’s had a good effect, but I think it’s a complicated horse to ride.”

Given how he has excelled within academia, it might be churlish to demand that Scanlon find some way to communicate better with the wider public. He certainly admires his peers who do. “Take Ronnie Dworkin, he’s a person who can write for a general audience very effectively. Tom Nagel can also do that. Some people are very good at it, I should probably try harder.” I think he’s probably the man best placed to work out whether he owes it to himself or to others to do so, or whether we should blame him if he does not.

Julian Baggini’s latest book is Complaint (Profile).