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Cover -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1. Elements of Relational Normativity -- 1.2. Overview of the Argument -- 2 The Problem of Moral Obligation -- 2.1. Practical Requirements: The Basic Challenge -- 2.2. Moral Obligation: The Specific Challenge -- 2.3. A Relational Approach to Moral Obligation -- 2.4. Refining the Picture -- 3 Morality as a Social Phenomenon -- 3.1. The Interpersonal Significance of Moral Right and Wrong -- 3.2. Individualistic and Relational Conceptions of the Moral Right -- 3.3. The Relational Structure of Interpersonal Accountability -- 3.4. The Relational Content of Blame -- 4 Relational Requirements without Relational Foundations -- 4.1. Obligations and Relationships -- 4.2. Self-Standing Relational Requirements -- 4.3. Anti-Individualism about the Normative -- 4.4. Agent-Relativity and Morality as an Ideal -- 5 From Interests to Claims -- 5.1. Defining the Manifold: Who Are the Claimholders? -- 5.2. Interests, Claims, and Moral Wrongs -- 5.3. Moral Justification and Moral Reasoning: From Interests to Claims -- 5.4. A Theory of Relational Morality? -- 6 Some Practical Consequences -- 6.1. Foreseeability, Claims, and Wrongs -- 6.2. Claims without Rights: Imperfect Moral Duties -- 6.3. Numbers and Non-Identity -- 6.4. Extramoral Concern for Moral Persons -- Notes -- Bibliograph -- Index

The Moral Nexus develops and defends a new interpretation of morality—namely, as a set of requirements that connect agents normatively to other persons in a nexus of moral relations. According to this relational interpretation, moral demands are directed to other individuals, who have claims that the agent comply with these demands. Interpersonal morality, so conceived, is the domain of what we owe to each other, insofar as we are each persons with equal moral standing.The book offers an interpretative argument for the relational approach. Specifically, it highlights neglected advantages of this way of understanding the moral domain; explores important theoretical and practical presuppositions of relational moral duties; and considers the normative implications of understanding morality in relational terms.The book features a novel defense of the relational approach to morality, which emphasizes the special significance that moral requirements have, both for agents who are deliberating about what to do and for those who stand to be affected by their actions. The book argues that relational moral requirements can be understood to link us to all individuals whose interests render them vulnerable to our agency, regardless of whether they stand in any prior relationship to us. It also offers fresh accounts of some of the moral phenomena that have seemed to resist treatment in relational terms, showing that the relational interpretation is a viable framework for understanding our specific moral obligations to other people

How to argue about practical reason -- Three conceptions of rational agency -- Explanation, deliberation, and reasons -- Normativity and the will -- Normativity, commitment, and instrumental reason -- Reason and responsibility -- Moral responsibility and the practical point of view -- Addiction as defect of the will : some philosophical reflections -- Caring, reflexivity, and the structure of volition -- Ressentiment, value, and self-vindication : making sense of Nietzsche's slave revolt -- Virtue, reason, and principle -- Scanlon's contractualism -- The rightness of acts and the goodness of lives -- Moral reasons and moral fetishes : rationalists and anti-rationalists on moral motivation

Abstract
This paper explores the question whether utilitarianism is compatible with the autonomy of the moral agent. The paper begins by considering Bernard Williams' famous complaint that utilitarianism cannot do justice to the personal projects and commitments constitutive of character. Recent work (by Peter Railton among others) has established that a utilitarian agent need not be free of such personal projects and commitments, and could even affirm them morally at the level of second"order reflection. But a different and more subtle problem confronts this approach: the use of utilitarian principles to justify the cultivation of personal projects and attachments undermines the autonomy to support this objection, according to which autonomy is a matter of acting in a way one can reflectively endorse.

Cover -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Contributors -- PART ONE: REASON, VALUE, AND DESIRE -- 1. The Activity of Reason -- 2. Valuing -- 3. Aims as Reasons -- 4. Scanlon on Desire and the Explanation of Action -- PART TWO: ETHICAL THEMES: CONTRACTUALISM, PROMISSORY OBLIGATION, AND TOLERANCE -- 5. Of Metaethics and Motivation: The Appeal of Contractualism -- 6. Contractualism on the Shoal of Aggregation -- 7. Immoral, Conflicting, and Redundant Promises -- 8. The Trouble with Tolerance -- PART THREE: POLITICAL THEMES: CONSERVATISM, JUSTICE, AND PUBLIC REASON -- 9. Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value -- 10. Global Political Justice and the "Democratic Deficit" -- 11. Establishment, Exclusion, and Democracy's Public Reason -- 12. The Significance of Distribution -- PART FOUR: RESPONSIBILITY -- 13. The Trouble with Psychopaths -- 14. Blame, Italian Style -- 15. Dispassionate Opprobrium: On Blame and the Reactive Sentiments -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W.

This work brings together 14 papers on an array of topics from the many areas to which philosopher Thomas Scanlon has made path-breaking contributions, each of which develops a distinctive and independent position while critically engaging with central themes from Scanlon's own work in the area