Thomas Scanlon , Moral Dimensions : Permissibility , Meaning , Blame

In Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame, Thomas Scanlon challenges moral philosophers with a subtle analysis of how permissibility, meaning and blame are to be understood. Scanlon’s challenge is significant not only because he is a moral philosopher of considerable stature but because his analysis proceeds with an unusual degree of care. Scanlon employs a number of novel distinctions that allow him to advance attractive alternatives to standard accounts of permissibility, meaning and blame. While the book is not an elaboration and defense of a moral theory, like Scanlon’s well-known What We Owe to Each Other, Moral Dimensions is still a substantial contribution to moral philosophy. In Chapter 1, ‘‘The Illusory Appeal of Double Effect’’, Scanlon argues that the Doctrine of Double Effect while intuitive confuses assessing an agent’s reasons for action and the permissibility of her action; he also claims that the doctrine runs together the ‘‘critical’’ and ‘‘deliberative’’ use of moral principles, principles used for judging others versus principles used when deciding which actions we should take. The permissibility of an action is roughly determined by the deliberative use of principles, while the critical use determines character. Chapter 2, ‘‘The Significance of Intent’’, focuses on the complex relation between intent and permissibility. Scanlon here draws an important distinction between an agent’s reasons for action and the meaning of an action. Meaning ‘‘is a matter of what others reasonably take the reasons of an agent to be. The meaning of an action is its significance for the agent and others’’ (p. 52). Reasons for action determine permissibility but actions may be permitted when motives for action are poor or bad. Chapter 3, ‘‘Means and Ends’’, contains an elucidation of the meaning of Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Scanlon argues that the complex notion of treating someone as a means can only be properly understood by means of the permissibility-meaning distinction. He then ties Kant’s account of moral worth with his own account of