educated at Princeton, Harvard, and Oxford, subsequently teaching at Princeton and currently Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard. Scanlon is the most influential defender of the position known as contractualism in moral philosophy, whose antecedents include Kant and Rawls. In Scanlon’s development there is no need for Rawls’s veil of ignorance. Rather we are to imagine a communal attempt to find principles for living together that nobody has sufficient reason to reject. ‘An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject’. In Scanlon’s view reasons are a primitive notion in moral philosophy, in terms of which values, obligations, and duties can all be best understood. His books include What we Owe to Each Other (1998), The Difficulty of Tolerance (2003), and Being Realistic about Reasons (2014), the last being the book of the John Locke lectures given in Oxford in 2009. See also buck-passing accounts.