Abstract

In What We Owe to Each Other, T.M. Scanlon says that any acceptable moral teory must answer what he calls the priority question: the question of why moral value should takes priority over other values, such as the values of love and friendship. In this essay I discuss Scanlon's answer to the priority question and contrast it with the answer offered by Christine Korsgaard in Sources of Normativity. I argue that each account contains important insights but that neither is completely satisfactory. However, by combining elements of the two accounts we can arrive at a richer understanding of the relationship between morality and other values, and a better explanation of the priority of the moral