According to one formulation of Scanlon’s contractualist principle, certain acts are wrong if they are permitted by principles that are reasonably rejectable because they permit such acts. According to the redundancy objection, if a principle is reasonably rejectable because it permits actions which have feature F, such actions are wrong simply in virtue of having F and not because their having F makes principles permitting them reasonably rejectable. Consequently Scanlon’s contractualist principle adds nothing to the reasons we have not to (...) act wrongly and is redundant. (shrink)

Ebbhinghaus, H., J. Flum, and W. Thomas. 1984. Mathematical Logic. New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. Forster, T. Typescript. The significance of Yablo’s paradox without self-reference. Available from http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk. Gold, M. 1965. Limiting recursion. Journal of Symbolic Logic 30: 28–47. Karp, C. 1964. Languages with Expressions of Infinite Length. Amsterdam.

I am pleased by the degree of agreement about reasons between the three of us, which is much greater than I might have guessed. I have no objection whatever to the project of giving the kind of psychological description of deliberation about reasons that Gibbard proposes. I agree that “weighing X in favor of A isn’t mysterious,” but I do confess to some doubt about how a psychological description of this process of weighing “explains, indirectly, X’s counting in favor of (...) A in such circumstances.” If there is any disagreement between Gibbard and me on this point, I think it is over the degree to which such an explanation is to be expected. (shrink)

Scanlon suggests a buck-passing account of goodness. To say that something is good is not to give a reason to, say, favour it; rather it is to say that there are such reasons. When it comes to wrongness, however, Scanlon rejects a buck-passing account: to say that j ing is wrong is, on his view, to give a sufficient moral reason not to j. Philip Stratton-Lake 2003 argues that Scanlon can evade a redundancy objection against his (Scanlon’s) view of wrongness (...) by adopting a buck-passing account of wrongness. We argue that this manoeuvre does not succeed. Scanlon’s notion of wrongness rests on the idea of a reasonably rejectable principle. As Stratton-Lake points out, Scanlon offers two accounts, one in terms of permission, the other in terms of proscription. The permission account is tricky to formulate. Scanlon’s account (quoted in Stratton-Lake 2003: 71) might suggest any of the following four formulations (where the principles in question are principles ‘governing how one may act’ (Scanlon.. (shrink)