Scanlon on Double Effect

Abstract

In this new book Moral Dimensions, T. M. Scanlon (2008) explores the ethical significance of the intentions and motives with which people act. According to Scanlon, these intentions and motives do not have any direct bearing on the permissibility of the act. Thus, Scanlon claims that the traditional Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is mistaken. However, the way in which someone is motivated to act has a direct bearing on what Scanlon calls the act’s “meaning”. One particularly important kind of “meaning” that an act can have consists in the ways in which it is appropriate for various people to blame the agent for the act. So the book ends with an extended analysis of blame and blameworthiness. As anyone acquainted with Scanlon’s work would expect, the book is full of extremely valuable insights. The discussion of blame in the last chapter (122–214) is of especially great and lasting importance. In these comments, however, I shall follow the common practice of concentrating on the areas on which I disagree with the work that I am discussing. In particular, I shall defend the DDE against Scanlon’s attack. This attack has three parts: first, he argues directly against the plausibility of the DDE (18–20 and 56–62); secondly, he offers an explanation of why moral thinkers might have been misled into accepting the DDE (20–28); and thirdly, he offers an alternative account of the main intuitions that philosophers have adduced in favour of the DDE – by arguing that we can do justice to these intuitions without appealing to the DDE (28–36). I shall not have time to answer the third part of Scanlon’s attack here. 1 Instead, I shall focus exclusively on the first two parts of his attack. First, however, I shall comment briefly on the question of how the DDE should be interpreted.