In May 2023, the University of California, Berkeley hosted a conference in honor of Samuel Scheffler, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Attendees included students and colleagues from every stage of his distinguished career – from his doctoral studies at Princeton, through more than two decades on the Berkeley faculty, to his current position at NYU. Some of the papers in this volume originated as talks at that conference; others were written afterward by participants. All touch on, or otherwise highlight, the concerns and character of Scheffler’s philosophical work. Given the breadth of Scheffler’s contributions, it is no surprise that any serious work in moral or political philosophy is likely to intersect with themes that his writing has helped illuminate.
Scheffler’s doctoral dissertation, later published as The Rejection of Consequentialism (1982), argued for limits to the demands of morality. Scheffler perceived that consequentialism, which was and is for many the default moral theory, gave precedence to the impersonal or agent-neutral point of view, in a way that left inadequate room for the personal or agent-relative point of view. In ‘Agent-Neutral Reasons and Contractualist Moral Theory’, Robert H. Myers, a former student of Scheffler’s at Berkeley, who is now University Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto, highlights a way in which the situation has since been reversed. The reversal is due to T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism, which found its canonical expression in What We Owe to Each Other (1998). With its ‘individualist restriction’, contractualism privileges the agent-relative perspective, allowing no role for agent-neutral considerations in determining the morality of ‘what we owe to each other’. Myers sketches a way to resist that restriction, by recognizing how agent-relative reasons depend on agent-neutral ones.
Scheffler’s second book, Human Morality (1992), was largely about the nature of moral obligation – the topic of Stephen Darwall’s contribution. In ‘Normativity in Contemporary (and the History of) Ethics’, Darwall, who is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, notes that, despite their other differences, those who take reasons, ought, or fit to be the fundamental normative category converge in one central thought: namely, that normativity is a relation between a subject’s responses and a situation to which the subject is responding. What distinguishes the normativity of moral obligation, Darwall argues, is that it is grounded in reactive attitudes of blame. But if obligation is rooted in blame, what explains its authority over action? According to Darwall, it is a presupposition of blame that the person blamed had sufficient reason to act otherwise.
Scheffler’s nonconsequentialism has never been of the case-driven sort epitomized by the trolley problem and its many variants. In the judgment of Christopher Kutz, a former student of Scheffler’s at Berkeley, who is now C. William Maxeiner Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley, this is a good thing. In his ‘Trolleys, Drones and the Deadly Effects of Scientistic Ethics’, Kutz argues that this ‘decontextualized approach, masquerading as objective moral science, has pernicious real-world consequences’. Positively, he calls on moral philosophers to engage with ‘social context, relationships, and political complexity rather than abstract thought experiments’.
As the 1990s progressed, Scheffler’s attention turned increasingly toward a positive characterization of the personal point of view that his earlier work argued consequentialism crowded out, theorizing the relationships and projects that make for a meaningful human life. Two of the articles in this issue engage with what are now decades of reflection on these phenomena.
In ‘Accounting for the Normative Force of Project-Dependent Reasons’, Monika Betzler, Chair for Practical Philosophy and Ethics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, argues that while projects, unlike relationships, do not generate moral requirements, they nevertheless generate normative requirements of a kind. Our projects demand a certain loyalty from us, both over time and in face of changing conditions. Betzler goes on to probe the multiple sources of this distinctive normative force.
In ‘Mattering that It’s You’, Chelsea Rosenthal, a student of Scheffler’s at NYU, who is now Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, argues that it is not enough for a meaningful life that we engage in relationships and projects that are objectively valuable. Those relationships and projects must also be informed by and reflect what makes us the particular people we are: our ideals, personalities, and projects. This leads to the provocative conclusion that pursuing a worthwhile life not only is not impaired by, but also positively requires that there is no such thing as ‘the meaning of life’: a pre-set formula to which we must adhere in writing our own biographies.
In the early 2000s and 2010’s, Scheffler was a leading advocate of a novel strand of egalitarian moral and political theory. ‘Relational egalitarians’ argue that equality should not in the first instance be understood as a distributive ideal, governing how resources are allocated, but rather as a relational ideal, governing the relations in which persons stand to each other. In ‘Wealth, Power, and Equality’, Adam Lovett, a student of Scheffler’s at NYU, who is now Lecturer at the Australian Catholic University, urges that the relational ideal should be interpreted, more specifically, in terms of the equality of power. Observing that inequalities in wealth entail inequalities of power, Lovett argues that relational equality, in the end, requires a radical form of distributive equality: namely, complete equality of wealth.
While Scheffler’s work is centered on enduring philosophical questions, he has also been a keen observer of contemporary political and social currents and the theoretical problems they raise.
One example is his writing on globalization in the 1990s, particularly his article, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Justice, and Institutions’ (2008), which is the basis for Japa Pallikkathayil’s ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Institutions.’ There Scheffler asked how globalization might lead us to rethink the content and application of John Rawls’s principles of justice in a cosmopolitan direction. Pallikkathayil, a former colleague of Scheffler’s at NYU, who is now Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, argues that Scheffler underestimates how far Rawlsian justice, rightly interpreted, already points in a cosmopolitan direction. Long before globalization, Rawls’s principles of justice had global scope. Nevertheless, Pallikkathayil holds that Scheffler is correct in thinking that changing circumstances, such as climate change, may affect the content and application of principles of justice.
Another example is Scheffler’s work on terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Scheffler’s ‘Is Terrorism Morally Distinctive?’ (2006) is the basis for Brian Berkey’s ‘Terrorism and Moral Distinctiveness’. Berkey, a former student of Scheffler’s at UC Berkeley, who is now Associate Professor of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, revisits Scheffler’s account of what makes terrorism distinctive: roughly, that it uses violence with the intention of destabilizing the existing social order by causing fear. Among other reservations, Berkey doubts that the morality of actions depends on intentions. While Scheffler may not have identified what makes terrorist acts morally distinctive, Berkey suggests, he may have identified a morally significant feature of the character of the agents who perpetrate these acts.
Finally, there are Scheffler’s more recent reflections on the rise of Trump and authoritarian populism. In ‘The Rawlsian Diagnosis of Donald Trump’ (2019), Scheffler suggested a diagnosis of democratic backsliding in the United States. Whereas Rawls’s theory requires reciprocity for social stability, institutions and policies have in recent decades dramatically failed to achieve reciprocity. While sympathetic to Scheffler’s diagnosis, Hyunseop Kim’s ‘Do We Know How to Implement Rawls’s Liberal Principles of Justice?’ cautions against the natural assumption that all that stands in the way of realizing liberal principles is a lack of political will. Kim, a student of Scheffler’s at NYU, who is now Professor of Philosophy at Seoul National University, argues that just as important is a lack of political knowledge.
