Tim Scanlon

It's a steep climb up three floors to the bare office of newly arrived Professor of Philosophy Thomas N. Scanlon, a climb perhaps symbolic of the distance many philosophers feet from the mundanities of the "real world."

"That does bother me somewhat," Scanlon says of this distance. "Sometimes I think I should give [philosophy] up and go into something concrete, like math."

But Scanlon has done quite a bit to bridge the gap between philosophical ideas and actual applications.

A longtime associate editor of the quarterly journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, Scanlon has written on such topics as the freedom of expression and privacy rights, and has editted articles on abortion and war.

His current interest, he acknowledges, it somewhat abstruse. "The thing I'm interested in is . . . what kind of force is a moral obligation," he explains. "Sitting around asking. "What would happen if I broke a promise?' is just the kind of thing that gives philosophy a bad name."

Scanlon has just written a working paper on "the role of social institutions in . . . making an agreement between two people binding."

"I'm not suggesting that this has applications on how people behave in large-scale situations," be adds. "That would be a little grandiose, to say the least."

But it could be the basis for a new contractarian philosophical system with a different base than Conant University Professor John Rawls' "original position"--the theory currently holding away over the field of political philosophy.

In other words, it could be big shakes.

"Maybe, or maybe it will just fall apart," says Department Chairman Warren D. Goldfarb '69 of his newest colleague's latest work.

"He wants to take the notion of social agreement on certain moral principles that will seem to be reasonable and extend it to a general and more comprehensive moral view," Rawis said last year on the occasion of Scanlon's acceptance.

Scanlon says he is working up to a book--on the nature of morality--which would be his first. He is one of the few tenured faculty members at Harvard not to have published a book, though he has written numerous articles.

"Publishing books is not central form of scholarly accomplishment [in philosophy] as it is in other fields of the humanities," he says.

The Philosophy Department apparently agrees; Scanlon was the end-product of a multi-year search for a specialist in political and moral philosophy, the core of the department.

"Harvard has a great tradition of a very great eminence in this field," Goldfarb says, referring to Rawls, Professor of Philosophy Robert Nozick, and Roderick Firth, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity," However, these gentlemen, with the exception of Mr. Nozick, are not getting any younger," Goldfarb adds. "There is great concern of maintaining this tradition in that subject."

At least two other scholars in this field have turned down Harvard tenure offers in the past several years, and Scanlon says his decision to accept was difficult. "Princeton has a very good Philosophy Department, but this one is also very good," Scanlon says, adding that what finally swayed him was the change of scene from New Jersey: "I've been talking and arguing with this group of people for 18 years."

When Scanlon joined the Princeton department in 1966, after earning his B.A. at Princeton and his Ph.D. at Harvard, he was a young mathematical philosopher with a background in logic. Sometime after 1974, when he co-authored a paper with Goldfarb, Scanlon switched to the field of moral philosophy. Already, though, Scanlon had expressed an interest in such questions of ethics as freedom of expression.

In 1972, he wrote the first of two articles on the topic, arguing that certain inflammatory statements, even if they led to harm, cannot be suppressed, because the speaker's "contribution to the genesis of the harmful act was superseded by the agent's own judgment."

The 1972 article led to what appears to be a running intellectual feud with Nozick, who in his 1974 book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" called Scanlon's theory "mistaken."

"Though Nozick does not mention Scanlon by name," wrote a third-party philosopher, "I think it is clear from the context that he is responding to Scanlon's essay."

In a 1976 article on Nozick's book, Scanlon praised Nozick for bringing economic insituations to the same philosophical level as political institutions and political liberties, but criticized him for how he did his analysis.

"I have argued that the particular framework of property and contract rights which Nozick proposes does not constitute an adequate account of the claims of economic liberty," he wrote.

So how does is feel to be on the same Faculty as Nozick and other "gods" of the philosophy world? "They aren't the only gods," Scanlon says. "The gods are scattered around."