Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon (; born June 28, 1940) is an American philosopher. At the time of his retirement in 2016, he was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy, where he had taught since 1984. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Life and career Scanlon was born on June 28, 1940, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1962; earned his PhD in philosophy from Harvard under Burton Dreben in 1968; studied for a year at Oxford University on a Fulbright Scholarship; and returned to Princeton, where he taught from 1966 until 1984. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 1993. His teaching in the department has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. His book What We Owe to Each Other was published by Harvard University Press in 1998; a collection of papers on political theory, The Difficulty of Tolerance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Scanlon is the father-in-law of philosopher and African-American studies scholar Tommie Shelby.
Philosophical work Scanlon's dissertation and some of his first papers were in mathematical logic, where his main concern was in proof theory, but he turned to ethics and political philosophy, where he developed a version of contractualism in the line of John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Scanlon has also published important work on freedom of speech, equality, tolerance, foundations of contract law, human rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, as well as on foundational questions in moral theory.
Contractualism
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