1. I presented earlier versions of this article at the University of London, UC San Diego, Cambridge University, Oxford University, the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, the XXII World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, and the University of Manchester. In addition to thanking the audiences on those occasions, I thank Sarah McGrath for her commentary at the Pacific APA and G. A. Cohen, John Hawthorne, Charles Kurth, Veronique Munoz-Darde, David Owens, Frederick Teti, Peter Vallentyne, Alex Voorhoeve, Ralph Wedgwood, and the Editors ofPhilosophy & Public Affairsfor written comments and discussion.
2. 1. T. M. Scanlon,What We Owe to Each Other(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 229-30, 241.
3. 2. Ibid., p. 230.
4. 3. Here I borrow the concept of a "fixed point" from Rawls and apply it to moral theory. Rawls describes certain "considered convictions of justice" that "we now make intuitively and in which we have the greatest confidence" as "provisional fixed points which we presume any conception of justice must fit." See John Rawls,A Theory of Justice(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 19-20. I follow Rawls in maintaining that these fixed points are not unrevisable, but they must be taken very seriously.