Professor Scanlon taught philosophy at Princeton University before coming to Harvard in 1984. He is the advisory editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where he delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Brasenose College. He has written on freedom of expression, the nature of rights, conceptions of welfare, and theories of justice, and foundational questions in moral theory, and has published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic; Nomos; Ethics; and Philosophy and Public Affairs. His teaching in the department of philosophy has included courses on theories of justice, equality, and recent ethical theory. He is the co-editor of, among others, War and Moral Responsibility; The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion; and Medicine and Moral Philosophy. His more recent publications include Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame; The Difficulty of Tolerance; and What We Owe To Each Other.

Professor Scanlon is a charter member of the Faculty Committee, serving since the Center's founding in 1987 until 2010.