Perhaps the most intriguing question for me is why Scanlon might choose to engage in this endeavor. I think most people would agree (though not to every detail) that the way we generally conceive of ethics--either only evaluating the ends or the means--is lacking. We know that, most of the time, we are comfortable arguing for the most utilitarian outcome; none of us, however, is comfortable with the prospect of losing the organ lottery. Scanlon makes some interesting in-roads to the middle. With the middle, of course, always comes the fear that we will always default to what is utilitarian--I'm not sure I understand how Scanlon gets around this problem, but I get that he's, to some extent, attempting to accomplish just this.

I like the idea of thinking of rights as the "parcelling out of valued forms of discretion." This makes sense particularly in light of the discussion in section IV. It would probably be rational to consent to a system in which our organs would be divided up and given to others; we are uncomfortable with this notion because it seems to violate consent if decided without our agreement. I also think its interesting that its possible that the deontology might rest on utilitarian ideas--we create particular rules with the believe that it will lead to certain consequences which are valued. Much of the debate, then, is over which consequences are more valuable.

One more distinction I found useful was made on 147. Unlike rule utilitarianism, his theory is more concerned with avoidance of major violations. That being said, we can set aside rules (and adopt new ones) if doing so is likely to maximize utility. He is, in light of our discussion of Lyons, NOT concerned merely with incremental utilitarian gains; overriding rights requires something major.

To be honest, I understood a number of individual parts of this article better than the overall picture.