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Books

Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, & Moral Progress and Analytic Philosophy & Human Life by Thomas Nagel

Jane O’Grady mulls over two new books by Thomas Nagel.

No books by Thomas Nagel have appeared since he startled academia with his controversial Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in 2012. Now there are two at once. Analytic Philosophy and Human Life is a collection of papers, reviews, and tributes to philosopher friends; Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress consists of two ethical essays, one of which was first published in 2021 in the London Review of Books.

The first of the essays opens with an anecdote. Soon after the Normandy landings in the Second World War the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, then a British Intelligence officer, was sent to interrogate a French collaborator who had been captured by the Resistance. When they were alone, the prisoner refused to impart any of the vital information he possessed unless given an assurance of being handed over to the British afterwards. Hampshire, who knew the man was going to be shot, said he was unable to offer any such guarantee. As a result he got no information.

This is Nagel’s point of departure for examining two opposing moral outlooks. Consequentialist/Utilitarian views would tend to regard Hampshire’s duty as clear, if distasteful: he should make the prisoner a false promise in order to gain life-saving, victory-hastening information. Consequentialists take the rightness of an action to be a matter of how much it promotes a good outcome, as if the individual were just an impersonal conduit for benefitting humanity. According to the other sort of moral view (Nagel says it has no specific name), actions are right and wrong not instrumentally– in virtue of how much good they achieve – but intrinsically, so that “the right is at least in some respects independent of the good.” On this view, Hampshire’s duty is not determined by a calculation of his actions’ consequences; it’s already structured in advance, circumscribed by the inviolable boundaries of what may or may not be done to a human being. Nagel recommends that when these two outlooks conflict, we should engage in what John Rawls (his supervisor at Cornell) called ‘reflective equilibrium’: taking our moral intuitions as a starting point, we should continually examine, in the light of our immediate circumstances and of what is enabled by current technology, how far our intuitive moral values need to be preserved, extended, or revised.

Many consequentialists would deny the need for any such strategy. They would claim, writes Nagel, that Hampshire’s “squeamishness” about lying is merely “a groundless taboo”; that “moral gut feelings”, although initially a useful evolutionary development, have created a “natural illusion built into our moral psychology”, and that they now serve to obstruct the rational (consequentialist) view of “impartial welfare maximisation”. But, counters Nagel, consequentialism itself rests on intuitions – mainly an intuition as to there being a “general good” and what that consists in. So too does the decision to prefer one type of morality over the other. And, far from being superfluous and self-indulgent, our inveterate “moral gut reactions” are essential to moral life, which would be hugely diminished if we ceased to respect them. To say this may be considered to beg the question, Nagel admits, but “perhaps that is unavoidable”. He does not spell out, though, how exactly ‘reflective equilibrium’ is supposed to work, nor how the balancing between moral intuitions is to be adjudicated. Nor does he mention that Hampshire was forever anguished about his decision, and that, whichever option he had taken, the French traitor was still going to be shot. Nagel himself advocates a pluralist ethics that caters for many, sometimes conflicting, values, built around the importance of the moral agent’s own projects, attachments, and interactions with others. Not that he believes morality to be a question of subjective decision, at an individual or at a social level. With his first book The Possibility of Altruism (1970), and ever since, Nagel has contributed to the revival of moral realism which holds moral values to be in some way objectively true. However, he has continually opposed the “old illusion”, prevalent in ethics as much as in metaphysics, “that all existence, truth, and knowledge must conform to a single model”. His aim has always been to present a picture of morality that does justice both to its subjectivity and objectivity. So, adamant that there are objective moral reasons for action, he is equally adamant that they must be “reasons for people to do things” – which implies that the criteria for what are to qualify as moral reasons depend on intuitions, and that these will inevitably vary over space and time.

Nagel’s second essay in Moral Feelings examines in what way moral progress could be possible. Does it consist in discovering what “in a sense had been true all along, like the chemical composition of salt”? Not quite: salt has always been chemically composed of sodium chloride, irrespective of our knowing this, whereas, Nagel argues, some moral truths could not have been recognised earlier than they were: they became ‘“understandable on reflection only by those who [had] already passed through certain prior states of moral thought and practice.” For example, without a particular notion of the individual’s relation to the state as demanding not just one-way, but reciprocal, obligations, the very conception (let alone promotion) of individual freedom of belief and expression would have been impossible as that notion was ‘unavailable’ until the eighteenth century in Europe. For Thomas More in sixteenth century England, the liberal conception of freedom was in fact simply ‘out of reach’; and thus being a fierce persecutor of heretics was not, after all, inconsistent with his intelligence, erudition, and otherwise-compassion. But (Nagel seems to be saying) it is not just that, in many cases, moral truths cannot become apparent until certain other concepts are in currency. More radically, he may be suggesting that the validity of moral truths depends on our apprehending them. Could there have been any reason for not inflicting suffering on others, he wonders, before there were creatures “capable of grasping the general concept of a mental state like pain which could be experienced either by themselves or by other beings”? In which case, should we say that cruelty was not wrong in the primeval past?

Surely, many readers will cry, cruelty has always been wrong, whether or not it’s acknowledged as such. Others may hold the fashionable relativism (loathed by Nagel) which says that not only the conceptualisation, but the very nature, of ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, or ‘bad’, is entirely dependent on how they’re defined within particular cultures. Relativists of various sorts may happily endorse the view that our cave-dwelling ancestors, and Thomas More, are not blameworthy for having been cruel – and moreover, that perhaps their cruelty does not count as wrong, or perhaps even as cruelty. Usually, though, even the most extreme relativists are resolute in pronouncing slavery (for example) to be eternally, objectively evil. But, moots Nagel, perhaps to proclaim the timeless wrongness of slavery is “‘just a projection into the past of a universalist idea – the claims of humanity as such.” No such idea of the wrongness of slavery was available to the ancient Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle. They regarded slavery as “a necessary institution”, although “bad luck” for the slaves. “The conception of justice as an all-embracing value,” says Nagel, is “a relatively recent invention.”

Isn’t there at least a tinge of relativism in this? Nagel seems to be saying not just that it is “only at a certain point in history” that certain moral truths have been, or will be, recognised, but that it is only when, and by virtue of, being recognised as such, that they are moral truths at all. “Reasons do not appear in a description of the natural world, but the rational beings who have those reasons do, so reasons do not exist in a separate, Platonic realm. Reasons are reasons for people to do things, and do not exist apart from rational beings.” Nagel calls his position “person-dependent realism”.

His other new book, Analytic Philosophy and Human Life, contains a review of T.M. Scanlon’s Being Realistic about Reasons (2014). Here Nagel agrees with Scanlon that, if a driver’s car is likely to hit a pedestrian, she has moral reasons to turn the steering wheel, whether or not she accepts them. The reasons for turning the wheel are present irrespective of her beliefs. Nagel’s endorsement of Scanlon is not, however, inconsistent with his argument for a ‘person-dependent’ stance on moral reasons (in his ‘Moral Reality and Moral Progress’ essay) – since the driver’s reasons for turning the wheel are currently available to anyone in her situation.

Thomas Nagel portrait by Athamos Stradis

In some cases, says Nagel in that essay, what are now accepted reasons for belief and action had already “existed unrecognised for a long time” before being actually appreciated (that homosexuality is morally neutral, not morally reprehensible, for instance). But how does he distinguish between these cases and those others in which he maintains that revisionism was impossible before the advent of certain psychological, political, social, and religious belief systems? Surely their introduction was not foundational for, but intermingled with and actually promoted by, that of the moral reasons supposedly derived from them. Surely the changes were achieved only because certain individuals somehow counteracted the mores then current, thanks to strenuous deliberation and dissatisfaction, informed by moral reasoning that superseded the previous sort. If, as Nagel suggests, it was because Aristotle dimly discerned slavery’s wrongness that he was prompted to defend it, then what needed to happen in the cultural climate before others became fully sighted about it? Wasn’t the usually-innovative Aristotle wilfully blind here?

How timeless is moral truth? This “tricky question” Nagel seeks to answer “in the spirit of” Aristotle’s famous paradox: That ‘There will be a sea battle on Tuesday’ was truthfully said on the previous Sunday, even though the battle had yet to be fought. The same holds, says Nagel, with “the prediction that there will be persons of a kind to which certain moral reasons apply.” But, by the same logic, aren’t primeval people (and, if differently, Aristotle and Thomas More) correctly described as having had moral reasons not to be cruel even though they were prevented, by the unavoidable lack of certain scientific and political beliefs in their own times, from recognising those moral reasons?

Two of the essays in Analytic Philosophy and Human Life adroitly tackle Peter Singer’s radical demand that each of us should donate a substantial proportion of our income to the alleviation of poverty, and examine how this could actually be implemented in real life. The review of Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017) deftly exposes why Dennett’s belief in the illusoriness of consciousness and self is itself an illusion. The ‘Tributes’ to various philosopher friends the book contains are warm, honest and illuminating. His review of H G Adler’s account of the Theresienstadt concentration camp is darkly compassionate. What Adler extrapolated from his terrible experience, says Nagel, was “that there is nonetheless a ground of morality that is in principle always available.” Yet the review concludes by lamenting that our best bulwark against evil is liberal democratic institutions, with their guarantee of individual rights. Individual morality is too fragile.

In the autobiographical introductory essay, Nagel describes how, despite being grounded in the scrupulously logical Anglo-American tradition in philosophy, he has always been drawn “temperamentally, in a subterranean way” to the more fluid and literary Continental movements of existentialism and phenomenology. Moreover, while being sharp and dexterous in using fine linguistic distinctions in the analytical manner, he has been chiefly concerned with “ lebensphilosophie – philosophical reflection on basic questions of life and death.” This has recently gained “at least partial respectability” in analytic philosophy, as he delightedly remarks – largely (though he doesn’t say so) thanks to him.

In these two books, Nagel seeks to do justice to our conflicting ethical intuitions, – to reconcile the objectivity of morality with the subjectivities of moral perspectives and their range across time and space. The nuanced complexity of his arguments is puzzling, but hugely stimulating.

Jane O’Grady writes philosophers’ obituaries for the Guardian, coedited Blackwell’s Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations with A. J. Ayer, and recently wrote Enlightenment Philosophy in Arcturus’s ‘Knowledge in a Nutshell’ series.

• Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress 71 pages, £16.99, and Analytic Philosophy and Human Life, 291 pages, £19.99, both by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press, 2023.