See also [[=Bernard Williams]]. Nagel was supervised by [[=John Rawls]]. His views on metaethics and rationality are broadly similar to those of [[=Henry Sidgwick]] and [[=Derek Parfit]]. Nagel supervised [[=Samuel Scheffler]]. Inbox: - Essay title: Impartiality, How? - Mind and Cosmos - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/08/the-new-thomas-nagel-book.html - Re-read Nagel reviewing Williams. (In the Nagel folder) - Man, Nagel vs Williams feels like a good ii salon to me. - Nagel (1991) Equality and Impartiality - Nagel (1979) Moral Questions - Parfit thinks The View from Nowhere is best intro to Philosophy. - https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/01/09/thomas-nagel-after-youve-gone/ - https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/11/david-hume-vs-thomas-nagel-knowing-a-hawk-from-a-handsaw-but-mad-south-southwest-weblogging.html - https://chab123.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/why-darwinist-materialism-is-wrong-review-of-the-thomas-nagel-book-by-alvin-plantinga/ - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/11/simon-blackburn-suffers-from-the-fallacy-of-mood-affiliation.html - https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2012/09/17/nagel-reviews-plantinga-in-the-nyrb/ - https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/09/27/philosopher-defends-religion/?pagination=false # The Last Word ## Bernard Williams reviews the Last Word Nagel wants to vindicate our rationality, and the justifications that we offer for our beliefs, against people who say that these ways of thinking are simply the ones that we are culturally used to and happen to favor. [...] Nagel wants to show [...] that “understanding and justification come to an end…with objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view.” By this he means that if the argument between conflicting positions or interpretations were pursued far enough, and if the parties were fully rational, they would have to accept one resolution of the debate or another, or at least agree with each other that for mutually intelligible reasons it could not be resolved. They could not retreat to merely explaining each others’ outlook in psychological, social, or political terms. [...] Who, in these discussions, are “we”? Is every claim to the effect that our understandings are relative to “us” equally threatening? When we reflect on what “we” believe, particularly in cultural and ethical matters, we often have in mind (as the relativists do) ourselves as members of modern industrial societies, or of some yet more restricted group, as contrasted with other human beings at other times or places. Such a “we” is, as linguists put it, “contrastive”—it picks out “us” as opposed to others. But “we” can be understood inclusively, to embrace anyone who does, or who might, share in the business of investigating the world. Some philosophers have su_gested that in our thought there is always an implied “we” of this inclusive kind; according to them, when cosmologists make claims about what the universe is like “in itself,” they are not abstracting from possible experience altogether, but are implicitly talking about the way things would seem to investigators who were at least enough like us for us to recognize them, in principle, as investigators. [...] What is really disturbing, however, about the relativists and subjectivists is surely not this idea in itself, but rather their insistence on understanding “us” in such a very local and parochial way. [...] They suggest that there are no shared standards on the basis of which we as human beings can understand each other—that there is no inclusive, but only a contrastive, “we.” [...] Nagel’s basic idea is that whatever kind of claim is said to be only locally valid and to be the product of particular social forces—whether it is morality that is being criticized in this way, or history, or science—the relativist or subjectivist who oñers this critique will have to make some other claim, which itself has to be understood as not merely local but objectively valid. Moreover, in all the cases that matter, this further claim will have to be of the same type as those that are being criticized: the relativists’ critique of morality must commit them to claims of objective morality, their attempts to show that science consists of local prejudice must appeal to objective science, and so on. [...] Nagel is quite right in saying that these kinds of skepticism cannot become total, this side of insanity. If we are to think at all, we cannot regard logic, or science, or history, as just local fancies. [...][...] If we can relegate some of our thoughts to being mere appearances, this implies that we have an objective view of a world—a world that is really there —to which we, and those appearances, belong. [...] [Nagel] One cannot ultimately get outside these styles of thought. One has to go on in the same way. In the end, anyone who tries to make the case against objectivity in a certain field will be involved in making claims in that field which, once again, have to be understood as objective. [...] the question is not whether we grasp anything objectively, but how much we grasp, and the answer to that may be obscure enough to leave us with some of the unease which, I take it, Nagel’s strategy is supposed to dispel. If we can relegate some of our thoughts to being mere appearances, this implies that we have an objective view of a world—a world that is really there —to which we, and those appearances, belong. [...] We should not forget that the style of philosophy to which Kant self-consciously opposed his critique he called dogmatic philosophy, meaning that it took the supposed deliverances of reason at their face value, without asking how they were grounded in the structure of human thought and experience. [...] Nagel’s philosophy is certainly not dogmatic in tone or intellectual manner: it is patient, honestly open-minded, attentive to argument, and willing to pursue the discussion with any moderately rational objectors. It is also not dogmatic in the sense that it invokes anyone else’s dogma; his book is meant to be a defense of reason. Yet, in the spirit of Kant’s distinction, it is dogmatic, because it is not interested enough in explanations. It draws, as it seems to me, arbitrary limits to the reflective questions that philosophy is allowed to ask. [...] The basic idea that we see things as we do because of our historical situation has become over two hundred years so deeply embedded in our outlook that it is rather Nagel’s universalistic assumption which may look strange, the idea that, self-evidently, moral judgment must take everyone everywhere as equally its object. It looks just as strange when we think of travel in the opposite direction. “To reason is to think systematically in ways anyone looking over my shoulder ought to be able to recognize as correct,” Nagel says near the beginning of his book. Anyone? So I am reasoning, along with Nagel, in a liberal way, and Louis XIV is looking over our shoulder. He will not recognize our thoughts as correct. Ought he to?—or, more precisely, ought he to have done so when he was in his own world and not yet faced with the task of trying to make sense of ours? We are brought back to the demand for explanations. If liberalism is correct and is based in universal human reason, as Nagel seemingly takes it to be, why is it that earlier times did not think of it or accept it? [...] If we come to understand historically and psychologically how our own and others’ ethical thoughts came about, this can change the way we think about the status of our thoughts, and about their relation to other people’s. To neglect this possibility does seem to me to constitute a form of dogmatism in Kant’s sense, a refusal of the kind of critique that has made modern philosophy (including the deformations that Nagel rightly rejects) what it is. [...] I am struck by two assumptions that he makes. One is that if one does not think of one’s morality as universally applicable to everyone, one cannot confidently apply it where one must indeed apply it, to the issues of one’s own time. [...] We say that your peculiar morality has purposes; not to mention the less friendly ones, it tries to help us to live together, to formulate pictures of a life worth living, to make sense of one’s desires in relation to other people’s desires and needs, and so on. There have been other ways of doing these things, and no doubt there will be others in the future. ## Highlights The last word in philosophical disputes about the objectivity of any form of thought must lie in some unqualified thoughts about how things are—thoughts that remain, however hard we may try to get outside of them or to regard them merely as contingent psychological dispositions. [...] the issue of where understanding and justification come to an end. Do they come to an end with objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view, or do they come to an end within our point of view—individual or shared—so that ultimately, even the apparently most objective and universal principles derive their validity or authority from the perspective and practice of those who follow them? [...] The issue, in a nutshell, is whether the first person, singular or plural, is hiding at the bottom of everything we say or think. [...] Reason, if there is such a thing, can serve as a court of appeal not only against the received opinions and habits of our community but also against the peculiarities of our personal perspective. It is something each individual can find within himself, but at the same time it has universal authority. Reason provides, mysteriously, a way of distancing oneself from common opinion and received practices that is not a mere elevation of individuality—not a determination to express one's idiosyncratic self rather than go along with everyone else. Whoever appeals to reason purports to discover a source of authority within himself that is not merely personal, or societal, but universal—and that should also persuade others who are willing to listen to it. [...] How is it possible that creatures like ourselves, supplied with the contingent capacities of a biological species whose very existence appears to be radically accidental, should have access to universally valid methods of objective thought? It is because this question seems unanswerable that sophisticated forms of subjectivism keep appearing in the philosophical literature, but I think they are no more viable than "crude" subjectivism.1 [...] The idea of reason, by contrast, refers to nonlocal and nonrelative methods of justification—methods that distinguish universally legitimate from illegitimate inferences and that aim at reaching the truth in a nonrelative sense. Those methods may fail, but that is their aim, and rational justifications, even if they come to an end somewhere, cannot end with the qualifier "for me" if they are to make that claim. The essential characteristic of reasoning is its generality. If I have reasons to conclude or to believe or to want or to do something, they cannot be reasons just for me—they would have to justify anyone else doing the same in my place. [...] Reason purports to offer a method of transcending both the merely social and the merely personal. And a critic of the rationalist conception, believing such double transcendence to be impossible, may say either that what is being appealed to is really an aspect of the shared practices oi one's social, intellectual, or moral community (perhaps a particularly deep aspect) or that it is a deep but nevertheless individual feature of one's personal responses. In either case the claim to unconditional universal authority would be unfounded. # The View From Nowhere ## Introduction? too many hypotheses and systems of thought in philosophy and elsewhere are based on the bizarre view that we, at this point in history, are in possession of the basic forms of understanding needed to comprehend absolutely anything. The history of the subject is a continual discovery of problems that baffle existing concepts and existing methods of solution. At every point it faces us with the question of how far beyond the relative safety of our present language we can afford to go without risking complete loss of touch with reality. We are in a sense trying to climb outside of our own minds, an effort that some would regard as insane and that I regard as philosophically fundamental. -- Nagel on Philosophy There is a persistent temptation to turn philosophy into something less difficult and more shallow than it is. It is an extremely difficult subject and no exception to the general rule that creativebefforts are rarely successful. I do not feel equal to the problems treated in this book. They seem to me to require an order of intelligence wholly different from mine. Others who have tried to address the central questions of philosophy will recognise this feeling. ## Ch 10, §4. The Moral, the Rational, and the Supererogatory ### Freewrite Impartial theory of value needs a transform applied to get a normative theory for humans (or any other kinds of minds). The transform involves taking the minds for what they are—at some level, accepting their constraints, rather than telling them to change to the point of self-erasure. > We must so to speak **strike a bargain between our higher and lower selves in arriving at an acceptable morality**. Does it make sense to regret these constraints? From the impartial perspective, sort of—on the one hand, we're leaving value on the table. But on the other... the constraints can be recognised and respected, impartially. You need actual minds to get anything done. From the human perspective, no. Either you think of your theory of value as strongly impartial (not just for humans) or you think of your theory of value as a theory of value *for humans*, and regard the idea of a strongly impartial theory as irrelevant or incoherent. Nagel does the former, and then has to moderate to make it livable. Williams does the latter. (?) But then—transhumanism. What should we aspire to, given those capabilities? Our ability to say "sorry, humans as humans can pursue impartial welfare maximisation" starts to fade away as we increasingly gain the ability to change basic parameters of human nature and society. More and more, it seems like we actually could breed humans with highly impartial value functions—or at least create digital minds along these lines... Questions: - **What did Williams make of Nagel's book?** IIRC he reviewed it in the LRB. #todo - **What happens when transhumanism comes on the scene, or digital minds?** (Suddenly, the constraints seem less fixed...) - Compare Joe Carlsmith alienation metaethics ### My summary - Rational required vs rationally acceptable - "Valid moral requirements must take account of the common motivational capacities of the individuals to whom they apply." - [On the impartial perspective, we should not adopt moral principles that lead to bad consequences, obviously.] But reflection on human motives may yield **a further modification in the demands of impersonal morality—a modification based on tolerance and the recognition of limits.** **even though morality has to emerge from an impersonal standpoint, that standpoint must take into account the kind of complex beings for whom it is being devised**. The impersonal is only one aspect of their nature, not the whole of it. What it is reasonable to ask of them, and what is impersonally expected of them, should reflect this. We must so to speak **strike a bargain between our higher and lower selves in arriving at an acceptable morality**. In this way the gap between moral and more comprehensively rational requirements can be narrowed. It means that there is impersonal sanction for striking the balance between personal and impersonal reasons in a certain way. Even without knowing the content of such a principle, we can observe something else about its character. **It is an attempt to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation. Insofar as it reduces the requirements of impersonal morality, this will reflect an attitude of tolerance and realism about human nature, rather than the conviction that to act on a more demanding requirement would be irrational or wrong.** The idea is that **certain demands on the ordinary individual—to overcome his own needs, commitments, and attachments in favor of impersonal claims that he can also recognize—are unreasonable in a way that can be impersonally acknowledged.** that **supererogatory virtue is adherence to the claims of impersonal morality prior to their modification to accommodate the normal limitations of human nature. This modification takes the form of a relaxation of these requirements through tolerance, as it were, rather than the discovery of new moral reasons that outweigh the original impersonal ones.** If they had been outweighed, then there would be reasons against the type of sacrifice that displays supererogatory virtue: it would be wrong. As things are, it is merely not required. And those who undertake it nonetheless are praiseworthy for submitting themselves to the true strength of reasons that they could not reasonably be required to follow strictly, given the mixed character of human motives. **The appearance of supererogation in a morality is a recognition from an impersonal standpoint of the difficulties with which that standpoint has to contend in becoming motivationally effective in the real life of beings of whom it is only one aspect.** 9 The result for the relation between morality and the good life is that some of the starker conflicts will be softened by these reductions of moral demands due to tolerance. ### Highlights Rational” may mean either rationally required or rationally acceptable. [...] Where a number of different and opposing reasons bear on a decision, there are three possible outcomes with regard to the rationality of the alternatives. Either the reasons against may be decisive enough so that the act would be irrational; or the reasons for may be decisive enough so that the act is rationally required; or there may be enough reasons both for and against so that although the act is not rationally required, it would not be irrational either—in other words, it would be rational in the weak sense: rationally acceptable. [...] valid moral requirements must take account of the common motivational capacities of the individuals to whom they apply. Moral reasoning must be applied to the question of how to draw rational conclusions from conflicts between impersonal reasons and personal ones. We might think of impersonal morality as developing in stages. Its source is **a wish to be able to endorse or accept one’s actions and their justifications from a standpoint outside of one’s particular situation, which is not that of any other particular person either.** Such a standpoint must be not only detached but universal, and it must engage the will. [...] [On the impartial perspective, we should not adopt moral principles that lead to bad consequences, obviously.] But reflection on human motives may yield **a further modification in the demands of impersonal morality—a modification based on tolerance and the recognition of limits.** Viewing the situation from outside, I may recognize that the weight of impersonal reasons, however fully they are faced, will still have to contend with the immediate pressure of more personal motives, which **remain active in their own right even though they have been taken into account from an impersonal standpoint as the desires of one person among others.** It isn’t just that my personal interests will cause me to rebel against impersonal demands—though that may happen. It’s that this resistance will get some support from the objective standpoint itself. **When we regard people objectively and think about how they should live, their motivational complexity is a consideration. If we are trying to answer from the objective standpoint the question how personal and impersonal motives are to be integrated, the result will not just be a rubber stamp for the dominance of impersonal values**, despite the fact that it is the objective standpoint that reveals those values. We can take conflict between subjective and objective standpoints back to the objective standpoint on appeal. The result is likely to be that **at some threshold, hard to define, we will conclude that it is unreasonable to expect people in general to sacrifice themselves and those to whom they have close personal ties to the general good**. [...] **One might take the severe line that moral requirements result from a correct assessment of the weight of good and evil, impersonally revealed, that it is our job to bring our motives into line with this, and that if we cannot do it because of personal weakness, this shows not that the requirements are excessive but that we are bad**—though one might refrain from being too censorious about it.  I don’t believe this because **even though morality has to emerge from an impersonal standpoint, that standpoint must take into account the kind of complex beings for whom it is being devised**. The impersonal is only one aspect of their nature, not the whole of it. What it is reasonable to ask of them, and what is impersonally expected of them, should reflect this. We must so to speak **strike a bargain between our higher and lower selves in arriving at an acceptable morality**. In this way the gap between moral and more comprehensively rational requirements can be narrowed. It means that there is impersonal sanction for striking the balance between personal and impersonal reasons in a certain way. Wolf says that the standpoint from which such a judgment should be made is not the impersonal standpoint of morality—nor the standpoint of personal perfection—but **“a perspective that is unattached to a commitment to any well-ordered system of values” (Wolf (2), p. 439).** She believes morality cannot be judge in its own case, and that we should expect that there will sometimes be good reasons for resisting its claims. But **I believe an answer can be sought from the impartial standpoint of morality, which will give to everyone a dispensation for a certain degree of partiality—in recognition of the fact that it is only one aspect of the human perspective.** Like reason, the moral standpoint should try to recognize and explain its own limits.8 [...] it does not define the rational simply in terms of the moral, because morally derived reasons supply only one of the factors determining what people can reasonably be required to do [...] Even without knowing the content of such a principle, we can observe something else about its character. **It is an attempt to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation. Insofar as it reduces the requirements of impersonal morality, this will reflect an attitude of tolerance and realism about human nature, rather than the conviction that to act on a more demanding requirement would be irrational or wrong.** The idea is that **certain demands on the ordinary individual—to overcome his own needs, commitments, and attachments in favor of impersonal claims that he can also recognize—are unreasonable in a way that can be impersonally acknowledged.** But this does not necessarily mean that it would be irrational for someone who can do so to accept such demands, or rather to impose them on himself. So this aspect of impersonal morality may throw light on the puzzling subject of supererogation. **Supererogatory virtue is shown by acts of exceptional sacrifice for the benefit of others. Such acts are praiseworthy and not regarded as irrational, but they are not thought to be either morally or rationally required. What is it about them that makes them good, indeed exceptionally good, and provides a reason for doing them, without at the same time providing a reason against not doing them that would make such failure rationally unjustified and bad?** After all, someone who does not make these sacrifices is failing to do something that he does have a morally estimable reason to do. Morality is not indifferent between his doing it and his not doing it. So why should the difference be of this peculiar, “optional” kind? The answer, I think, is that **supererogatory virtue is adherence to the claims of impersonal morality prior to their modification to accommodate the normal limitations of human nature. This modification takes the form of a relaxation of these requirements through tolerance, as it were, rather than the discovery of new moral reasons that outweigh the original impersonal ones.** If they had been outweighed, then there would be reasons against the type of sacrifice that displays supererogatory virtue: it would be wrong. As things are, it is merely not required. And those who undertake it nonetheless are praiseworthy for submitting themselves to the true strength of reasons that they could not reasonably be required to follow strictly, given the mixed character of human motives. **The appearance of supererogation in a morality is a recognition from an impersonal standpoint of the difficulties with which that standpoint has to contend in becoming motivationally effective in the real life of beings of whom it is only one aspect.** 9 The result for the relation between morality and the good life is that some of the starker conflicts will be softened by these reductions of moral demands due to tolerance. ## Ch 10, §5. Politics and Conversion Nagel thinks that agent-relative values are a thing. So a world in which people only pursued agent-neutral values would kinda suck, according to him. > **The world that I dream would emerge from a process of political reconstruction would not contain “new men” unrecognizably different from ourselves in being dominated by impersonal values, so that their individual happiness consists in serving humanity.** That might be better than the world we have now, but quite apart from the problem of whether such a thing is possible, **it would be a poorer world than one in which the great bulk of impersonal claims were met by institutions that left individuals—including those that supported and operated those institutions—free to devote considerable attention and energy to their own lives and to values that could not be impersonally acknowledged**. He proposes a "normative division of labout": we create political norms and institutions that promote agent-neutral values, while leaving a bunch of space for individuals to pursue both agent-neutral and agent-relative values. Questions: - What happens if we deny agent-relative value is a thing? - What is the debate about agent-relative reasons and agent-relative values? SEP? - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-agent/ - What would RW or HL or AK say to this? - What about Hilary Greaves? ### Highlights **there remains something deeply unsatisfying about conflict between the good life and the moral life** and the compromises between them, which produces constant pressure to reinterpret one or both of them so that the two are guaranteed to coincide. In saying that such conflicts are possible I do not mean to treat them lightly. Williams has put his finger on a fundamental and neglected problem of ethics. If it is the function of an ethical theory to identify both the moral life and the good life, and to reveal the reasons we have to lead each of them, then **a theory that allows them to diverge will be claiming something that is hard to accept, given the importance of each of these ideals**. Since we don’t want life to be like that, it is natural to hope that such theories are false, but this cannot refute them. [...] I believe that what lies behind these impossibility claims is not ethics or logic but the conviction that things should not be that way—that it would be bad if they were. So it would. **But it is not a necessary truth that the best life is always realized by doing everything right.** Moral rationality is not a dominant enough part of individual human good for that. [...] **The basic moral insight that objectively no one matters more than anyone else, and that this acknowledgment should be of fundamental importance to each of us even though the objective standpoint is not our only standpoint, creates a conflict in the self too powerful to admit an easy resolution**. [...] The dilemmas revealed here can arise for most ethical theories, and in particular for theories with a significant impersonal element. **Whether the dilemmas are not only possible but actual will depend on the way the world is, and the way we are**. [...] The clash between morality and the good life is an unsatisfactory condition that presents us with a task, and while theory may be required for its solution, the solution itself is not just a new theory but a change in the conditions of life. I shall mention two possible approaches. The first is **personal conversion.** Someone who finds himself convinced of the truth of a morality that makes impossible demands on him —such as utilitarianism if he is an affluent individual in a world of extreme inequality—may be able **by a leap of self-transcendence to change his life so radically from the inside that service to this morality—to the welfare of mankind or of all sentient beings—becomes his overwhelming concern and his dominant good**. This might be either a personal choice or something that he thinks everyone should do: a demand of human transformation. [...] If the leap is successful, what constitutes a good life for him will be different when he lands on the other side, and harmony will be restored. The problem is to find the strength to make the leap, given the very different personal values he now has. [...] The second alternative is political. [...] An important, perhaps the most important task of political thought and action is to arrange the world so that everyone can live a good life without doing wrong, injuring others, benefiting unfairly from their misfortune, and so forth. Moral harmony and not only civil peace is the right aim of politics, and it would be desirable to achieve it without putting everyone through the type of deep personal conversion needed to make a clash between morality and the good life impossible. Some degree of alteration of individual personality is a legitimate part of the ambition of reconciliation through politics, but it need not be so radical as what is hoped for in pure personal conversion, where all the work is done within a single soul and a great deal may have to be abandoned. Instead **we take the clash between personal values and impersonal morality to be a clash between ideals neither of which we should want to abandon, so that it presents us with the constructive task of creating a world in which the effective clash will be contingently reduced, if not eliminated, and the institutions under which we live will make it possible for us to lead rich personal lives without denying the impersonal claims that derive from the needs of our billions of fellow inmates.** This is not yet an ethical or a political theory, but it describes the form that I think a theory must take which harmonizes morality and the good life without abandoning too much of either. Given a choice between these two methods of dealing with the clash of perspectives I prefer the second, which brings **a normative division of labor into human life and therefore requires less heroic unification**. **The world that I dream would emerge from a process of political reconstruction would not contain “new men” unrecognizably different from ourselves in being dominated by impersonal values, so that their individual happiness consists in serving humanity.** That might be better than the world we have now, but quite apart from the problem of whether such a thing is possible, **it would be a poorer world than one in which the great bulk of impersonal claims were met by institutions that left individuals—including those that supported and operated those institutions—free to devote considerable attention and energy to their own lives and to values that could not be impersonally acknowledged**. # Bernard Williams LRB review of The View from Nowhere The unifying theme, as Nagel puts it at the beginning, is the problem of ‘how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole.’ [...] Nagel thinks that an objective view cannot include everything, and will always be incomplete. He also makes a claim about what is real, when he says ‘reality is not just objective reality.’ It is not clear, however, how this represents his thought. For him, objectivity does not apply, at least in any direct way, to things: it is not a way in which some (but not all) things exist. It is, rather, a style of understanding, one that tries to describe any kind of experience or thought from the outside, to include it in a wider account of things in which that experience or thought occupies no privileged position. The experience or thought is had from a certain point of view: the objective account is an account _of_ that point of view which is not itself given _from_ that point of view. [...] **Nagel now fully admits a distinction between those aims of an agent that make some moral claim on others’ co-operation and those that do not**. If someone is in severe pain, then that does make some claim on the concern and time of other appropriately placed people (however ambitiously or defensively ‘appropriately placed’ may be construed), but they are under no obligation at all to assist his passionate ambition to build a monument to his own god. What explains this difference? Nagel says: ‘the more a desire has as its object the quality of the subject’s experience, and the more immediate and independent of his other values it is, the more it will tend to generate impersonal ... reasons’ – that is to say, reasons for other people to do things. This seems to imply that a passionate and selfish hedonist, concentrated specially on the improvement of his pleasures, would have a special claim on our assistance, and I doubt whether this is what we want to conclude. More generally, I doubt whether the distinction can be fastened, as Nagel tries to fasten it, simply to differences in the structural or experiential nature of various projects that agents may have. **It is likely to depend, more than he allows, on social conceptions of what counts as a basic need as opposed to a mere want or taste**. [...] This is not, like Montaigne’s, a humility grounded in permanent scepticism: he looks to unimaginable degrees of progress, notably in our moral existence. Nor is it a Platonic contempt for the human and the contingent in the face of the universal and impersonal. But a sense of the universal, an implied view of all activities from outside, does shape the argument. Nagel does not think that we can coherently achieve such a view, still less that we should stay with it, but as a limiting idea, it conditions his view of everything. That is why he can ask, for instance, whether we are all equally important or all equally unimportant. For many of us the question is not whether the truth lies with one of those options (or, as Nagel rather strangely puts it, ‘somewhere in between’), but whether those options mean anything at all, if we are not talking about our importance to each other. [...] The passion for the beyond, and its synoptic ambitions, make this in some ways an untypical work of contemporary philosophy. Although it is deeply and expertly involved in contemporary discussions, it aspires, in some part, to an earlier style of high philosophical reflection. But, in the spirit of its own thesis, at the same time it knows where it is. The ongoing tension between the universal and the local is also a tension within the book between abstract metaphysical argument and the vividly immediate, which occasionally displays itself: in the unforgettable story, for instance, of a spider who lived in a urinal at Princeton. ## LRB: Types of Intuition https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/thomas-nagel/types-of-intuition We evaluate many different kinds of thing, but important among them are states of affairs or outcomes, on the one hand, and actions or policies, on the other. To evaluate states of affairs we use the concepts of good and bad, better and worse. To evaluate actions we use in addition the concepts of right and wrong. The classical problem is whether there is an independent aspect of morality governing the rightness and wrongness of acts and policies – either of individuals or of institutions – or whether the only truly fundamental values are good and bad, so that standards of right and wrong must be explained instrumentally, by identifying the types of actions and policies that lead to good and bad outcomes. The latter possibility was given the name ‘consequentialism’ by Elizabeth Anscombe, and its best-known version is utilitarianism. The opposite view, that the right is at least in some respects independent of the good, doesn’t have a name, but the principles that it identifies are usually called ‘deontological’ – an ugly word, but we seem to be stuck with it. Deontological principles say that whether an act is morally permitted, prohibited or required often depends not on the goodness or badness of its overall consequences but on intrinsic features of the act itself.