b) An enriched, moral reason? A different reality?

Thomas Nagel in The View From Nowhere'⁶ adopts a different tack in arguing against Hume’s negative conclusion that morality is not based on reason. Nagel explicitly accepts that there are no moral qualities in the fabric of the universe.¹⁷ So how then does he attempt to salvage a rationalist ethics from the Humean attack? To start, Nagel implicitly follows the intuitionist in saying that the moral realm is different, somehow unique.

The claim that certain reasons exist is a normative claim, not a claim about the best causal explanation of anything.²⁰

Were this Nagelian programme of establishing a non-empirical basis for ‘reasons’ and ‘reality’ to be successful, one can see that Hume’s attack on reason-based moral theories would be in jeopardy. Nagel’s ‘real reasons’, whatever else they might be, must be reasons that have normative force and can move people to act. Such ‘reasons’ could surely be the basis of moral distinctions. Much, therefore, will depend on whether Nagel’s alternative programme is found to be convincing, a programme which begins with the moral rather than the rational.²¹

Nagel offers an intricate and subtle argument in favour of objectivity in morals.

The result of this process is a new perspective. More than just a new perspective in fact, the process will yield new motives and reasons for action as well as new values and will seem to be a non­perspective. These new values are ‘real’ insists Nagel.

The view that values are real is not the view that they are real occult entities or properties, but that they are real values: that our claims about value and about what people have reason to do may be true or false independently of our beliefs and inclinations.²⁸

In my terms, Nagel is asserting that in the normative realm of values and reasons for action something is lost if we break down motives into feelings and beliefs. Values exist outside the causal world and one can discover them, can discover ‘true’, ‘real’, indeed in a sense ‘mind-independent’ reasons and values, by stepping outside of oneself and reaching an impartial, objective standpoint.²⁹ These discovered reasons for action are examined exclusively in the normative or moral sphere and are allowed to subsume the desire component I wish, at least theoretically, to separate out.

And that, at its simplest, is Nagel’s response to Hume’s negative conclusion that morality is not based on reason. It merely remains for Nagel to convince us of the merit of his position.

He starts by candidly admitting that there is no direct way to prove the possibility of his ‘normative realism’.³³ However, he continues, the burden of proof is not on those who presume that values are real but on those who disagree. All he need do is consider arguments against his position. Nagel takes three: the argument from relativity;³⁴ the tendency towards nihilism of objectivity;³⁵ and the argument from queemess.³⁶ It suffices for the present to say that Nagel finds that all arguments against his normative realism fail. And given where he has placed the onus of proof certain values and reasons can be considered to be real, to be independent of the minds of people, to be true. Nagel is then free to consider the implications of what follows from his search for generality. For example, he goes on to consider whether there are any ‘motives’ completely unlinked from an agent,³⁷ how objectivity can be employed as a standard,³⁸ and why ethics is not solely in terms of impersonal values.³⁹

These latter issues which Nagel goes on to raise are all thought­provoking. Indeed much of what he later says can be used and adopted by the Humean. But for Nagel all his arguments flow back to their source in his normative realism.

I think, though, that Nagel’s base position is untenable. Like a beautiful and elaborate house of cards, there is no solid foundation. The internal structure may be well-crafted, the proportions and shape aesthetically pleasing, but the constructed argument as a whole is precariously dependent on the support of an all-pervasive form of wish-fulfilment — ‘normative realism’ simply must be true for the alternative, to Nagel, is too depressing to contemplate. Let me explain in greater detail what I find wrong with Nagel’s normative realism.

Nagel’s theory begins with objectivity. Discover a process that leads to true, real, objectively right values and reasons for actions and it follows, however difficult the process may be to follow in practice, that Hume is wrong. Nagel never directly confronts though, I want to stress, how any such process could ever result in objectivity and truth when, by admission, no right moral answers exist in the fabric of the universe. That is, Nagel assumes that a standpoint is possible which is more than ‘my’ or ‘your’ or some other person’s standpoint made as impartial or disinterested as possible — a standpoint more than a merely inter-subjective one. But if that were so the additional element would appear to have to come from outside people. If this external aspect is not from the causal world and not demonstrative and not occult entities what is it? Nagel never tells us. He does reveal his technique clearly though, as well as perhaps betraying a fundamental misunderstanding of Hume, in the following passage:

Someone who, as in Hume’s example (Treatise, bk.2, pt.3, sec.3), prefers the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of his finger may not be involved in a contradiction or in any false expectations, but there is something the matter with him nonetheless, and anyone else not in the grip of an overnarrow conception of what reasoning is would regard his preference as objectively wrong.⁴⁰

Of course there is something wrong with the finger lover.

Nagel’s objectifying tendency is obviously at the heart of his response to Hume’s negative conclusion about reason’s divorce from morality. We have seen already that Nagel’s objectivity is tied to the external standpoint. Detach from oneself, step outside oneself, transcend appearances and find and occupy the objective standpoint, is his prescription. From such a vantage one will gain a new perspective which reveals ‘real’ values and ‘objective truth’. Gaining that vantage is the task of reason and so Hume’s conception of reason is too narrow.

It is difficult to respond to Nagel beyond pointing out the sheer implausibility of his views and emphasising the difficulties which inhere in a theory that equates an impartial standpoint with objective truth. This response does not, I must stress, involve a rejection of the tenet that seeking the impartial or disinterested vantage is a key aspect of morality. It is. Indeed it is a key element in Humean moral theory as I will show in chapters four and five. But such a new perspective cannot be said to reveal truth and real values. In saying that it does the Nagelian prescription has been pushed too far and outworn its plausibility. A new perspective may often lead one to have new motives to action but why are these to be considered ‘real’ motives? And what are the criteria of truth for Nagel? Something more is needed — if disputes are to be avoided amongst his Nagelian adherents who, having followed in good faith his prescription and found for themselves the ‘true’ standpoint and ‘real’ values, later find they still disagree on what are the best, right actions to take — than the vague, amorphous advice Nagel in practice offers. Reasons for action which are the result of some long, difficult struggle to overcome my own immediate, strong desires and embrace the impersonal cannot simply be elevated to the status of ‘objectively real’ or ‘true’ reasons without taking great liberties with what is normally meant by truth and objective reality. Quite simply, it does not follow that because a new (or even ‘non’) standpoint will sometimes change one’s values, those new values will have some relation to intrinsic truth or reality or have some mind-independent authority. Indeed, stated like this it is completely unbelievable.

Nor does Nagel’s prescription alleviate the most troubling aspect of subjectivism, the need to create as opposed to discover standards and criteria of value. Recall that Nagel is explicit that there are no moral values out in the fabric of the universe waiting to be found. Thus the most attractive aspect of intuitionism — that there are real, true moral values waiting to be discovered — is disavowed in Nagel’s normative realism. Yet the language of ‘finding’ and ‘discovering’ is not disavowed but explicitly retained by Nagel. But if values are not, as he admits, ‘out there’ to be found then these terms seem inapposite because they do suggest that values are ‘out there’. Moreover this retention of the language of discovering true values, without any corresponding values existing in the describable world, will not change the fact of relativity, of many differently held and often opposing values, out in the actual world. Normative realism seems to me, despite its explicit disavowals, to sail dangerously close at times to the shores of a latent intuitionism.

Were intuitionism correct, there would at least be the comfort that real (in the normal sense), objective values exist and might eventually be found, even if many humans today are by and large incapable of discovering them. Were Nagel’s normative realism correct the process of ‘stepping outside oneself, ‘comparing and constructing alternatives’ and ‘bringing objectivity to bear on the will’ would still be a subjective process. I must do it and my conclusions might differ from yours, even if we both read all of Nagel’s opinions on the implications of his process. (And of course there is nothing in the process of normative realism itself that requires that we do even that.) Nagel’s normative realism is inherently subjective as far as the causal world of humans’ day-to-day actions is concerned. For him to seek refuge in some normative realm where there are “irreducibly normative truths”⁴³ does not change the fact of the subjectivity, in the causal world at least,⁴⁴ of his prescription. A subjective theory of morals will also need to create standards and criteria of conduct but will do so without the vestiges and trappings of a disavowed intuitionism. Perhaps, in the end, the subjectivist approach will be felt to be a more honest approach.

As for Nagel’s normative realism then, I find his attempt to escape from Hume’s negative conclusion — that moral distinctions are not derived from reason — to be just as unsuccessful as the intuitionist attempt. Extending the sense of reason to encompass the process of gaining some indeterminate external standpoint is unwarranted. As I shall argue in chapter five below, the search for an impartial vantage can be explained in terms of Humean reason and underived proclivities. The grounds then for including Nagel’s ‘objectifying tendency’ as some part of human reason which Hume has missed seem to me to rest, ultimately, on the fact that Nagel has placed the burden of proof on those who disagree with him. And this in turn rests on Nagel’s acceptance of the ‘strong impulse to believe that there are intrinsic values’. More needs to be said about this, about what conclusions may properly be drawn from the way people normally think about moral distinctions. For now I leave the topic until section b) of the next chapter.

This is not to say that I disagree with all or most of Nagel’s programme. There is much of value in the detailed superstructure he assembles regarding such issues as how to construct a more impersonal vantage and when to defer to it. But the fundamental assertions which comprise the base of Nagel’s theory are, to me, implausible. A newly adopted perspective may often lead me to pursue new values. These new values can be called ‘real’ if that appellation is to mean ‘actually felt by me.’ As some universal statement of worth however, or in some other objective or mind-independent sense of ‘real’, it does not follow — nor is it believable — that a new perspective is equivalent to a true perspective. And as there are no ‘moral truths’ or ‘real values’ in that world in which all of us happen to live — the one that can be observed and psychologically explained — the problem of subjectivity, of which value to choose and on what criteria when there is disagreement, has not been eliminated, not even reduced, by Nagel.

Rather than illustrating any deficiency or too great restrictiveness in the Humean vision of reason, I think that Nagel’s failed attack shows the value of Hume’s careful elucidation of the scope of reason. By avoiding or refusing to specify the reach of reason at the start, a certain vagueness and fuzziness necessarily appears in any moral theory that claims to be rationalistic. Such vagueness may lead to inappropriate metaphysical pictures of worlds containing primary moral qualities. Alternatively the fuzziness may blur the lines one’s theory traces so that the language of discovery and finding seems acceptable despite a denial of there being anything to find or discover. If Hume is to be shown to be wrong, if his conception of reason be too restrictive and his move to an areasonable ethics be misconceived, then a more successful attack is necessary than either Nagel’s or the intuitionist’s.

So far in this chapter I have defended Hume’s negative conclusion (i.e. that moral distinctions are not solely derived from reason) against the two assaults of intuitionism and normative realism. I have argued that neither foray has dislodged the negative Humean conclusion. I want now to consider one last potential vanquisher before turning in the next chapter to Hume’s positive moral theory and the case in favour of a subjectivist ethics.

c)