A Transcendental Reply Considered (that yes, reason alone can move action)

One such attempt to argue that reason alone can motivate action is made by Thomas Nagel.³⁹ In this section I will assess Nagel’s Kantian reply which rests on a transcendental, metaphysical claim about humans.

Nagel attempts to show this special quality of reason by starting with prudence (involving a conception of the very nature of personal identity over time) and moving to morality (involving a conception of “oneself as merely a person among others equally real”⁴¹).

Prudent actions, like Nagel’s example of buying yourself groceries even though you are not hungry when you buy them, are, for him, to be explained in terms of reasons underived from any present desires. The argument is complex, but its main features are these:

a) One’s future desire for food gives one a reason to shop now.

b) A desire to satisfy future desires (to call this a desire may be inappropriate but nevertheless call such desires ‘desires/) is not a desire of the same sort as a present desire for water, food or groceries (‘desires₂’).

c) The source of desires₂ lies in a physical or psychological transitory state of the body. The source of desires, lies in the very nature of personal identity and in reason.

d) It would be irrational not to have desires,.

e) Just as one’s own future desires give one a present reason to do something, so too do the desires of other people. A concern for others is built into moral reasoning. The source of moral motivation is reason; it is a reflection of the way practical reasoning works.

f) It would be irrational not to have moral desires (which are another form of desires]).

Supporting these main features, Nagel offers further arguments. For one, he points to and criticises the Humean alternative. For Hume, a future desire cannot move one to act; it cannot give one a reason⁴² to do something now. For Hume, there must be some sort of present desire. In effect, Nagel and Hume treat desires differently. As Harman puts it, desires are seen by Hume to be:

forces or energy that reason directs and organizes. In [Hume’s] conception, reason itself provides no energy and no force. In Nagel’s more Kantian theory, basic desires are not forces or energy but a kind of data. When you reason, your information includes the fact that you have or will have certain desires. These desires influence what you will do because you take them to give you reasons to do things and you tend to do what you think you have reasons to do. But present desires give you no more reason to do something than future desires do and it is irrational to satisfy only present desires at the expense of future desires.⁴³

Hume would have to say that one has a present desire to satisfy future desires and this, according to Nagel,⁴⁴ threatens to lapse into circularity. What standards are to be used to test the existence of desires,? If the test of whether there be a desire, to act is simply whether there be a motive to act then the Humean position is true but trivial. However Nagel’s transcendental position, linking certain reasons for action (desires,) firstly to the very nature of personal identity and later, by extrapolation, to the very nature of moral thinking, is alleged to escape the Humean dilemma.

That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it i s appropriate to ascribe to me a desire for my own future happiness.

What Nagel seems to be saying is that desires, do not function as some sort of distinguishable extra component in understanding a reason to act. Retrospectively observers can credit a person X with a desire, (for her own future happiness), but for X herself there was no independent desire at work. The belief alone moved her to act.

But let us consider Nagel’s position in more detail. The above passage⁴⁶ can be re-cast as follows:

1) These considerations (e.g. that Act Y will promote X’s future happiness) motivate X to do Y;

2) It follows from the fact of 1) that a desire can be ascribed to X (e.g. for her own future happiness).

3) But that this desire must be a condition of action, must be what moves X, does not follow.

From this simple re-statement of the core of Nagel’s position, five possible interpretations could be given to the relation ‘follows’ in 2).

i) : 2) ‘follows’ empirically from 1) always — i.e. experience

(but nothing more than experience) shows a desire is always needed to move any action.

ii) : 2) ‘follows’ empirically from 1) usually.

iii) : 2) ‘follows’ empirically from 1) always, but discussion is

explicitly limited only to desires, —i.e. experience shows that desires that will promote X’s future happiness are always, in fact, desired and it is these desires that move action in the prudential (or moral) case.

iv) : 2) ‘follows’ empirically from 1) usually, but discussion is

explicitly limited only to desires,.

v) : 2) ‘follows’ from 1) in a logically necessary but non-

causal way.

As Nagel makes clear in the passage above,⁴⁷ it is interpretation v) that he is advocating.⁴⁸

But what does it mean to say that there is a logically necessary relation between 2) and 1)? It must mean that conceptually and linguistically the notions of ‘motivation’ (from 1)) and ‘desire’ (from 2)) are logically connected.

To my mind Nagel’s Kantian position is unconvincing and fails to show how reason alone can move action. This is because he is unconvincing in his attempt to transcend the scope of Humean reason and to build an enriched conception of reason that includes the realisations that ‘all the times of one’s life are equally real’ and that ‘one is simply one person among others equally real.’ When failure to have such realisations occurs in someone, Nagel can of course describe her as being irrational or disassociated from herself, but no further explanation is possible. The fundamental question though is whether such an extension of the domain of reason to encompass the desire to be a particular sort of person — an extension which forecloses causal explanation — is helpful and furthers understanding. My opinion is that Hume’s view of reason, and by extension of people, necessity, contingency and motivation, is, in the end, more enlightening.

To start my defence of Hume let us go back to Nagel’s point 3) above to see its status in the light of points i) through v). In chart form the results would be:

if i) —> 3) is false.

if ii) —> 3) is true.

if iii) —> 3) is false.

if iv) —> 3) is true.

if v) —> 3) is false in a trivial sense but true if the desire in 3) is for anything beyond mere movement.

This careful analysis of Nagel allows us to see, in stark terms, the fundamental issue over which the Nagelian and the Humean disagree. For surely Hume does not mean to assert merely that it is just a desire to move that ever leads us to act. That is trivial indeed.

If we go back to i) through v) above, this may help to show up the differing positions of Hume and Nagel. Hume would accept i).

It might be argued that not to have the relevant conception of one’s own future, in the prudential case, would be irrational; but a parallel argument in the moral case would lack plausibility.⁵¹

This points up my two main criticisms of Nagel’s transcendental reply that reason alone can move action. Firstly, let us accept for present purposes the first part of Nagel’s prudential argument — that a conception of one’s own personal identity is bound up ‘logically’ with that person’s conception of time, such that to have either conception one must have the other.⁵² However such an admission in no way ‘proves’, or even makes it more likely, that reason can motivate action. Having certain desires (say desires₂) together with a conception of personal identity over time may entail that desires! arise, that no person with such a conception and any present desires can be completely devoid of desires for her own future well-being. (Or put obversely, as desires seem to look beyond the immediate present, it may be an impossible task to imagine someone who is completely indifferent to all future states and yet who has desires and a conception of his personal identity.) But this is not enough for Nagel. He must show more than that a conception of personal identity over time leads to desires being extended, altered or diminished. That would be consistent with reason (even in Nagel’s sense) being a mere guide to the passions, for it was never claimed by Hume that reason had no role. This should be recalled and stressed perhaps, that Hume certainly did conceive reason as able to guide and re-direct desires. Its impotence lay in not being able to move action alone, in needing a desire or desires to act on and influence. Consequently Nagel must claim that prudential desires, desires], owe their existence solely to, or perhaps more fundamentally to, this conception of personal identity over time rather than to present desires, desires₂. Only then could the desires] be said to be rational or logical.

But in what way could the logical conception be more fundamental than having some desire₂ to begin with? At most, in my opinion, the Nagelian might say that not only Hume’s causal reason” but also the ‘logical’ conception of one’s continued and distinct existence can guide and affect the passions. In no way, however, does that admission make desires! themselves somehow more rational or reason-based than, say, attempting to get rich by aiming to be an immigration lawyer rather than by trying to grow money trees. The content of desiresi is still supplied by desires₂. A desire for food when I will be hungry tomorrow (but am not hungry right now as I write) is simply a present desire shaped by causal reason’s understanding of, and perhaps the logical relation between, time and my identity. No autonomous future desire is somehow mandated purely by logic and so, again, it is not Nagel’s logical relation that moves action but at base always a desire.

Part of the attraction of Nagel’s prudential argument, I think, is the sharp distinction he draws between present and future desires. But on the Humean view this can be misleading. His view is of an entity, a human-being, which has long-term dispositions to act variously in certain kinds of situations. Someone who looks ahead has a different kind of ‘temper’ from one who does not (consider how this way of thinking ahead can be, and has to be, taught to children). The response to Nagel then is that there are various and many states of affairs that can be and are desired by a person. All of them are focused on the future, some shorter, some longer term, and they compete for dominance. Of course experience, reason and perhaps even the conception of one’s own identity over time affect these desires. And the results of what motivates whom and when are myriad. It is a false dichotomy to talk of prudential and non-prudential desires.

My second criticism is that Nagel’s emphasis on prudence before moving to morality seems to obscure a fundamental flaw in his transcendental claims specifically about morality. That flaw is quite simply that a very many people do not have moral desires,. Hence to assert that a concern for others is an element of reason inflates, needlessly and unconvincingly to my mind, the concept of rationality. The universality or virtual universality of prudential desires is left behind in moving to moral desires, to desires for equal concern for the well-being of others and the seeing of oneself as one among many, and yet the claim for transcendental status is still made. Here Nagel is not substituting v) for iii), as in the case of prudential desires, but rather attempting to offer v) in place of iv). On what basis can Nagel say that a moral world necessarily presents itself in the way he says when experience shows many people do not so perceive? If anything the case for subjectivity of morals is strengthened by the diversity of moral perspectives and even more so by people who choose to be amoral, to not take a moral perspective.⁵

Of course even this latter point cannot ‘disprove’ Nagel’s argument because the Nagel world view is explicitly “not the kind of thing that could be established by the methods of the natural sciences.”⁵⁵ Thus a dissenter cannot point to experience to disprove or verify⁵⁶ because Nagel’s system can only be viewed from within. And this, more than perhaps anything, shows the philosophical gulf between Nagel and Hume. Hume’s home is very much in those natural sciences for he insists on positions that can be established by observation and experience, not in spite of them. The Humean claim that empirical facts are motivationally inert remains, to my mind, unsullied by Nagel’s Kantian attack. And the corollary of that Humean claim is that the motivational will and cognitive beliefs can usefully be kept separate; they can be understood as distinct existences, even though a hard and fast dichotomy may in practice be implausible.⁵⁷ Any state which Nagel or others claim presents itself solely in terms of reasons and belief (i.e. the cognitive) and merely entails some appetite state of desire is in fact “only impurely cognitive, and contain[s] the appetite state as a part. If such a state strikes its possessor as cognitive, that is because he is projecting his states of will on to the world (a case of the mind’s propensity to spread itself upon objects.)”⁵⁸ The best description is the Humean one which separates an impotent conception of the observable facts open to all from those desires, dispositions and preferences which make certain actions desirable or undesirable to their possessor.

And this is reinforced by the realisation that nowhere is Nagel able to prove that a lack of concern for others is ‘irrational’. It is every day shown that people need not care about others. Moreover there is something faintly circular and unhelpful about saying that concern for others is built into moral reasoning — so that the source of motivation is a concern for others which is, by Nagelian definition, a quality of reason — while at the same time arguing in such a way that reason seems both to subsume and to be subsumed by the moral perspective. Again I ask, what is this reason? And how does it help to distinguish the doctor who kills one to save five from the doctor who saves five rather than one?⁵⁹ Should the adoption of the Nagelian position not lead inexorably to a full-blooded utilitarianism where the evaluator’s wants count for no more than anyone else’s?⁶⁰ If not, does his position not collapse into a well-camouflaged intuitionism?

For the Humean like me, the capacity of moral considerations to move one to act does need explaining from without, in terms of that which is not ‘intrinsically moral’ (to use a very non-Humean phrase). Perhaps, in the end, Nagel and Hume are not that far apart in some ways.⁶¹ But the spirit of their approaches could not be further removed. Nagel seeks to elevate certain perceptual qualities of people into transcendental, objective truths; Hume, at most, admits that certain proclivities are widespread and uniform — but they need not have been. At the heart of this divide is a fundamental disagreement about what is necessary, and what contingent, for human beings in the world they inhabit. And of course the vantages from which each chooses to regard the phenomenon of morality are different. The latter comes from without to the world as the natural scientist predisposed to observe and doubt; the former looks from within and judges the world with the same sort of pre-dispositions and aspirations as the ideologue or theologian. My preference lies with Hume.