Thomas Nagel, Moral Feelings, Moral Reality and Moral Progress

It is possible and indeed quite common to exaggerate the role of Rawls and Nagel, especially Rawls, in bringing about the rebirth of normative ethics. This should be avoided for two reasons. Firstly, they were preceded by notable thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch in the field of moral philosophy and Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott, Judith Shklar, and Herbert Hart in the field of political philosophy and jurisprudence who managed to avoid the stranglehold of value-free meta-ethics. The second, less widely recognized point is that it is far from obvious that the ahistorical brand of normative ethics exemplified by Rawls and Nagel is the most worthwhile way of doing moral and political philosophy. Their subsequent move toward a historically inflected version of ethics suggests that they began, to a greater or lesser extent, to have misgivings about their earlier mode of normative ethics.

I have written at greater length on the topic of Nagel’s general understanding of philosophy in a recent issue of the Dublin Review of Books in 2023, https://​drb.​ie/​articles/​problems-problems/​.

Dworkin put forward this viewpoint most cogently in “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 87–139 and in his Justice for Hedgehogs (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Bernard Willaims, “Why Philosophy Needs History” London Review of Books 2002, republished in his Essays and Reviews 1959–2002. (Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 405–412 and his paper “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” Philosophy 75 (2000), republished in his Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 180–199.

It’s worth comparing in this context Nagel’s response to contingency with the more radical and arguably more authentic version put forward by Richard Rorty in his Contingency Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially chapters 1–3. Both Nagel and Bernard Williams are more sharply dismissive of Rorty’s view of the nature and implications of a recognition of historicity for liberalism than is warranted; see Nagel’s review of Rorty’s Truth and Progress; Philosophical Papers Vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) in the Times Literary Supplement (1998) and Bernard Williams’s review of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity in The London Review of Books, (1989).

Another pertinent factor in evaluating the moral significance of the potential or actual collapse of liberalism would be a consideration of the moral and political makeup of whatever regime and society ended up replacing it. It would be hard to judge in advance that whatever came after a liberal society would be either normatively inferior or superior. And recognizing the force of this point can also prompt skeptical reflections in the other direction about the alleged moral superiority of liberalism over its historical antecedents. Nagel is on far surer ground when he contrasts the objective moral superiority of liberal society with the objective moral depravity of the Nazi and Bolshevik regimes than when he reflects on what he regards as the objectively absolute moral progress of a deontologically based liberalism and the objectively absolute moral catastrophe of its potential collapse. The kind of skepticism referred to here is not a species of external moral skepticism but rather an emphatically internal, non-corrosive form of skepticism based on a fundamentally humanistic conception of the philosophical enterprise. There is, finally, the more general overriding fact that how we make sense of ourselves has become more as well as less important, more so on the grounds that how we choose to live our lives is given added sharpness in the context of the effects of humanly caused climate change and our destruction of the planet, and less so on the basis that we may have already crossed the point of no return and are now left to mourn the infinitely beautiful and precious world we seem bound to lose and soon.

My understanding of a humanistic conception of philosophy has much in common with Bernard Williams’s view of philosophy put forward in his “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” (2006), especially his deeper recognition of history’s importance to philosophy compared with that of Nagel. However, it does not share several of the assumptions underlying Williams’s contrast between philosophy (as a humanistic discipline) and science.