Thomas Nagel, Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress

Excerpt

Imagine that a dear friend whom you have always esteemed for his open-mindedness begins in his old age to espouse strangely prejudiced views, culminating eventually in emotional expressions of hostility to a community of which you are a member. You will find this upsetting, of course—but you will also find yourself drawn to questions such as “Was he really a racist all along?” (or sexist, homophobe, anti-Semite, or whatever epithet best fits the case). You may reject this (“No! It’s the dementia speaking”). You may accept it, sadly, especially if you think that the demented person is still in some sense the person you knew and loved; after all, dementia can sometimes bring positive traits into stronger relief, so why should it not do the same to negative ones? Both judgments presuppose that there is some fact of the matter to be determined, a real answer to the question. But there is a third possibility. Maybe “Was he really a racist?” is the wrong question—because you might doubt the coherence of the concept of a “racist” as a systematic trait of a person that could be lurking for years underneath their non-racist behavior. Maybe “racist” makes sense only as an aggregator of a set of specific actions and attitudes. …