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Going Nowhere: Nagel on Normative Objectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Marilyn Friedman
Marilyn Friedman
Affiliation:
Purdue University
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Extract

In The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel develops a theory of practical reasoning which attempts to give the personal, or subjective, point of view its due2 while still insisting on the objectivity of ethics.

On the objective side, Nagel affirms that there are truths about values and reasons for action which are independent of the ways in which reasons and values appear to us, independent of our own particular beliefs and inclinations (p. 144). The objective foundation for these truths consists in a certain distinctive process of understanding. Objective understanding is explicated in terms of an objective standpoint, a standpoint defined as impersonal, that is, as detached from the subjective point of view. The objective standpoint is structured by a conception ‘of the world as centerless—as containing ourselves and other beings with particular points of view’ (p. 140). As with scientific reasoning, ‘we begin from our position inside the world and try to transcend it by regarding what we find here as a sample of the whole’ (p. 141).

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 254 , October 1990 , pp. 501 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 (Oxford University Press, 1986). All page references in the body of the paper are to this text.

2 In this respect, Nagel's current work in ethics departs from his earlier work in The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar in which he had not yet made a place for the theoretical legitimacy of the personal point of view.

3 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 143.Google Scholar

4 Brinkley, Joel, ‘The Stubborn Strength of Yitzhak Shamir’, The New York Times Magazine, 08 21, 1988, pp. 26–29, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76–77Google Scholar. The quotation is from p. 68.

5 The phrase is borrowed from: Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 260.Google Scholar

6 In light of Nagel's writings on political institutions and on the sort of moral thought which grounds liberal societies, I anticipate that he would not dispute the importance of inter subjectivity in the practice of objective normative reflection. Cf. Nagel, Thomas, ‘Moral Conflict and Political Legitimacy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer 1987), 215–240Google Scholar. However, Nagel has not yet developed the relevance of intersubjectivity for the problems discussed here—nor has he attended to these problems.

7 The problems to which I subsequently respond were brought to my attention by William Whisner.

8 This is Habermas's approach. Cf. his Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume I of The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).Google Scholar

9 ‘Why Dialoguer?’ Journal of Philosophy, LXXXVI, 1 (01 1989), p. 8.Google Scholar

10 Contra Rawls, op. cit.; and Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

11 Rorty, Contra Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 394.Google Scholar