¹ Cf. Scanlon, Thomas, “Rights, Goals and Fairness,” ed. Hampshire, S., Public and Private Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

In attacking utilitarianism one is inclined to appeal to individual rights, which mere considerations of social utility cannot justify us in overriding. But rights themselves need to be justified somehow, and how other than by appeal to the human interests their recognition promotes and protects?

² On the integrity and justice objections, see Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and below. Consequentialism is construed very broadly to encompass any doctrine that assigns impersonal rankings to alternative worlds and prescribes actions (or, alternatively, rules, virtues, etc.) entirely on the basis of their tendency (or expected tendency) to produce more highly ranked worlds. The ranking of worlds need not be a matter of aggregating their constituent values. Nor is there any restriction on what counts as valuable and disvaluable, e.g., one isn't restricted just to ranking pleasures and pains.

³ Cf. Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 33.Google Scholar

⁴ Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

⁵ That is to say, all things considered except for possible side constraint, deontic reasons for or against the action.

⁶ Cf. The View from Nowhere, pp. 152–53.

⁷ If alternative worlds can be ranked impersonally, any competing personal ranking of those worlds will have the status of an idiosyncratic departure from rational evaluation, and thus will have no rational force for determining how that idiosyncratic agent should act. Nor, it seems, could a competing personal ranking which simply stands alongside a valid impersonal ranking warrant an agent-centered prerogative of the sort proposed by Scheffler (one that would block the inference from W₂ being What Ought To Exist to the idiosyncratic agent's obligation to promote W₂).

⁸ For a survey and critique of these objections, see Kalin, Jesse, “In Defense of Egoism,” ed. David, Gauthier, Morality and Rational Self-Interest (Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 64–87Google Scholar, “Two Types of Moral Reasoning: Egoism as A Moral Theory,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (November 1975), pp. 323–56, and Mack, Eric, “Egoism and Rights,” The Personalist (Winter 1973), pp. 5–33Google Scholar, “Campbell's Refutation of Egoism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (November 1974), pp. 659–63.

⁹ Moore, G.E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 98.Google Scholar In Nagel's language, Moore is denying that the reference to the person who “possesses” the good is essential to its description.

¹⁰ Moore, Principia Ethica, p. 99.

¹¹ See especially Kalin, “Two Kinds of Moral Reasoning,” pp. 340–44.

¹² Does anyone ever deny that people have reasons for action? At points in The View from Nowhere, Nagel suggests that such a denial comes in the form of maintaining that the normative realm is illusory, that there are beings moved by motives of various sorts, and this is all (pp. 140–41). On such an eliminative view, the intense pain that I would undergo were I to rest my hand on a hot stove explains my keeping my hand off it. But it does not indicate that I am rational in doing so. Nagel holds, in contrast, that “I have a reason, and not just an inclination, to refrain from putting my hand on a hot stove. (p. 157) Nagel contrasts “the purely psychological, antirealist account,” (p. 145) which he labels “Humean subjectivism,” (p. 142) with “normative realism” (p. 139). Yet the latter seems to go beyond a simple denial of Humean subjectivism; normative realism also denies that our reasons for action are limited to “our preexisting motives.”

¹³ Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 498.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ To deny the existence of external values is not to deny the existence of “external reasons” as that term has recently been used by Bernard Williams. An external reason is a reason which, when possessed, need not motivate the agent possessing that reason. External values of the sort debunked here would provide agents with external reasons. But an agent might have an external reason, e.g., his (recognition of his) objective need for X, which was not indicative of such an external value. It looks like the reasons we have purely in virtue of deontic restraints are external reasons in Williams's sense. Cf. Williams, Bernard, “Internal and External Reasons,” ed. Harrison, R., Rational Action: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 17–28.Google Scholar

¹⁵ The View from Nowhere, p. 153. The survival of the Frick Collection might, of course, fulfill the posthumous interests of various agents and, in this way, be a good thing. But this would not support the collection's external value.

¹⁶ ibid.

¹⁷ Moreover, it does not seem that X's external (and, hence, fully intrinsic and self-contained) goodness as such would provide reasons for action among such agents as might appear on the scene. Property G (or whatever it is that purports to be intrinsically good) will provide such agents as appear with reasons for action only insofar as the realization of G in some way fulfills or is constitutive of their desires, projects, or selves. But, in that case, the agents' respective reasons for action will correspond to the agent-relative value of diverse realizations of G and not to the supposed external goodness of G. Even were it to exist, the intrinsic good would be too dissociated from the life of flesh– and purpose-bound agents to provide those agents with reasons for action.

This conclusion may be too quick. Perhaps the perception (veridical or not) of the Form of the Good could itself motivate an agent. In such a case, it would be putting the cart before the horse to say that the agent's reason for action corresponds to the agent-relative value of his participation in the Good. Of course, the agent will not be acting with reason unless his perception of the Good is veridical.

¹⁸ The View from Nowhere, p. 158. In the uncut version of what appears within the brackets, Nagel (p. 150) speaks more portentously of reasons that “can be recognized and accepted from the outside.”

¹⁹ ibid. Nagel claims to have already argued that “the possibility of assigning agent-neutral value to pleasure and pain should be admitted.” (p. 160) But this, I think, is mistaken. He seems to be referring to arguments made in a section labelled “Antirealism” (pp. 143–49). Yet in this section Nagel's target seems to be “disbelief in the reality of values and reasons,” and this can clearly be rejected without embracing even the possibility of agent-neutral values and reasons. The situation is further complicated by Nagel's characterizations of “realism” (p. 139), which suggest that realism takes one step or more beyond reason-acknowledging doctrines such as “the position that each person has reason to do what will satisfy his desires or preferences” (p. 149).

²⁰ The relevant couple of sentences in Nagel, ibid. p. 160, read:

The dissociation here is a split attitude toward my own suffering. As objective spectator, I acknowledge that TN has a reason to want it to stop, but I see no reason why it should stop. My evaluation [i.e., the evaluation of the ‘objective spectator’?] is entirely confined within the framework of a judgment about what it is rational for this person to want.

²¹ Perhaps the reason that Nagel thinks that this intra-personal dissociation is worrisome is that, although my objective self acknowledges that EM has reason to end his suffering, the inability of my objective self to share this reason suggests that its existence is an illusion, i.e., it suggests the Humean subjectivism according to which there are motives, but not reasons. This suggestion runs counter to Nagel's recognition that even agent-relative reasons count as real reasons. Nevertheless, Nagel does continue to flirt with his earlier view that the only real reasons are agent-neutral ones. Cf. the next passage from Nagel in the text.

²² ibid., p. 160.

²³ ibid.

²⁴ ibid., p. 139.

²⁵ ibid., p. 160.

²⁶ ibid., p. 161.

²⁷ Moreover, it is implausible to imagine, as Nagel does, that an agent who lacked or lost the conception of himself would form the sophisticated judgment, “This experience ought not to go on, whoever is having it.” ibid., p. 161.

²⁸ Gauthier, David, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 47.Google Scholar The Hobbes passage is quoted by Gauthier on p. 51.

²⁹ Of course, the assumption here as elsewhere throughout this paper is that we are talking about ultimate values and fundamental preferences: values that are not simply instrumental for the production of other values, and preferences that are not merely responsive to perceived instrumental value.

³⁰ ibid., p. 47. It would probably be better for Gauthier to speak of “final” or “ultimate” value than of “intrinsic” value.

³¹ Mill, J.S., Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), pp. 44–45.Google Scholar

³² The identification of the subjectivist/objectivist distinction with the relativist/neutralist distinction is very strong throughout Nagel. When he proceeds to argue for the agent-relative (i.e., “personal”) status of certain values (e.g., success as a pianist or as a mountain-climber), Nagel's argument is that the value of these states of affairs are (merely) conferred upon them by the agents who are in pursuit of them. The implicit premise is that the alternative to agent-neutrality is subjectivity. This identification of the two distinctions also pervades Lomasky's, Persons, Rights and the Moral Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, especially ch. 9. Gauthier clearly rejects this identification, although he sees a natural association between subjectivism and relativism on the one hand and objectivism and neutralism on the other. Cf. Morals by Agreement, pp. 46–59.

³³ Persons, Rights and the Moral Community, p. 231. The argument in this and the next several paragraphs and, especially, the idea of a choice between satisfying and extinguishing desires, draws on Lomasky, pp. 229–37. See also Lomasky's unpublished “Rational Choice, Rational Choice, Rational Choosers.”

³⁴ What he cares about is growing a tomato that correctly is judged to be prizewinning. Were he to discover that the prize had been awarded by mistake, the afterglow would be lost. But why? The revelation of the mistake would not show that he had not achieved the felt experience of growing the prize tomato and the felt satisfaction of winning. Cf., of course, Nozick's experience machine discussion, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 42–45.

³⁵ Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community, p. 232.

³⁶ Morals by Agreement, p. 56.

³⁷ ibid., p. 53.

³⁸ This sort of argument appears in Finnis's, JohnNatural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, chs. III and IV. Finnis clearly, albeit implicitly, takes “basic goods” to be agent-neutral.

³⁹ Another possibility, not to be explored here, is that value is agent-neutral (or, at least, not agent-relative) while reasons of value for action remain agent-relative. Knowledge is good; knowledge as such is not an agent-relative value. But only those achievements of knowledge that realize the powers and/or aspirations of A₁ provide A₁ with reason to act. By loosening the link between value and reason, it may be possible to affirm the non-agent relative value of certain states of affairs without being committed to agents at large having reason to promote those states of affairs.

⁴⁰ The Rejection of Consequentialism, p. 81.

⁴¹ Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 30.

⁴² The Rejection of Consequentialism, pp. 100–101. The final section of this essay will cast doubt on this claim.

⁴³ ibid., p. 94.

⁴⁴ ibid., p. 97.

⁴⁵ The View from Nowhere, p. 181.

⁴⁶ ibid., p. 180.

⁴⁷ ibid. Emphasis added.

⁴⁸ ibid., p. 177. If I am right about the non-occurrence of agent-neutral values, Nagel's reliance on agent-neutral value is a further problem for his account of deontic restrictions.

⁴⁹ This assumes that philosophical pacifism is mistaken. Maybe it is not. But Nagel would probably be discomfited to discover that the defense of his account of deontic restraints depends upon philosophical pacifism – especially since it is the principle of double effect that is central to both his account of deontic constraints and many discussions of the legitimacy of defensive force, including Nagel's own discussion. See Nagel, Thomas, “War and Massacre,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 1972), pp. 123–44.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ The View from Nowhere, p. 183.

⁵¹ ibid., p. 184.

⁵² Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 33.

⁵³ Perhaps Nozick does want to say that, to vindicate his action, A₁must appeal to an impersonal value that is advanced through A₂'s loss and that such an appeal must always fail. See the comparable argument in Isaiah Berlin's “Two Concepts of Liberty.”

In the name of what can I ever be justified in forcing men to do what they have not willed or consented to? Only in the name of some value higher than themselves. But if, as Kant held, all values are made so by the free acts of men, and called values only so far as they are this, there is no value higher than the individual.

Note that the agent-relativity that Berlin invokes seems to be tied, in the name of Kant, [!], to subjectivism. Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 137.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ The Rejection of Consequentialism, p. 94.

⁵⁵ ibid.

⁵⁶ The View from Nowhere, p. 140.

⁵⁷ Of course, the departure from solipsism will lead to the discovery or the formation of particular shared values with certain other individuals.

⁵⁸ On the idea that basic rights are to be ascribed coherently by means of identifying persons' basic “titles” and not by seeking to identify what types of actions persons have rights to perform or have rights against the performance of, see Steiner, Hillel, “The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights,” Journal of Philosophy (December 1977), pp. 767–75.Google Scholar On the two-stage process for identifying violations of rights, see Mack, Eric, “Moral Rights and Causal Casuistry,” ed. Brody, B., Moral Theory and Moral Judgment in Medical Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1988), pp. 57–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁹ One might try to recreate a paradox of deontic restraint by insisting that A₁'s failure to prevent A₃ from inflicting C on P₂ and P₃ constitutes A₁'s inflicting C on them. Thus, the absolutist aspirations of the deontologist would be defeated by the necessity for A₁ to choose between his fewer and more numerous violations of constraint C. But against such a view see “Moral Rights and Causal Casuistry,” and Mack, Eric, “Bad Samaritanism and the Causation of Harm,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 9, no. 3 (Spring 1980), pp. 320–59.Google Scholar However, whatever the plausibility of ascribing the violation of the rights of P₂ and P₃ to A₁ on account of his failure to prevent A₃'s infliction of C on them, this line of argument would not revive the “paradox” that Scheffler had in mind, viz., one that reveals the deontologist's inescapable reliance on the badness – in particular, the impersonal badness – of the results of the actions he seeks to proscribe.