Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Was he right? Some skeptics might question whether there even is such a thing as “the moral universe.” What we call morality, they may say, is nothing more than the subjective judgments of people in various times and places. Customs or religious teachings may impose a high degree of uniformity within a particular society, but cultures differ, and there is no basis for saying that one has gotten it right and the other wrong. It would therefore be an illusion to think that the shift from one conception of morality to another amounts to progress, for there are no moral truths toward which progress can be measured. A different kind of skeptic might accept that there is a “moral universe”—that is, that some moral judgments are true and others are false—but deny that we today are morally better than people in ancient civilizations or that there is any long-term trend bringing us closer to justice.
To start with the most basic question: Are some moral judgments true and others false? How philosophers answer that question often depends on their answer to another one: Are there objective reasons for action? By “objective reasons for action,” philosophers mean reasons that hold for everyone, regardless of their preferences, attitudes, or desires. The view that there are no objective reasons for action was forcefully presented in 1739 by David Hume, who wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” By “passions” he meant all kinds of desires, including what he called “calm passions,” such as benevolence, love of life, and kindness to children. These are not the products of reason, he believed, but rather “instincts originally implanted in our natures.”
Hume’s view of reason was still dominant among English-speaking philosophers in 1970, when Thomas Nagel challenged it in his influential book The Possibility of Altruism. Nagel gave a simple example. Suppose I know that in six weeks I will be in Rome, and my visit will be more enjoyable if I can speak Italian. Then, it would seem, I have a reason to learn Italian (not necessarily a conclusive reason, of course). And yet it is conceivable that I might have no desire to learn Italian, at least not until I land in Rome and become more acutely aware of what I am missing by not being able to speak the language. To say, following Hume, that I have no reason to learn Italian unless I have a current desire to do so would mean dissociating my present and future selves to such an extent that most people would find it a paradigm example of irrationality. Nagel avoided this problem by asserting that the fact that I will desire something in the future provides me with a reason to act so as to bring about that future state of affairs, even if I currently have no desire to act in that way.
Nagel then argued for an even more contentious conclusion: if our own future desires can provide us with reasons for action, then we can take an impersonal perspective from which the desires of others also provide us with reasons for action. I will return to that argument later. For the moment it is sufficient to say that it leads Nagel to the view that there are objective reasons for altruism, and hence objective moral truths.
Now eighty-seven and an emeritus professor at New York University, Nagel is one of the most eminent philosophers of the past fifty years. He returns to the topic of objective moral judgment in “Gut Feelings and Moral Knowledge,” initially given as a Dewey Lecture at Harvard Law School in 2015 and the first of two essays that make up his recent short book, Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress. It starts with an incident told to him by the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who served in British military intelligence during World War II and was in France in 1944 after the Allies landed in Normandy:
The French Resistance had captured an important collaborator, who was thought to have information that would be useful to the Allies. Hampshire was sent to interrogate him. When he arrived, the head of the Resistance unit told Hampshire he could question the man, but that when he was through they were going to shoot him: that’s what they always did with these people. He then left Hampshire alone with the prisoner. The man immediately said that he would tell Hampshire nothing unless Hampshire guaranteed that he would be turned over to the British. Hampshire replied that he could not give such a guarantee. So the man told him nothing before he was shot by the French.
Nagel writes that he has retold this story not to discuss whether Hampshire did the right thing but to illustrate the force of our moral feelings. “Even those who think that Hampshire should, for powerful instrumental reasons, have made a false promise of life to this man facing certain death,” he writes, “can feel the force of the barrier that presented itself to Hampshire.” For my part, I do think that Hampshire should have made a false promise, and yet I acknowledge that if I were in his situation, the decision would not be as easy as simply calculating the consequences—in lives likely to be saved by the collaborator’s information—of telling such a lie. The intuition that it is wrong to make a false promise—even to a man who, no matter what I do, is about to die—would be hard to resist.
R.M. Hare, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 to 1983, answered such problems by pointing out that we are, and should be, brought up to have moral intuitions that lead us to do what will bring about the best consequences in the situations we encounter. To make promises we know we cannot keep will generally result in bad consequences. Occasionally, however, we may be in an extraordinary situation in which making such a promise would bring about consequences good enough to clearly outweigh any bad consequences that might come from breaking the promise. In those cases, Hare said, we should overcome our intuitive repugnance and make the false promise. Hare called this “two-level utilitarianism.” It provides a sound guide to what we should do in a situation like Hampshire’s, as well as an account of why it is good that we do not find it easy to overcome the intuition against telling such lies.
Another response to our moral intuitions against doing what will have the best consequences is, as Nagel notes, to debunk them as having evolved from an earlier era. Joshua Greene’s research on the trolley problem is a good example. The basic problem is this: if a runaway trolley is heading for five workers on its track, all of whom will be killed, and the only thing you can do to save them is switch the trolley onto a different track where only one worker will be killed, most people agree that it is permissible for you to throw the switch. But if you see the trolley while standing on a footbridge over the track, and the only thing you can do to save the five workers is push a stranger wearing a heavy backpack onto the track, killing him but saving the five because the combined bulk of the stranger and his backpack will stop the trolley, most people say it is not permissible for you to do that.
Philosophers have published many articles debating whether there is a sound justification for these differing moral judgments. Greene instead questioned ordinary people—some of them while they were having their brains scanned—about variations on these cases. The results led him to conclude that we have a strong intuition against using hands-on violence to kill someone, even to save more lives, but no intuition against throwing a switch with the same consequences. He suggested that this is because hands-on violence has been possible for the entirety of our existence as human beings. Without an inhibition against it, perhaps even in our ancestral social primates, the small communities in which we lived would not have survived. Trolley switches, on the other hand, have not existed long enough for us to have evolved an intuition against using them to kill. Hence when a switch can be used to kill someone, people decide to save five by killing one. Greene’s explanation shows, in my view, that the evolved intuition should be disregarded and that it is better, in both situations, to save more rather than fewer people.
Nagel doesn’t deny that two-level utilitarianism and Greene’s evolutionary argument may both help explain why we have the gut feelings that we do, but he thinks the force of these feelings survives the explanation. When we examine our moral intuitions from an external point of view, he says, we are taking a step outside ourselves, but “the inside point of view that we are examining does not disappear. We cannot completely withdraw from our own point of view and observe ourselves as if we were someone else.”
This suggests, for Nagel, that there is something else going on: the perception of a moral truth. He draws on John Rawls’s method of “reflective equilibrium,” which involves testing normative moral theories against one’s own moral intuitions and revising both until they are in accord, or as close as possible. In the Hampshire case, Nagel says, there are “two quite different reflective equilibria to be found here, one of which preserves a significant deontological component in morality and one of which is significantly revisionary”—that is, the first accepts and gives weight to traditional morality, with its rule against making promises one does not intend to keep, while the second is willing to revise those rules, or even disregard them altogether, when doing so will bring about better consequences. This is, he says, “a standoff.”
The reference to reflective equilibria, however, is difficult to reconcile with Nagel’s belief, which I share, that there are objective moral truths. Rawls used the method of reflective equilibrium to argue for his favored principles of justice, but he did not claim that it leads to objectively true ethical principles: it is plausible, after all, that the reflective equilibria different societies reach will vary depending on how liberal or conservative their cultures are.1 To preserve a belief in objective moral truth when two conflicting reflective equilibria reach a standoff, it would be necessary to hold that one is true and the other false, although we cannot know which is which.
Nagel begins “Moral Reality and Moral Progress,” the second and longer part of the book, by distinguishing moral progress from scientific progress.2 When we make progress in sciences such as chemistry, he says, we discover facts—for example, that salt is sodium chloride—that had been true even before we had the concepts needed to understand them. Progress in morality, Nagel claims, is different. “The truth of a moral proposition cannot be distinguished from there being a reason for people to conduct themselves in the way it prescribes,” he writes, and “there cannot be such a reason unless it is accessible to those to whom it applies.” Some important moral reasons, Nagel argues, are not accessible until we have developed legal, political, and economic institutions that did not exist before.
Early in the essay Nagel claims that “reasons are reasons for people to do things, and do not exist apart from rational beings.” Hence when there were no people, there were no true moral principles. Although the fact that an action will cause pain is a reason not to do it, he says, this was not true before there was life in the universe, and moreover, it was not true before
there were creatures capable of grasping the general concept of a mental state like pain which could be experienced either by themselves or by other beings—the concept of other minds, in short. That is a necessary condition of the reason being accessible to them, and therefore of applying to them.
I don’t think this claim is strictly necessary for his argument, and I find it puzzling. Why, after all, should the fact that a principle is not timelessly applicable lead us to say that it is not timelessly true? Many nonhuman predators inflict agony on other animals but lack the capacity to understand that they are inflicting suffering on beings with minds. Ichneumon wasps feed on the bodies of living caterpillars, a gruesome fact that led Darwin to remark, “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.” I doubt Darwin thought that these wasps could grasp the concept of other minds. He does appear to have assumed that caterpillars can feel pain, which could be doubted—but if you prefer an example with greater certainty, replace the wasps with North American short-tailed shrews, who paralyze mice and then slowly eat their living but immobile prey. We cannot blame the wasps or the shrews, but we can agree with the implication of Darwin’s remark: the universe would be a better place if all predators killed their prey humanely before eating them. That is, in my view, a timelessly true moral judgment, even though before humans evolved the reasons behind it were not accessible.
Nagel grants that “suffering is bad” and “pleasure is good” may be necessary truths. (He footnotes Sharon Hewitt Rawlette’s The Feeling of Value, which also makes this claim.) But he thinks that other forms of moral progress can be achieved only through a historical process whereby we gain access to new moral reasons. He acknowledges that this would not be the case if there were a “single governing moral principle, such as utilitarianism, recognizable by any rational being, from which all moral reasons were derived.” The nineteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, for instance, held that it is self-evident that
the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other; unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other.
As Sidgwick’s parenthetical phrase indicates, he was not suggesting that the universe actually has a point of view, but rather that it is possible for us to see the world from a perspective that is not our own but universal. He regarded it as self-evident that once we take this perspective, we will realize that our own good is of no greater significance than that of another. He also thought that “as a rational being, I am bound to aim at good generally.”
In The Possibility of Altruism, Nagel defended a position very similar to Sidgwick’s, arguing that to avoid “solipsistic dissociation,” we need to recognize that anyone’s personal reasons for acting in their own interests give rise to impersonal objective reasons for action. He reiterates that view in “Moral Reality and Moral Progress,” writing of the recognition that “the interests of all humans, or all sentient creatures, have objective value, and therefore provide anyone with reasons for action.”
Nagel does not, however, think that this recognition is a sufficient basis for sound moral judgments. “The utilitarian tradition has a long and honorable record of trying to subsume all of morality under a single principle,” he writes.
According to this account, progress has come through the creation over time of social, political, and economic forms of life that advance the aggregate general welfare. If this were the correct account of moral progress, then the normative condition for access to any moral truth whatever would have been met when humans were first able to appreciate that the happiness or unhappiness of all human beings is of equal value, from an impersonal standpoint…. However, I do not accept this account because I believe the normative grounds of morality are not unitary but multiple: impartial benevolence is only one of them.
This is a roughly correct characterization of the utilitarian tradition, though I prefer Sidgwick’s, both because it refers to “individuals” rather than “human beings” and so includes all sentient beings, and because it includes an important qualification (“unless, that is, there are special grounds for believing that more good is likely to be realised in the one case than in the other”). Nagel goes on to offer four examples to support his alternative view that important forms of progress can be made only when we have gone through particular historical developments. I remain unconvinced, however, that these are requirements for moral progress. Are Nagel’s specific historical processes really necessary to access the moral truth on which such progress depends?
Nagel’s first example is “the extensive and sophisticated system of individual rights that are now widely recognized in liberal democracies,” including the inviolability of the person; the freedom of expression, of religion, of conscience, and of association; and the right to privacy. Such rights could not have been recognized, he claims, without the development of the conception that the legitimacy of the state rests on popular sovereignty.
We can, however, question whether these rights themselves provide an independent basis for moral claims or are instead derived from—and justified by—the principle that we should do our best to reduce the suffering and maximize the happiness of everyone, human or nonhuman, affected by our actions. The classic and most frequently cited defense of freedom of expression and of individual liberty remains John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). In the introductory chapter, Mill is quite explicit about the source of his objections to the suppression of freedom:
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.
Mill then proceeds to give a strong utilitarian argument for the importance of freedom of expression. (The recent narrowing of what views are considered acceptable to put forward in universities and other public venues has, regrettably, given me more occasions to cite these arguments than used to be necessary.)
The concept of a right to freedom of religion, Nagel tells us, “became accessible to the inhabitants of Christendom” only after the “horrible wars of religion following the Reformation.” Nagel thinks this is because the concept can’t be understood without the idea of limits on sovereign authority, which follows from the conception that this authority must be justified to those over whom it is exercised. An alternative explanation would be that it was precisely the widespread killing and devastation caused by attempts to compel adherence to the Catholic rather than the Protestant faith, or vice versa, that led to the recognition, on broadly utilitarian grounds, that a better route to peace and prosperity would be to allow people to decide for themselves what place of worship they attended. Indeed, the fact that it took much longer for “freedom of religion” to be extended to atheists indicates that it wasn’t the recognition of a right to freedom of conscience that drove the early advocates of religious freedom.
A similar point can be made even more strongly about Nagel’s second example of moral progress: modern ideas about social and economic equality that have led the state to provide support for people who lack the means to feed, clothe, and house themselves, and also to provide education and health care. These ideas are, of course, entirely in accord with the utilitarian goal of reducing suffering and, in the case of education, increasing prosperity and well-being. It is significant that the United States—with its individualist traditions and its insistence, in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, on the importance of rights—has been slower to adopt such provisions than countries with more utilitarian traditions, like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Sweden.
Nagel’s third topic is sexual morality. In a lengthy discussion (considering the brevity of the book), he describes recent shifts in thinking about sexual harassment. In some instances he suggests that we have gone too far, asserting that “misconduct in private life should not destroy professional or artistic status.” His main point, however, is that we can understand questions of sexual morality only in light of two historical facts: today’s liberated standards of sexual conduct and the recognition that even after women were granted legal equality, they retained in many other respects a lower status than men. This puts the sexual harassment of women by men in a different category from same-sex harassment or the harassment of men by women.
This discussion is insightful, but again I would question whether Nagel is right when he asserts that we cannot pursue answers to these questions except in our present historical setting. The historical record shows that the founders of utilitarianism were far ahead of their contemporaries in arguing for the equality of women. Mill is again an example. During his brief tenure as a member of the House of Commons, he brought about the first vote on extending suffrage to women—too far ahead of its time, unfortunately, to pass. Sidgwick organized the first “Lectures for Ladies” at Cambridge University, long before the university admitted women as students.
Something similar is true for sexual morality itself. Nagel suggests that the norms of sexual morality we see today followed from the availability of effective contraception, but in the 1810s Jeremy Bentham wrote several remarkable essays advocating greater sexual freedom as a suitable means of increasing happiness, especially among those who could not afford other pleasures. Access to the moral truth of a freer sexual morality was, it seems, already available then.3 Nor can the lack of effective contraception explain the law that made sodomy a crime—a law against which Bentham presented powerful arguments.
The last of Nagel’s examples is justice in relations between sovereign states in the age of globalization and mass migration. Here he acknowledges that what constitutes justice between sovereign states is a very old question, but he points out that new issues are raised both by our greatly increased capacity to assist foreign populations in need and by the fact that economic refugees are now seeking to migrate in large numbers. We could add that we now understand what industrialized nations are doing to the climate of our planet, and therefore to the inhabitants of its least developed countries, who will suffer the most from climate change. And yet if these issues were not discussed by earlier writers concerned with justice between states—Grotius, for example—that is surely for the simple reason that they were living in a different world. If they were in possession of all the facts about our world, I see no reason to think that they would have been unable to reach the right conclusions on what would constitute moral progress in this sphere.
Although Nagel does, as we have seen, include all sentient beings in the category of those who may have objective value, none of his examples contemplates further progress in expanding the circle of moral concern beyond human beings. Yet our relations with animals, and possibly with other entities such as forests, species, and ecosystems, raise huge and important ethical questions.4 The existence of an active animal rights movement, including a sharp increase in the availability of vegetarian and vegan meals, is a sign of progress, but it has to be set against the continued global growth of the manufacture of animals for human consumption, which currently produces in excess of 200 billion vertebrate animals annually, almost all of them intensively confined in conditions that cause them to lead miserable lives, full of stress and often pain.
We all seek to avoid pain and to have pleasurable experiences, so it is not difficult for us to grasp that pain is bad and pleasure is good. (I am not denying that we seek other things as well, and may regard them as good too.) The larger question, then, is whether we are capable of expanding the circle of those whose pleasures and pains are taken into consideration—and whether, as I have argued in a work that Nagel cites, this process of expanding the circle of impartiality is the way to moral progress.5
I remain hopeful that we are capable of making moral progress by expanding the circle in the manner that Sidgwick describes. To implement that principle fully, and on the basis of an accurate understanding of what our actions involve for all of those affected by them, would be a huge advance. The rules and principles that have emerged from the historical processes Nagel cites are surely relevant. I consider them, however, valid or valuable not in their own right but rather as important means of achieving a society that provides for the well-being of all.
English (US) · 