Nagel, Thomas - Value

01/11/2012

Mind And Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Ch 5, Oxford University Press, 2012

In this final chapter, author considers how the possibility of objective value (value realism) invalidates Darwinian physicalism. Part of the chapter is spent presenting the case for value realism as opposed to value subjectivism. A significant problem for author is that value subjectivism is a potent and coherent alternative to value realism. Author's strategy seems to be to argue that value realism is incompatible with Darwinian physicalism (similar to Street's argument), and so much the worse for Darwinian physicalism.

Author begins the discussion by assuming that practical reasoning is indispensably conscious. This already casts a shadow (according to author) over the possibility of practical reasoning and judgments being subject to materialist reduction, but author sets that aside for the time being. Author discusses the conflict between value subjectivism and value realism, and admits that value subjectivism is a valid alternative (pg98-100). In this context, "value realism" is the position that "our responses to moral situations try to reflect the evaluative truth and can be correct or incorrect by reference to it." (pg98). Author also defends value realism from the challenge that it needs metaphysical 'baggage', in other words, that something must be real in the world for value realism to be about. Author denies this: what value realism treats as its subject matter are the same worldly facts that we all use, like: there is a dog I might run over with a car if I do not brake (pg101-105). Interestingly, author argues that the best evidence for value realism is "the fruitfulness of evaluative and moral thought in producing results, including corrections of beliefs formerly widely held..." (pg104).

In section 3 author paraphrases the arguments of Sharon Street that moral realism is incompatible with Darwinian physicalism. For Street, this invalidates moral realism. For author, Darwinian physicalism must be re-thought (pg105). Author defends using a philosophical argument to refute empirical findings, arguing that human capabilities (presumably, to find objective moral values) are part of what needs explaining by science (pg106). Author outlines Street's argument, which basically points to a disanalogy between a survival value to having perceptual nodes that get at (some) physical reality and value/judgment nodes that get at (some) value/moral reality. In the first case, abilities that link to physical facts is adaptive. In the second, abilities that link to moral facts is not necessarily adaptive; what is far more adaptive is a co-evolution of species-specific inter-subjective values (pg107-8).

Author takes time to discuss the case for value realism using moral simples like pleasure and pain (pg110-1), and then moves to a positive account of the capacities for recognizing value, including free will (pg112-3). In short, humans can be "motivated by their apprehension of values and reasons, whose existence is a basic type of truth, and that the explanation of action by such motives is a basic form of explanation, not reducible to something of another form, either psychological or physical." (pg114) The idea author has in mind is that human action is explainable by "judgments", and those are irreducible or 'emergent' properties of a unified, conscious, mind. It is here when author states that epiphenomenalism in consciousness is incompatible with value realism (pg115-6).

Author then looks through the familiar lens of asking for both a constitutive and an historical account of a capacity to appreciate objective value. Author admits the historical account is 'obscure' or sketchy, but outlines how it might go, broadly as part of the development of life story (pg117-8). If value is tied to life, and to specific things that make certain lives go better and worse, then it is acceptable to treat value realism as life-dependent, or even species-dependent. Or perhaps even organism-relative. (pg119-120) Author discusses how the causal historical explanation seems implausible and turns instead to a teleological one that aims at a multiplicity of values (pg121-2). Author then defends teleology on its own, and compares it to the causal account, which author charges still cannot account for the evolution of the cell (pg123-4). Author concludes by saying that though this theory seems bizarre, so too do older theories when viewed through today's lens, and that the future remake of Darwinian physicalism will make the current en vogue theory also look ridiculous.