Reading Nagel Part I

"Just as their are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action, and altruism is one of them."

I suppose that he's referring to epistemology and ethics for this analogy. (I originally wrote something stupid here, but i deleted it!)

"just as the capacity to accept certain theoretical arguments is a condition of rationality" there's the ethics/epistemology comparison again.

"Something beyond justificaiton is needed." I didn't read this carefully enough, but I'm moving slowly and have to go on. But I think he just gave a version of the regress argument against foundationalism in epistemology? Or not?

The way he frames things reminds me of Smith: on the hand desires can't seem to provide the categorical normativity that we're looking for; what we're really looking for is a way to say that one who denies ethics is going against reason. On the other hand, the psychological picture of desires underwriting motivations is a very attractive one.

"I believe that an explanation can be discovered for the basic prinicples of ethics, but not a justification."

"Philosophers who believe that there is no room for rational assessment of the basic springs of motivation will tend to be internalists, but at the cost of abandoning claims to moral objectivity. One way to do this is to build motivatoinal content into the meanign of ethical assertions by turning them into expressions of a special sort of inclination..." Expressivism. "A stronger position one which ties the movitation to the cognitive content of ethical calims requires the postulatoin of motivational influences which one cannot reject once one becomes aware of them."

He claims Moore's intuitionism is a result of recognizing the distance between natural facts and evaluative ones, but failing to produce an internalist position, th erelevent inclinatoin or attitude.

Hume: "Among the conditions for the presence of a reason for action there must always be a deirse or inclination capable ofmotivating one to act accordingly...given Hume's famous restirctions on rational assessment of the passions and of preferences, the possibility of justifying morality is strictly limited. Any justificaiton ends finallywith the rationally gratuitous presence of theemotion of sympathy; if that condition were not met, one would simply have no reason to be moral."

"But still, the motivational basis is prior to and independent of the ethical system which derives from it. A quite different sort of theory would be necessary to alter that relation of priority. Plato and Aristotle constitute examples of such a rebillion against the priority of psychology...Fortunately, we have a far etter example in th eperson of Kant, who is explicitly and consciously driven by the demand for an ethical system whose motivaitonal grip is not dependent on desires which must simply be taken for granted... A hypothetical imperative is the only kind which Hume regards as possible. It states what a given desire provides one with a motivation to do, and it applies only if one is subject to that desire. The desire itself is not comanded by the imperative. Consequently no hypothetical imperative can state an uncondiationl requirement on action."

Just thinking about the thesis again: a really cool result would be to show that realism of all sorts is tied to each other. Scientific realism and ethical realism rise and fall together. This could show that epistemic realism isn't really getting its force from anything but the assumption that our science is true in a real sense. Tie all the realisms together, rather than all the normative stuff together (but really this is the same thing). Another really cool result would be to reveal how exactly the objections go wrong, if they're originally made in the strong way as opposed to the weaker one.

III. The Solution

"The issue of priority between ethics and motivaiton theory is for an internalist of crucial importance. The position which I shall defend resembles that ofKant in two repsects: first ir ptovides an account of ethical motivation which doesn't rely on the assumption that motivatoinal factor is already present among the conditions of any moral requirement...there are reasons for action which are specifically moral; it is because they represent moral requirements that they can motivate, and not vice versa...Certain ethical principles are themselves propositions of motivatoin theory so fundamental tha tthey cannot be derived from or defined in terms of previously understood motivations..thus they define motivational possibilities, rather than presupposing them...The second way in which my position resembles Kant's is that it assigns a central role in the operation of ethical motives to a certain feature of the agent's metaphysical conception of himself. On Kant's view the conception is that of freedom whereas on my view it is the conceptio nof oneself as merely a person among others equally real."

We are not fuly free to be amoral, or insusceptible to moral claims. That is what makes us men.

So according to this way of viewing things, Hume is right about motivations and desires, but there's just a desire that is so inescapable it might as well be objective. It can't be resisted, so neither can morality.

This strikes me as suprising: "This solutoin may appear to involve an ellegitimate conflation of explanatory and normative inquiries. But a close connection between the two is already embodied in the orindary concept of a reason, for we can adduce reasons either to explain or to justify action." Hmm...I wonder if we could escape the muck of trying to explain explanation by providing a reason-based, normative account. For later.

IV. "Interpretation is not a species of justification. A justificaiton must proceed within the context of a system of reasons, by showing that certain conditions are met which provide sufficient reason for hat which is being justified. Since my claims concern the formal character of any system of reasons (explanatory of normative) which can provide the context for particular rational justificaions,there can be nothing more fundamental to appeal to in the way of reasons for adhering to the specific conditions. They lie beyond the range of justification."

This would seem important for epistemology as well, and defending foundationalism against the regress argument.

"Moral and other practical requirements are grounded in a metaphysics of action, and finally in a metaphysics of the person. The more central and unavoidable is the conception of oneself on which the possibility ofmoral motivation can be shown to depend the closer we will have come to demonstrating that the demands of ethics are inescapable."

What I love about Korsgaard is the deep account she gives of action, motivation, reasons, and ethics, and this is what it's like to read Nagel too. And Scanlon. These guys are great.

"I have no confidence that it is a necessary truth that we are constituted as we are, inthe fundamental respects whic hgive rise to our susceptibility to moral considerations. But if we were not so constituted, we should be unrecognizably diffeernt, and tha tmay be enough for the purpose of the argumen."

"There are parallels here to the requiements on theoretical reasoning."