I really should be working on papers instead of posting. But I couldn't resist this one: Jonathan Ichikawa has a post about Nagel on his weblog. In the comments to that post, he mentions hippie/businessman examples. These examples are mentioned in Parfit's Reasons and Persons, and pretty much have this structure: someone has a certain set of values or lifestyle that they like. This person knows that in the future they will strongly desire that their values and/or lifestyle had been different. Does the person now have reason to change their values and/or lifestyle? If not, cases like these speak against the possibility of prudence (i.e., that there can be reasons involving future stages of a person which can motivate present stages of that person), and to the extent that the possibility of altruism depends on the possibility of prudence, they speak against the thesis of Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism.
I don't think that these cases pose a problem for Nagel. If future reasons exist, either they are outweighed by present reasons or they are not. If they are, then prudential reasons in this case are compatible with the agent rationally not acting in accordance with them. If the reasons are not outweighed, and the agent is aware both of the reasons and the fact that they are not outweighed, then it seems very difficult to support the thesis that the agent is rational in not acting in accordance with them.
Of course, someone could say that prudence isn't possible because reasons can't be timeless. They could, for instance, accept presentism (which would involve a claim that there can't even be any future reasons), or, weaker, accept A-theory (which would merely involve the claim, entailed by presentism, that tensed indexicals can't be removed from reasons). This could be used to show that prudential reasons can't exist. But I don't think this hurts Nagel – he's arguing for the possibility of altruism, not of prudence. And saying that tensed indexicals can't be removed from reasons without loss of meaning doesn't seem to entail anything about whether personal indexicals can be removed. And going with presentism won't help against altruism's possibility either – because, thankfully, people can believe that nothing exists at other times while thinking that it's true that other people exist. So Nagel's arguments for altruism's possibility will be just as powerful for a presentist as they will be for an eternalist.
In fact, I would say that prudence doesn't play much of a role in the book at all, except that it's useful for helping us understand the form of Nagel's argument for the possibility of altruism. I would say that, except for one thing:
From what I'm understanding of Nagel’s book, he needs two claims to support his thesis that altruism is possible: (i) reasons are impersonal, or can be restated without any personal indexicals without any loss of meaning, and (ii) reasons are sufficient to motivate us (though their motivating us may entail the existence of a related desire, this desire needn't play a role in motivating us).
If someone denies (ii) and says that the person not acting in accordance with future reasons does so rationally because reasons aren't sufficient to motivate us (saying, for instance, that an accompanying desire must play a role in motivating, and the person in the example lacks the relevant desire), then Nagel's support for the possibility of prudence and the possibility of altruism will both be in trouble, for both depend on claim (ii).
However, I still think that the hippie/businessman cases don’t cause trouble for Nagel, because I suspect (yeah, that's not very strong - unfortunately, I don't yet have arguments to support what I'm thinking) that a denial of (ii) will need to be motivated on grounds other than our intuitions about these cases. So the cases don't seem to be doing any work against Nagel's thesis.
Alright, I'm going back to not posting now!
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