Nagel - "The Limits of Objectivity"

1. These lectures are about objectivity and its limits. In the
second and third lectures I shall be concerned with normative
questions; I shall defend the objectivity of ethics, and try to
explain what it means. But today I am going to say something
about the problem of objectivity as it occurs in metaphysics, especially
in the philosophy of mind. I do this because the problem
has a similar form in the two areas, and because ideas arising from
metaphysics influence our views of what must be done to discover
objectivity in ethics. I hope therefore not only to say something
about subjectivity and objectivity in the philosophy of mind, but
also to set the stage for an account of what it would be for ethics
to be objective.
2. As an aid to comprehension, let me begin by asserting without
argument what I hope to show by examination of particular
cases.
Objectivity is a method of understanding. It is beliefs and
knowledge that are objective in the primary sense. Only derivatively
do we call objective the truths that can be understood in
this way.
To acquire a more objective understanding of some aspect of
the world, we step back from our view of it and form a new conception
which has that view and its relation to the world as its
object. In other words, we place ourselves in the world that is to
be understood. The old view then comes to be regarded as an
appearance, more subjective than the new view, and correctable
or confirmable by reference to it. The process can be repeated,
yielding a still more objective conception.
78 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
But it will not always yield a result, and sometimes it will
be thought to yield a result when it really doesn’t: then, as
Nietzsche warned, one will get a false objectification of an aspect
of reality that cannot be better understood from a more objective
standpoint. So although there is a connection between objectivity
and reality - only the supposition that we and our appearances
are parts of a larger reality makes it reasonable to seek understanding
by stepping back from the appearances in this waystill
not all reality is objective, for not everything is better understood
the more objectively it is viewed. Appearance and perspective
are essential parts of what there is, and in some respects they
are best understood from a less detached standpoint. Both in
ethics and in metaphysics, I believe, realism underlies the claims
of objectivity and detachment, but it supports them only up to a
point.
3. The question I want to discuss now is whether there is a
sense in which the mind and the self are parts of objective reality.
Eventually I shall take up the question of what it is for a particular
person to be me (or you). But first I am going to talk
about the objective status of mental phenomena in general.
This question is in the background of the mind-body problem,
for the mind-body problem arises because certain features
of subjective experience resist accommodation by one very important
conception of objectivity. I am not going to offer a solution
to the mind-body problem here. But I believe that no
progress can be made with it unless we understand this conception
and examine its claims with care.
For convenience I shall refer to it as the physical conception
of objectivity. It is not the same thing as our idea of what physical
reality is actually like, but it has developed as part of our method
of arriving at a truer understanding of the physical world, a world
that is presented to us initially but somewhat inaccurately through
sensory perception.
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 79
The development goes in stages, each of which gives a more
objective picture than the one before. The first step is to see that
our perceptions are caused by the action of things on us, through
their effects on our bodies, which are themselves parts of the
physical world. The next step is to realize that since the same
physical properties that cause perceptions in us through our bodies
also produce different effects on other physical things and can
exist without causing any perceptions at all, their true nature must
be detachable from their perceptual appearance and need not
resemble it. The third step is to try to form a conception of that
true nature independent of its appearance either to us or to other
types of perceivers. This means not only not thinking of the
physical world from your own particular point of view, but not
thinking of it from a more general human perceptual point of
view either: not thinking of how it looks, feels, smells, tastes, or
sounds. The secondary qualities then drop away, and the primary
qualities are thought of structurally.
This has turned out to be an extremely fruitful strategy. The
understanding of the physical world has been expanded enormously
with the aid of theories and explanations that use concepts
not tied to a specifically human perceptual viewpoint. Our
senses provide the evidence from which we start, but the detached
character of this understanding is such that we could possess it
even if we had none of our present senses, so long as we were
rational and could understand the mathematical and formal
properties of the objective conception of the physical world. We
might even in a sense share an understanding of physics with other
creatures to whom things appeared quite different, perceptually -
so long as they too were rational and numerate.
The world described by this objective conception is not just
centerless, it is also in a sense featureless. While the things in
it have properties, none of these properties are perceptual aspects.
All of those have been relegated to the mind, a yet-to-be-examined
domain. The physical world as it is supposed to be in itself con-
80 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
tains no points of view and nothing that can appear only to a
particular point of view. Whatever it contains can be apprehended
by a general rational consciousness that gets its information
through whichever perceptual point of view it happens to view
the world from.l
4. Powerful as it has proven to be, this bleached-out physical
conception of objectivity encounters difficulties if it is put forward
as the method for seeking a complete understanding of reality.
For the process began when we noticed that how things appear
to us depends on the interaction of our bodies with the rest of the
world. But this leaves us with no account of the perceptions and
specific viewpoints which were left behind as irrelevant to physics
but which seem to exist nonetheless, along with those of other
creatures. Not to mention the mental activity of forming an objective
conception of the physical world, which seems not itself
capable of physical analysis.
Faced with these facts one might think the only conceivable
conclusion would be that there is more to reality than what can
be accommodated by the physical conception of objectivity. But
to remarkable numbers of people this has not been obvious. The
physical has been so irresistibly attractive, and has so dominated
ideas of what there is, that attempts have been made to beat everything
into its shape and deny the reality of anything that cannot
be so reduced. As a result the philosophy of mind is populated
with extremely implausible positions.
I think part of the explanation of this modern weakness for
reduction is that a less impoverished and reductive idea of objectivity
has not been available, to fill out the project of constructing
an objective picture of the world. The objectivity of physics was
viable: it continued to yield progressively more understanding
1Bernard Williams gives an excellent account of this idea in his recent book,
Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1978). He calls it the absolute conception of reality.
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 81
through successive applications to those properties of the physical
world that earlier applications had discovered.
It is true that recent developments in physics have led some
to believe that it may after all be incapable of providing a conception
of what is really there, independently of observation. But
I do not wish to argue that since the idea of objective reality has
to be abandoned because of quantum theory anyway, we might as
well go the whole hog and admit the subjectivity of the mental.
Even if, as some physicists think, quantum theory cannot be
interpreted in a way that permits the phenomena to be described
without reference to an observer, the heliminable observer need
not be a member of any particular species, like the human, to
whom things look and feel in highly characteristic ways. This
does not therefore require that we let in the full range of subjective
experience.
The central problem is not whether points of view must be
admitted to the account of the physical world. Whatever may be
the answer to that question, we shall still be faced with an independent
problem about the mind. It is the phenomena of consciousness
themselves that pose the clearest challenge to the idea
that physical objectivity gives the general form of reality. In
response I do not want to abandon the idea of objectivity entirely
but rather to suggest that the physical is not its only possible
interpretation.
5. Eventually I shall argue that the claims of even an expanded
objectivity should not be exaggerated. But first I want to explore
the possibility of arriving at an objective concept of mind. The
reason for wanting such a thing is that we assume some connection,
even if not a very tight one, between what is real and what
can be objectively understood. We assume in particular that we
ourselves, minds included, are parts of the world as it is in itself,
and not just parts of the world as it appears to us: though we are
of course also parts of that phenomenal world. And if we are
82 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
parts of the world as it is in itself, then we would hope to be able
to acquire some conception of ourselves that is not just the conception
from within: a conception of ourselves from without, as
contained in the world.
It is not obvious that this is possible, but it is natural enough
to consider whether it might be. And to find out, we must ask
ourselves whether it is possible to form a conception of our own
minds from an objective standpoint. Here it is essential, as it is in
regard to other matters, not to identify objectivity with the physical
conception of objectivity. We have to think of objectivity as
something general enough to admit of different interpretations for
different subjects of inquiry.
The general idea of objectivity that we must use to think
about a single world containing both mental and physical phenomena,
is the idea of the world as it is, rather than as it appears
to any particular viewpoint within it. Even if such a conception
works very differently with respect to minds from the way it works
with respect to matter, it still has to provide a way of thinking
about what the world contains in detachment from any particular
point of view within that world. The results will be understandable
to individuals who occupy various points of view only if they
can think about the world in detachment from their particular perspectives
on it.
Our capacity for such detachment, indeed our appetite for it,
is one of our most important and creative characteristics. It leads
to false objective conceptions of mind and other things if the
supply of interpretations of objectivity is too meagre. But we may
be able to remedy this if we try to develop an interpretation to
suit the subject matter instead of trying to understand the mind
and its attributes by means of a conception of objectivity developed
to account for a completely different set of things. The question
then is whether, viewing the world in detachment from our particular
perspective on it - i.e., viewing it as a place that contains
us —we can form an objective conception that includes points of
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 83
view, our own and those of others, and that does not misrepresent
them as aspects of objective physical reality.
There are many points of view in the world, of many different
kinds, and we are familiar with only a few. To understand them
all from no particular point of view would seem to require a
process of self-transcendence different from that which occurs
when we investigate the external world. Perhaps no conception of
objectivity adequate to the mind can exist, in which case we shall
have to choose between abandoning the assumption that everything
real has an objective character and abandoning the assumption
that the mind is real. But we are not faced with this dilemma
simply by the failure of the physical conception of objectivity to
apply to the mental. It is clear that an objective conception of
mental phenomena cannot, like that of physical phenomena, be
based on abstraction from the specific form of our external perception
of them. So we must ask instead whether there can be an
understanding of them independent of the specific point of view
to which they appear, which nevertheless keeps their perspectival
character.
What I want to do is to explain what a natural objective
understanding of the mind along these lines would be. I believe
it has its beginnings in the ordinary concept of mind, but that it
can be developed beyond this. The question is, how far beyond?
In my view, quite far. I believe we can include ourselves,
experiences and all, in a world conceivable not from a specifically
human point of view, and that we can do this without reducing
the mental to the physical. But I also believe that any such conception
will necessarily be incomplete. And this means that the
pursuit of an objective conception of reality comes up against
limits that are not merely practical, limits that could not be overcome
by any objective intelligence, however powerful. But finally,
I shall claim that this is no cause for philosophical alarm, because
there is no reason to assume that the world as it is in itself must
be objectively comprehensible. It is natural for us to want to bring
84 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
our capacity for detached, objective understanding as much into
alignment with reality as we can, but it should not surprise us if
objectivity is essentially incomplete.
6. The fundamental problem of how the mind can be objectively
understood appears in philosophy independently of the
ambition to form a complete scientific conception of the world.
It appears as the problem of other minds. Each of us is the subject
of various experiences, and to understand that there are other
people in the world as well, one must be able to conceive of
experiences of which one is not the subject: experiences that are
not present to oneself. To do this it is necessary to have a general
conception of subjects of experience and to place oneself under it
as an instance. It will not do simply to extend the idea of what is
immediately felt into other people’s bodies, for as Wittgenstein
observed, that will only give you an idea of feeling things in their
bodies, not of their feeling things.
Though we all grow up with the required general conception
that allows us to believe in genuinely other minds, it has been
philosophically very problematic, and there has been much difference
of opinion over how it works. Some philosophers have been
attracted to analyses in behavioral, causal, or functional terms
which are objective in the sense in which physics is objective.
That is because, though nontheoretical, the ordinary concept of
mind is evidently a conception of how things are, and it is assumed
that physical objectivity provides the general form of understanding
how things are.
Others, seeing that the physical idea of objectivity cannot be
applied to the mental, have been left with an insoluble problem
of solipsism: the inability to make sense of the idea of real minds
other than one’s own. Solipsism seems to me to represent a higher
level of insight than reductionism, for it does not throw away the
problem which must be faced and solved if we are to understand
what minds are and how the world can contain them.
[NAGEL] TheLimits of Objectivity 85
But both these responses rest on a fundamental mistake. The
ordinary concept of mind contains the beginnings of an entirely
different way of conceiving objective reality. We do not make
sense of the idea of other minds by construing it in a way which
becomes unintelligible when we try to apply it to ourselves. We
do not abandon the essential factor of a point of view when we
conceive of the minds of others: instead we generalize it, and
think of ourselves as one point of view among others. The first
stage of objectification of the mental is for each of us to be able
to grasp the idea of all human perspectives, including his own,
without depriving them of their character as perspectives. It is the
analogue for minds of a centerless conception of space for physical
objects, in which no point has a privileged position.
The beginning of an objective concept of mind is the ability
to view one’s own experiences from outside, as events in the
world. If this is possible, then others can also conceive of those
events and one can conceive of the experiences of others, also
from outside. Any experience can be thought about and known
to have occurred not only from the point of view of its subject but
from other points of view, at least if they are sufficiently similar
in type to that of the subject.
To think in this way we use not a faculty of external representation,
but a general idea of subjective points of view, of which
we imagine a particular instance and a particular form. It is this
general faculty of sympathetic subjective imagination that takes
us on the first step outside of ourselves in the acquisition of an
objective concept of mind, and that enables each person to place
himself among the contents of the world.
So far the process does not involve any abstraction from the
general forms of our experience. We still think of experience in
terms of the familiar point of view we share with other humans.
All that is involved in the external conception of mind is the
imaginative use of this point of view - a use that is partly present
in the memory and expectation of one’s own experiences.
86 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
To represent an experience from outside by imagining it subjectively
is the analogue of representing an objective spatial configuration
by imagining it visually. One uses ordinary appearance
as a medium. What is represented does not resemble the representation
in all respects. It is represented in terms of certain general
features of subjective experience - subjective universals -
some instances of which one is familiar with from one’s own
experience. But the capacity to form universal concepts in any
area enables one not only to represent the present situation from
without but to think about other possibilities which one has not
experienced and perhaps never will experience directly. So the
pretheoretical concept of mind involves a kind of objectivity which
permits us to go some way beyond our own experiences and those
exactly like them. The difficult step is the next one, the step
beyond representation by resemblance.
7. Of course one possibility is that this particular process can
go no farther. We can have a concept of mind general enough
to allow us to escape solipsism and perhaps even ethnocentrism,
but perhaps we cannot transcend the general forms of human
experience and the human viewpoint. That viewpoint permits us
to conceive of experiences we have not had, because of the flexibility
of the human imagination. But it may not allow us to
detach the concept of mind from a human perspective. If this is
so, then there are strict limits to the objectivity of that concept;
and that seems to mean that we cannot conceive of ourselves as
parts of a world whose reality can be acknowledged from every
rational perspective.
This is a drastic conclusion, but I think it follows if we restrict
the pursuit of objectivity in this area to the use of subjective
imagination about the experiences of others. Even allowing for
a certain amount of flexibility, the subjective imagination can
reach only so far. And it may seem that there is no other way of
conceiving of minds - our own and others’ - from outside with-
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 87
out losing hold of the fact that they are perspectives or points of
view. For if we don’t conceive of them from inside, we must be
conceiving of them as part of the familiar external world, and
that is the old mistake.
So the issue is whether we can form a general concept of
experience that extends far beyond our own or anything like it.
Or more accurately, whether there can be such a concept - for
we may be unable to grasp it as we are presumably unable to grasp
now concepts of objective physical reality which will be developed
five centuries hence. The possibility that there is such a concept
is sufficient motive for trying to form it. It is only if we are convinced
in advance that the thing makes no sense that we can be
justified in setting the limits of objectivity with regard to the mind
so close to our own ordinary viewpoint.
8. I believe that in fact we already possess a rudimentary general
concept of experience, and that it does not lose all content
when we use it to think about cases in which we cannot apply it
more specifically.
Consider first, cases where we have strong evidence that
experience is present, without either knowing what its character
is, or even being in a position to hope ever to reach an understanding
of its character that will include the capacity for selfascription.
This is true of at least some of the experiences of all
animals that are not very close to us in structure and behavior.
In each case there is extensive external evidence of conscious inner
life, but only limited application of our own mental conceptsmostly
general ones — to describe it.2
It is the ordinary prephilosophical concept of experience that
leads to this result. We have not simply left it behind and taken
off with the word. And the extension is not part of a private
2 Skeptics should read Herbert Spencer Jennings’ great book, originally published
in 1906, The Behavior of the Lower Organisms (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1976).
88 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
language but a natural idea shared by most human beings about
what sorts of things occupy the world around them. We are
forced, I think, to conclude that all these creatures have specific
experiences which cannot be represented by any mental concepts
of which we could have first-person understanding. This doesn’t
mean that we can’t think about them in that general way, or
perhaps in more detail but without first-person understanding -
provided that we continue to regard them as subjective experiences
rather than mere behavioral dispositions or functional states.
But it seems to me that we can in principle go farther. We can
use the general concepts of experience and mind to speculate
about forms of conscious life whose external signs we cannot
confidently identify. There is probably a great deal of life in the
universe, and we may be in a position to identify only some of its
forms, because we would simply be unable to read as behavior the
manifestations of creatures sufficiently unlike us. It certainly
means something to speculate that there are such creatures, and
that they have minds.
These uses of the general concept of mind exemplify a theoretical
step that is commonplace elsewhere. We can form the
idea of phenomena that we do not know how to detect. Once the
conception of a new physical particle is formed, defined in terms
of a set of properties, those properties may then allow experiments
to be devised which will permit its detection. In this way
the progress of physical discovery has long since passed to the
formation of physical concepts that can be applied only with
sophisticated techniques of observation, and not by means of
unaided perception or simple mechanical measurement.
Only an unacceptable verificationist dogmatism would deny
the possibility of forming objective concepts that reach beyond our
current capacity to apply them. The aim of reaching a conception
of the world which does not put us at the center in any way
requires the formation of such concepts. We are supported in this
aim by a kind of intellectual optimism: the belief that we possess
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 89
an open-ended capacity for understanding what we have not yet
conceived, and that it can be called into operation by detaching
from our present understanding and trying to reach a higherorder
view which explains it as part of the world.
It is the same with the mind. To accept the general idea of a
perspective without limiting it to the forms with which one is
familiar, subjectively or otherwise, is the precondition of seeking
ways to conceive of particular types of experience that do not
depend on the ability either to have those experiences or to
imagine them subjectively. It should be possible to investigate
in this way the quality-structure of some sense we do not have,
for example, by observing creatures who do have it.
But if we could do that, we should also be able to apply the
same general idea to ourselves, and thus to analyze our experiences
in ways that can be understood without having had such
experiences. That would constitute a kind of objective standpoint
toward our own minds. To the extent that it could be achieved,
we would be able to see ourselves as not merely part of the human
world: something we can already do with regard to our bodies.
And this would serve a natural human goal: for it is natural to
want to reach a general understanding of reality, including ourselves,
which does not depend on the fact that we are ourselves.
9. In the pursuit of this goal, however, even at its most successful,
something will inevitably be lost. If we try to understand
experience from an objective viewpoint that is distinct from that
of the subject of the experience, then even if we continue to credit
its perspectival nature, we will not be able to grasp its most
specific qualities unless we can imagine them subjectively. We
will not know exactly how scrambled eggs taste to a cockroach
even if we develop a very complete objective phenomenology of
his sense of taste. When it comes to values, goals, and forms of
life the gulf may be even more profound.
Since this is so, no objective conception of the mental world
90 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
can include it all. But in that case we must ask what the point is
of looking for such a conception. The aim was to place perspectives
and their contents in a world seen from no particular point
of view. It turns out that some aspects of those perspectives cannot
be understood in terms of an objective concept of mind. So
with respect to those aspects we are in the same position we were
in to begin with. We must say either that they are not real or that
not everything real is part of objective reality. Since the first is
patently absurd, that leaves the second. But if some aspects of
reality can’t be captured in an objective conception, why not forget
the ambition of capturing as much of it as possible? The world
just isn’t the world as it appears to one highly abstracted point of
view. And if one can’t have complete objectivity, the goal of
capturing as much of reality as one can in an objective net is pointless
and unmotivated.
I believe there is an answer to this, and that it is the answer to
a very general problem of which this is an instance. Reality is not
just objective reality, and any objective conception, in order not to
be false, must include an acknowledgment of its own incompleteness.
This is an important qualification to the claims of objectivity
in other areas as well, and later I shall argue that it has a direct
application to ethics. We may try to develop as complete an
understanding of values as we can from a neutral standpoint
but we will have to acknowledge the existence and validity of
some values that cannot be neutrally understood, and even of
some values that cannot be either neutrally or sympathetical1y
understood.
But to return to the case under discussion: even if an objecttive
conception of mind were developed, it would have to include
the qualification that the exact character of each of the experientia1
and intentional perspectives with which it deals can be
understood only from within or by subjective imagination. A
being with total imaginative power could understand it all, but
an ordinary being using an objective concept of mind will not.
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 91
So we have not given up the idea of the way the world really
is, independently of how it appears to us or to any particular occupant
of it. We have only given up the idea that this coincides with
what can be objectively understood. The way the world is includes
appearances, and there is no single point of view from which they
can all be fully grasped.
This amounts to the rejection of idealism with regard to the
mind. The world is not my world, or our world - not even the
mental world is. This is a particularly unequivocal rejection of
idealism because it affirms the reality of aspects of the world that
cannot be grasped by any conception I can possess -not even an
objective conception of the kind with which we transcend the
domain of initial appearances. Here it can be seen that physicalism
is based ultimately on a kind of idealism: the idealism of objectivity.
Objectivity is not reality. It is just one way of understanding
reality. Still, even if objective understanding can be only
partial, it is worth trying to extend it, for a simple reason.
The pursuit of an objective understanding of reality is still
the only way to expand our knowledge of what there is beyond
the way it appears to us. Even if we have to acknowledge the
reality of some things that we can’t grasp objectively, as well as
the ineliminable subjectivity of some aspects of our own experience
which we can grasp only subjectively, the pursuit of an objective
concept of mind is simply part of the general pursuit of
understanding. To give it up because it cannot be complete would
be like giving up axiomatization in mathematics because it cannot
be complete.
10. I want now to change the subject slightly, from the general
Even if we accept the liberal realist picture of the world that
concept of mind to the individual concept of the self.3
3 I discuss this problem more fully in “The Objective Self,” forthcoming in
Knowledge and Mind (essays in honor of Norman Malcolm), Carl Ginet and Sydney
Shoemaker, eds.
92 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
I have sketched, as a place that contains us, with all our perspectives,
and other beings, with all theirs, something still remains
puzzling. Each of us will have to admit that one of the most
important things about this centerless world is that one of the
persons in it is himself. What kind of a fact is that? What kind
of fact is it, for example, that I am Thomas Nagel? It is a fact I
appear to recognize whenever I take a step back from my current
viewpoint to pursue a more objective overview, which includes
that person. But the fact that I am TN does not fit very easily
into the conception of the world from nowhere within it that this
detachment is supposed to produce. How can there be room in
such an impersonally described world for the further fact that TN
is me, the locus of my consciousness?
I am not a solipsist. I do not believe that the point of view
from which I see the world is the perspective of reality. The
world is seen from many points of view, including this one; there
are many subjects of consciousness in it, and an adequate center
less conception of the world must include them all. If the world
really doesn’t have a particular point of view, there can be no
irreducibly first-person facts. On the other hand nothing could be
clearer than that I am TN, and this seems like a first-person fact if
there ever was one. So I seem to have on my hands a fact about
the world which both must exist (for how things are would be
incomplete without it) and cannot exist (for how things are cannot
include it).
A full treatment of this question would have to deal with
the charge that it is a pseudo-problem caused by misunderstanding
of the logic of token-reflexives. I believe this charge can be shown
to be false. But instead of trying to do that here, I am going to
propose a solution to the problem. Any problem that has a solution
must be real.
The philosophical thought that I am TN has a content very
different from what is conveyed when I use the words ‘I am TN’
to introduce myself to you. But it is a content for which room can
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 93
be found in a centerless conception of the world. A similar fact
can be discovered about each of you, which is the object of your
thought that you are the particular human individual you in fact
are. But I shall proceed in the Cartesian first person, which is
intended to be understood by each of you as applying to himself.
When I think that I am TN, I think that the real me regards
the world from the point of view of TN: occupies TN, so to
speak. Another way of putting it would be to say that the publicly
identifiable person TN contains the real me. But what is this ‘real
me’? Why isn’t the real me just TN?
Strange as it may sound, I find it extremely puzzling that I
should be TN, and I think if we can understand what is puzzling
about it, we will get to the heart of the problem. Actually the
question “How can I be TN?” has two aspects, corresponding to
the two directions in which it can be asked. So far I have been
discussing the question “What kind of fact is it that the particular
person TN is me?” But there is also the question “How can I
be the particular person TN, or any other particular person for
that matter? How can I be somebody?” It is this question that
is really basic.
Think about the world as a whole, with the publicly identifiable
person you are as one of its contents, and ask yourself,
“How can I be anything so specific as that; how can I be merely
a particular person?” This is different from the original question,
which was, “What makes that person me?” The problem here is
how I can be anything so specific as a particular person in the
world at all - any person.
The trouble is that my connection with TN seems arbitrary.
When I consider the world as a whole, as existing from no particular
point of view, TN is just one person among many others,
and although on Earth his species is dominant, that fades to insignificance
on an astronomical scale. How can I, who am thinking
about the entire, centerless universe, be anything so specific
as this: this creature in the universe, existing in a tiny morsel of
94 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
space and time, with a definite and by no means universal mental
and physical organization ?
I believe the solution to both these problems is the same. The
problems are: (1) What kind of fact is it that TN is me?
(2) How can I be anything so specific as TN? And the solution
comes from identifying the ‘I’ in these thoughts with an objective
self that each of us contains, that has an unlimited capacity
to step back from the standpoint of the person I am in order to
form a new conception of the world in which that person and his
states are located.
The picture is this. Essentially I am a subject that apprehends
a centerless world. Essentially I have no particular point of view.
In fact I ordinarily view the world through the eyes, the person,
the daily life of TN, as through a window. But the experiences
and the perspective of TN with which I am directly presented are
not essential to the point of view of the true self. The true self
apprehends the world from no point of view and includes in its
conception TN and his perspective among the contents of the
world.
How do I separate my true self from this person ? By treating
the experiences of this person, which depend on his particularity,
as data. I throw him into the world as a thing that interacts with
the rest of it, and ask what the world must be like from no point
of view in order to appear to him as it does from his point of
view. I can reason in this way about anyone else as well as about
him. Even though I receive the information of his point of view
directly, I try to deal with it for the purpose of constructing a
realist and partly objective picture in a way similar to that which
would be appropriate if the information were coming to me
indirectly.
So when I have the philosophical thought that I am TN, I am
recognizing that the particular objective self that is the subject
of this centerless conception of a world in which TN is located,
is also viewing the world from within through the perspective of
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 95
TN. And when I am philosophically puzzled over how I can be
merely the person TN, it is because I am thinking of myself as the
objective self which occupies TN. The paradox disappears because
TN, like the rest of you, turns out to be not merely a particular
creature with a very specific perspective on the world from his
position inside it. Any human being also contains a very different
kind of subject, largely undeveloped or unexplored, but with the
potential for indefinite further impersonal and objective apprehension
of the world. The ‘further fact’ that I am TN is the fact
that this impersonal conception of the world can close over itself
by locating the subject that forms it at a particular point in the
world that it apprehends. It is attached to, and developed from,
the perspective of TN. And since that is not an irreducibly firstperson
fact, it can be part of the real world.
11. Let me close by saying something about the more general
implications of these remarks, which have been concerned specifically
with the philosophy of mind. In trying to explain how the
mind and the self are to be included in the real world that simply
exists, I have distinguished between reality and objective reality,
and also between objectivity and particular conceptions of objectivity.
The physical conception of objectivity is inappropriate for
increasing our understanding of the mind; and even the kind of
objectivity that is appropriate for this purpose will not permit us
to form a complete idea of all the various incompatible mental
perspectives. The general upshot, that applies to ethics as well, is
that one should pursue the kind of objectivity appropriate to the
subject one is trying to understand, and that even the right kind of
objectivity may not exhaust the subject completely.
The problem of bringing together subjective and objective
views of the world can be approached from either direction. If
one starts from the subjective side the problem is the traditional one
of skepticism, idealism, or solipsism. How, given my personal experiential
perspective, can I form a conception of the world as it is
96 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
independent of my perception of it? And how can I know that
this conception is correct? (The question may also be asked from
the point of view of the collective human perspective rather than
from that of an individual.) If on the other hand one starts from
the objective side, the problem is how to accommodate, in a world
that simply exists from no perspective, any of the following
things: (a) oneself, (b) one’s point of view, (c) the point of
view of other selves, similar and dissimilar, and (d) the objects
of various types of judgment that seem to emanate from these
perspectives.
It is this second version of the problem that interests me. It is
the obverse of skepticism because the given is objective reality -
or the idea of an objective reality - and what is problematic by
contrast is subjective reality. Without receiving full acknowledgment
this approach has been very influential in recent analytic
philosophy. It accords well with a bias toward physical science as
a paradigm of understanding.
But if under the pressure of realism we admit that there are
things which cannot be understood in this way, then other ways of
understanding them must be sought. One way is to enrich the
notion of objectivity. But to insist in every case that the most
objective and detached account of a phenomenon is the correct
one is likely to lead to reductive conclusions. Sometimes, in the
philosophy of mind, and as I hope to show, in ethics, the truth
is not to be found by traveling as far away from one’s personal
perspective as possible.
II. VALUE
1. Whether values can be objective depends on whether an
interpretation of objectivity can be found that allows us to advance
our knowledge of what to do, what to want, and what things provide
reasons for and against action. Last week I argued that the
physical conception of objectivity was not able to provide an
understanding of the mind, but that another conception was available
which allowed external understanding of at least some
aspects of mental phenomena. A still different conception is
required to make sense of the objectivity of values, for values are
neither physical nor mental. And even if we find a conception, it
must be applied with care. Not all values are likely to prove to be
objective in any sense.
Let me say in advance that my discussion of values and reasons
in this lecture and the next will be quite general. I shall be talking
largely about what determines whether something has value,
or whether someone has a reason to do or want something. I shall
say nothing about how we pass from the identification of values
and reasons to a conclusion as to what should be done. That is of
course what makes reasons important; but I shall just assume that
values do often provide the basis for such conclusions, without
trying to describe even in outline how the full process of practical
reasoning works. I am concerned here only with the general question,
whether values have an objective foundation at all.
In general, as I said last time, objectivity is advanced when
we step back, detach from our earlier point of view toward something,
and arrive at a new view of the whole that is formed by
including ourselves and our earlier viewpoint in what is to be
understood.
98 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
In theoretical reasoning this is done by forming a new conception
of reality that includes ourselves as components. This
involves an alteration, or at least an extension, of our beliefs.
Whether the effort to detach will actually result in an increase of
understanding depends on the creative capacity to form objective
ideas which is called into action when we add ourselves to the
world and start over.
In the sphere of values or practical reasoning, the problem is
somewhat different. As in the theoretical case, in order to pursue
objectivity we must take up a new, comprehensive viewpoint after
stepping back and including our former perspective in what is to
be understood. But in this case the new viewpoint will be not
a new set of beliefs, but a new, or extended, set of values. If
objectivity means anything here, it will mean that when we detach
from our individual perspective and the values and reasons that
seem acceptable from within it, we can sometimes arrive at a new
conception which may endorse some of the original reasons but
will reject some as subjective appearances and add others. This is
what is usually meant by an objective, disinterested view of a
practical question.
The basic step of placing ourselves and our attitudes within
the world to be considered is familiar, but the form of the resulta
new set of values, reasons, and motives - is different. In order
to discover whether there are any objective values or reasons we
must try to arrive at normative judgments, with motivational content,
from an impersonal standpoint: a standpoint outside of our
lives. We cannot use a non-normative criterion of objectivity: for
if any values are objective, they are objective values, not objective
anything else.
2. There are many opinions about whether what we have reason
to do or want can be determined from a detached standpoint
toward ourselves and the world. They range all the way from the
view that objectivity has no place in this domain except what is
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 99
inherited from the objectivity of those theoretical and factual elements
that play a role in practical reasoning, to the view that
objectivity applies here, but with a nihilistic result: i.e., that
nothing is objectively right or wrong because objectively nothing
matters. In between are many positive objectifying views which
claim to get some definite results from a detached standpoint.
Each of them is criticized by adherents of opposing views either
for trying to force too much into a single objective framework or
for according too much or too little respect to divergent subjective
points of view.
Here as elsewhere there is a direct connection between the
goal of objectivity and the belief in realism. The most basic idea
of practical objectivity is arrived at by a practical analogue of
the rejection of solipsism or idealism in the theoretical domain.
Just as realism about the facts leads us to seek a detached point of
view from which reality can be discerned and appearance corrected,
so realism about values leads us to seek a detached point
of view from which it will be possible to correct inclination and
to discern what we really should do, or want. Practical objectivity
means that practical reason can be understood and even engaged
in by the objective self.
This assumption, though powerful, is not yet an ethical position.
It merely marks the place which an ethical position will
occupy if we can make any sense of the subject. It says that the
world of reasons, including my reasons, does not exist only from
my point of view. I am in a world whose properties are to a certain
extent independent of what I think, and if I have reasons to
act it is because the person who I am has those reasons, in virtue
of his condition and circumstances. One would expect those reasons
to be understandable from outside. Here as elsewhere objectivity
is a form of understanding not necessarily available for all
of reality. But it is reasonable at least to look for such understanding
over as wide an area as possible.
100 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
3. It is important not to lose sight of the dangers of false
objectification, which too easily elevate personal tastes and prejudices
into cosmic values. But initially, at least, it is natural to
look for some objective account of those reasons that appear from
one’s own point of view.
In fact those reasons usually present themselves with some
pretensions of objectivity to begin with, just as perceptual appearances
do. When two things look the same size to me, they look at
least initially as if they are the same size. And when I want to
take aspirin because it will cure my headache, I believe at least
initially that this is a reason for me to take aspirin, that it can
be recognized as a reason from outside, and that if I failed to take
it into account, that would be a mistake, and others could recognize
this.
The ordinary process of deliberation, aimed at finding out
what I have reason to do, assumes that the question has an answer.
And in difficult cases especially, deliberation is often accompanied
by the belief that I may not arrive at that answer. I do not assume
that the correct answer is just whatever will result or has resulted
from consistent application of deliberative methods-even assuming
perfect information about the facts. In deliberation we are
trying to arrive at conclusions that are correct in virtue of something
independent of our arriving at them. If we arrive at a conclusion,
we believe that it would have been correct even if we
hadn’t arrived at it. And we can also acknowledge that we might
be wrong, since the process of reasoning doesn’t guarantee the
correctness of the result. So the pursuit of an objective account
of practical reasons has its basis in the realist claims of ordinary
practical reasoning. In accordance with pretheoretical judgment
we adopt the working hypothesis that there are reasons which
may diverge from actual motivation even under conditions of perfect
information - as reality can diverge from appearance -
and then consider what form these reasons take. I shall say more
about the general issue of realism later on. But first I want to
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 101
concentrate on the process of thought by which, against a realist
background, one might try to arrive at objective conclusions about
reasons for action. In other words, if there really are values, how
is objective knowledge of them possible?
In this inquiry no particular hypothesis occupies a privileged
position, and it is certain that some of our starting points will be
abandoned as we proceed. However, one condition on reasons
obviously presents itself for consideration: a condition of generality.
This is the condition that if something provides a reason
for a particular individual to do something, then there is a general
form of that reason which applies to anyone else in comparable
circumstances. What count as comparable circumstances depends
on the general form of the reason. This condition is not tautological.
It is a rather strong condition which may be false, or true only
for some kinds of reasons. But the search for generality is a
natural beginning.
4. There is more than one type of generality, and no reason to
assume that a single form will apply to every kind of reason or
value. In fact I think that the choice among types of generality
defines some of the central issues of contemporary moral theory.
One respect in which reasons may vary is in their breadth. A
general principle may apply to everyone but be quite specific in
content, and it is an open question to what extent narrower principles
of practical reasons (don’t lie; develop your talents) can
be subsumed under broader ones (don’t hurt others; consider your
long-term interests), or even at the limit under a single widest
principle from which all the rest derive. Reasons may be general,
in other words, without forming a unified system that always
provides a method for arriving at determinate conclusions about
what one should do.
A second respect in which reasons vary is in their relativity
to the agent, the person for whom they are reasons. The distinction
between reasons that are relative to the agent and reasons that
102 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
are not is an extremely important one. I shall follow Derek Parfit
in using the terms ‘agent-relative’and ‘agent-neutral’ to mark this
distinction. (Formerly I used the terms ‘subjective’and ‘objective,’
but those terms are here reserved for other purposes.)
If a reason can be given a general form which does not include
an essential reference to the person to whom it applies, it is an
agent-neutral reason. For example, if it is a reason for anyone
to do or want something that it would reduce the amount of
wretchedness in the world, then that is an agent-neutral reason.
If on the other hand the general form of a reason does include
an essential reference to the person to whom it applies, it is an
agent-relative reason. For example, if it is a reason for anyone to
do or want something that it would be in his interest, then that is
an agent-relative reason. In such a case, if something were in Jones’s
interest but contrary to Smith’s, Jones would have reason to want
it to happen and Smith would have the same reason to want it not
to happen. (Both agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons are objective,
since both can be understood from outside the viewpoint of
the individual who has them.)
A third way in which reasons may vary is in their degree of
externality, or independence of the interests of sentient beings.
Most of the apparent reasons that initially present themselves to
us are intimately connected with interests and desires, our own or
those of others, and often with experiential satisfaction. But it is
conceivable that some of these interests give evidence that their
objects have intrinsic value independent of the satisfaction that
anyone may derive from them or of the fact that anyone wants
them - independent even of the existence of beings who can take
an interest in them. I shall call a reason internal if it depends on
the existence of an interest or desire in someone, and external if
it does not. External reasons were believed to exist by Plato, and
more recently by G. E. Moore, who believed that aesthetic value
provided candidates for this kind of externality.
These three types of variation cut across one another. For-
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 103
mally, a reason may be narrow, external, and agent-relative (don’t
eat pork, keep your promises), or broad, internal, and agent-neutral
(promote happiness), or internal and agent-relative (promote your
own happiness). There may be other significant dimensions of
variation. I want to concentrate on these because they locate the
main controversies about what ethics is. Reasons and values that
can be described in these terms provide the material for objective
judgments. If one looks at human action and its conditions from
outside and considers whether some normative principles are
plausible, these are the forms they will take.
The actual acceptance of a genera1 normative judgment will
have motivational implications, for it will commit you under some
circumstances to the acceptance of reasons to want and do things
yourself.
This is most clear when the objective judgment is that something
has agent-neutral value. That means anyone has reason to
want it to happen-and that includes someone considering the
world in detachment from the perspective of any particular person
within it. Such a judgment has motivational content even before
it is brought back down to the particular perspective of the individual
who has accepted it objectively.
Agent-relative reasons are different. An objective judgment that
some kind of thing has agent-relative value commits us only to
believing that someone has reason to want and pursue it if it is related
to him in the right way (being in his interest, for example).
Someone who accepts this judgment is not committed to wanting
it to be the case that people in general are influenced by such
reasons. The judgment commits him to wanting something only
when its implications are drawn for the individual person he
happens to be. With regard to others, the content of the objective
judgment concerns only what they should do or want.
I believe that judgments of both these kinds, as well as others,
are evoked from us when we take up an objective standpoint.
And I believe such judgments can be just as true and compelling
104 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
as objective factual judgments about the real world that contains
us.
5. When we take the step to objectivity in practical reasoning
by detaching from our own point of view, the question we must
ask ourselves is this: What reasons for action can be said to apply
to people when we regard them from a standpoint detached from
the values of any particular person ?
The simplest answer, and one that some people would give, is
“None.” But that is not the only option. The suggested classification
of types of generality provides a range of alternative
hypotheses. It also provides some flexibility of response, for with
regard to any reason that may appear to a particular individual
to exist subjectively, the corresponding objective judgment may be
that it does not exist at all, or that it corresponds to an agentneutral,
external value, or anything in between.
The choice among these hypotheses, plus others not yet imagined,
is difficult, and there is no general method of making it any
more than there is a general method of selecting the most plausible
objective account of the facts on the basis of the appearances.
The only ‘method,’ here or elsewhere, is to try to generate hypotheses
and then to consider which of them seems most reasonable, in
light of everything else one is fairly confident of.
This is not quite empty, for it means at least that logic alone
can settle nothing. We do not have to be shown that the denial
of some kind of objective values is self-contradictory in order to
be reasonably led to accept their existence. There is no constraint
to pick the weakest or narrowest or most economical principle
consistent with the initial data that arise from individual perspectives.
Our admission of reasons beyond these is determined not
by logical entailment, but by what we cannot help believing, or at
least finding most plausible among the alternatives.
In this respect it is no different from anything else: theoretical
knowledge does not arise by deductive inference from the appear-
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 105
ances either. The main difference is that our objective thinking
about practical reasons is very primitive, and has difficulty taking
even the first step. Philosophical skepticism and idealism about
values are much more popular than their metaphysical counterparts.
Nevertheless I believe they are no more correct. I shall
argue that although no single objective principle of practical reason
like egoism or utilitarianism covers everything, the acceptance
of some objective values is unavoidable - not because the alternative
is inconsistent but because it is not credible. Someone who, as
in Hume’s example, prefers the destruction of the whole world
to the scratching of his finger, may not be involved in a contradiction
or in any false expectations, but he is unreasonable nonetheless
(to put it mildly), and anyone else not in the grip of an
overly narrow conception of what reasoning is would regard his
preference as objectively wrong.
6. But even if it is unreasonable to deny that anyone ever
objectively has a reason to do anything, it is not easy to find positive
objective principles that are reasonable. I am going to attempt
to defend a few in the rest of this lecture and the next. But I
want to acknowledge in advance that it is not easy to follow the
objectifying impulse without distorting individual life and personal
relations. We want to be able to understand and accept
the way we live from outside, but it may not always follow that
we should control our lives from inside by the terms of that
external understanding. Often the objective viewpoint will not be
suitable as a replacement for the subjective, but will coexist with
it, setting a standard with which the subjective is constrained not
to clash. In deciding what to do, for example, we should not
reach a result different from what we could decide objectively that
that person should do - but we need not arrive at the result in
the same way from the two standpoints.
Sometimes, also, the objective standpoint will allow us to
judge how people should be or should live, without permitting us
106 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
to translate this into a judgment about what they have reasons to
do. For in some respects it is better to live and act not for reasons,
but because we cannot help it. This is especially true of close personal
relations. Here the objective standpoint cannot be brought
into the perspective of action without destroying precisely what
it affirms the value of. Nevertheless the possibility of this objective
affirmation is important. We should be able to view our lives
from outside without extreme dissociation or distaste, and the
extent to which we should live without considering the objective
point of view or even any reasons at all is itself determined
largely from that point of view.
It is also possible that some idiosyncratic individual grounds of
action, or the values of strange communities, will prove objectively
inaccessible. To take an example in our midst: I don’t think
that people who want to be able to run twenty-six miles without
stopping are irrational, but their reasons can be understood only
from the perspective of a value system that is completely alien to
me, and will I hope remain so. A correct objective view will have
to allow for such pockets of unassimilable subjectivity, which need
not clash with objective principles but won’t be affirmed by them
either. Many aspects of personal taste will come in this category,
if, as I think, they cannot all be brought under a general hedonistic
principle.
But the most difficult and interesting problems of accommodation
appear where objectivity can be employed as a standard, but
we have to decide how. Some of the problems are these: To what
extent should an objective view admit external values? To what
extent should it admit internal but agent-neutral values? To what
extent should the reasons to respect the interests of others take an
agent-relative form ? To what extent is it legitimate for each person
to give priority to his own interests? These are all questions about
the proper form of generality for different kinds of practical reasoning,
and the proper relation between objective principles and
the deliberations of individual agents. I shall return to some of
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 107
them later, but there is a great deal that I shall not get to.
I shall not, for example, discuss the question of external
values, i.e., values which may be revealed to us by the attractiveness
of certain things, but whose existence is independent of the
existence of any interests or desires. I am not sure whether there
are any such values, though the objectifying tendency produces a
strong impulse to believe that there are, especially in aesthetics
where the object of interest is external and the interest seems
perpetually capable of criticism in light of further attention to the
object.
What I shall discuss is the proper form of internal values or
reasons - those which depend on interests or desires. They can
be objectified in more than one way, and I believe different forms
of objectification are appropriate for different cases.
7. I plan to take up some of these complications in the next
lecture. Let me begin, however, with a case for which I think the
solution is simple: that of pleasure and pain. I am not an ethical
hedonist, but I think pleasure and pain are very important, and
they have a kind of neutrality that makes them fit easily into
ethical thinking - unlike preferences or desires, for example,
which I shall discuss later on.
I mean the kinds of pleasure and pain that do not depend on
activities or desires which themselves raise questions of justification
and value. Many pleasures and pains are just sensory experiences
in relation to which we are fairly passive, but toward which
we feel involuntary desire or aversion. Almost everyone takes the
avoidance of his own pain and the promotion of his own pleasure
as subjective reasons for action in a fairly simple way; they are
not backed up by any further reasons. On the other hand if someone
pursues pain or avoids pleasure, these idiosyncracies usually
are backed up by further reasons, like guilt or sexual masochism.
The question is, what sort of general value, if any, ought to be
assigned to pleasure and pain when we consider these facts from
108 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
an objective standpoint ?
It seems to me that the least plausible hypothesis is the zero
position, that pleasure and pain have no value of any kind that
can be objectively recognized. That would mean that looking at it
from outside, you couldn’t even say that someone had a reason not
to put his hand on a hot stove. Try looking at it from the outside
and see whether you can manage to withhold that judgment.
But I want to leave this position aside, because what really
interests me is the choice between two other hypotheses, both of
which admit that people have reason to avoid their own pain and
pursue their own pleasure. They are the fairly obvious general
hypotheses formed by assigning (a) agent-relative or (b) agentneutral
value to those experiences. If the avoidance of pain has only
agent-relative value, then people have reason to avoid their own
pain, but not to avoid the pain of others (unless other kinds of reasons
come into play). If the avoidance of pain has agent-neutral
value as well, then anyone has a reason to want any pain to stop,
whether or not it is his. From an objective standpoint, which of
these hypotheses is more plausible? Is the value of sensory pleasure
and pain agent-relative or agent-neutral ?
I believe it is agent-neutral, at least in part. That is, I believe
pleasure is a good thing and pain is a bad thing, and that the
most reasonable objective principle which admits that each of us
has reason to pursue his own pleasure and avoid his own pain will
acknowledge that these are not the only reasons present. This is a
normative claim. Unreasonable, as I have said, does not mean
inconsis ten t.
In arguing for this claim, I am somewhat handicapped by the
fact that I find it self-evident. It is therefore difficult for me to
find something still more certain with which to back it up. But I
shall try to say what is wrong with rejecting it, and with the reasons
that may lie behind its rejection. What would it be to really
accept the alternative hypothesis that pleasure and pain are not
impersonally good or bad? If I accept this hypothesis, assuming
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 109
at the same time that each person has reason to seek pleasure and
avoid pain for himself, then when I regard the matter objectively
the result is very peculiar. I will have to believe that I have a
reason to take aspirin for a headache, but that there is no reason
for me to have an aspirin. And I will have to believe the same
about anyone else. From an objective standpoint I must judge
that everyone has reason to pursue a type of result that is impersonally
valueless, that has value only to him.
This needs to be explained. If agent-neutral reasons are not
ruled out of consideration from the start (and one would need
reasons for that), why do we not have evidence of them here?
The avoidance of pain is not an individual project, expressing the
agent’s personal values. The desire to make pain stop is simply
evoked in the person who feels it. He may decide for various
reasons not to stop it, but in the first instance he doesn’t have to
decide to want it to stop: he just does. He wants it to go away
because it’s bad: it is not made bad by his deciding that he wants
it to go away. And I believe that when we think about it objectively,
concentrating on what pain is like, and ask ourselves
whether it is (a) not bad at all, (b) bad only for its possessor, or
(c) bad period, the third answer is the one that needs to be
argued against, not the one that needs to be argued for. The
philosophical problem here is to get rid of the obstacles to the
admission of the obvious. But first they have to be identified.
Consider how strange is the question posed by someone who
wants a justification for altruism about such a basic matter as this.
Suppose he and some other people have been admitted to a hospital
with severe burns after being rescued from a fire. “I understand
how my pain provides me with a reason to take an analgesic,”
he says, “and I understand how my groaning neighbor’s
pain gives him a reason to take an analgesic; but how does his
pain give me any reason to want him to be given an analgesic?
How can his pain give me or anyone else looking at it from outside
a reason?”
110 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
This question is crazy. As an expression of puzzlement, it
has that characteristic philosophical craziness which indicates that
something very fundamental has gone wrong. This shows up in
the fact that the answer to the question is obvious, so obvious that
to ask the question is obviously a philosophical act. The answer
is that pain is awful. The pain of the man groaning in the next
bed is just as awful as yours. That’s your reason to want him to
have an analgesic.
Yet to many philosophers, when they think about the matter
theoretically, this answer seems not to be available. The pain of
the person in the next bed is thought to need major external help
before it can provide me with a reason for wanting or doing anything:
otherwise it can’t get its hooks into me. Since most of these
people are perfectly aware of the force such considerations actually
have for them, justifications of some kind are usually found.
But they take the form of working outward from the desires and
interests of the individual for whom reasons are being sought.
The burden of proof is thought always to be on the claim that he
has reason to care about anything that is not already an object of
his interest.
These justifications are unnecessary. They plainly falsify the
real nature of the case. My reason for wanting my neighbor’s pain
to cease is just that it’s awful, and I know it.
8. What is responsible for this demand for justification with
its special flavor of philosophical madness? I believe it is something
rather deep, which doesn’t surface in the ordinary course of
life: an inappropriate sense of the burden of proof. Basically, we
are being asked for a demonstration of the possibility of real
impersonal values, on the assumption that they are not possible
unless such a general proof can be given.
But I think this is wrong. We can already conceive of such a
possibility, and once we take the step of thinking about what
reality, if any, there is in the domain of practical reason, it be-
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 111
comes a possibility we are bound to consider, that we cannot help
considering. If there really are reasons not just motivational
pushes and pulls, and if agent-neutral reasons are among the kinds
we can conceive of, then it becomes an obvious possibility that
physical pain is simply bad: that even from an impersonal standpoint
there is reason to want it to stop. When we view the matter
objectively, this is one of the general positions that naturally suggests
itself.
And once this is seen as a possibility, it becomes difficult not
to accept it. It becomes a hypothesis that has to be dislodged by
anyone who wishes to claim, for example, that all reasons are
agent-relative. The question is, what are the alternatives, once we
take up the objective standpoint? We must think something. If
there is room in the realistic conception of reasons for agent-neutral
values, then it is unnatural not to ascribe agent-neutral badness to
burn pains. That is the natural conclusion from the fact that anyone
who has a burn pain and is therefore closest to it wants
acutely to be rid of it, and requires no indoctrination or training to
want this. This evidence does not entail that burn pains are impersonally
bad. It is logically conceivable that there is nothing
bad about them at all, or that they provide only agent-relative reasons
to their possessors to want them to go away. But to take such
hypotheses seriously we would need justifications of a kind that
seem totally unavailable in this case.
What could possibly show us that acute physical pain, which
everyone finds horrible, is in reality not impersonally bad at all,
so that except from the point of view of the sufferer it doesn’t in
itself matter? Only a very remarkable and farfetched picture of
the value of a cosmic order beyond our immediate grasp, in which
pain played an essential part which made it good or at least
neutral - or else a demonstration that there can be no agent-neutral
values. But I take it that neither of these is available: the first
because the Problem of Evil has not been solved, the second
because the absence of a logical demonstration that there are
112 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
agent-neutral values is not a demonstration that there are not agentneutral
values.
My position is this. No demonstration is necessary in order to
allow us to consider the possibility of agent-neutral reasons: the
possibility simply occurs to us once we take up an objective stance.
And there is no mystery about how an individual could have a
reason to want something independently of its relation to his particular
interests or point of view, because beings like ourselves are
not limited to the particular point of view that goes with their
personal position inside the world. They are also, as I have put it
earlier, objective selves: they cannot help forming an objective
conception of the world with themselves in it; they cannot help
trying to arrive at judgments of value from that standpoint; they
cannot help asking whether, from that standpoint, in abstraction
from who in the world they are, they have any reason to want anything
to be the case or not-any reason to want anything to
happen or not.
Agent-neutral reasons do not have to find a miraculous source
in our personal lives, because we are not merely personal beings:
we are also importantly and essentially viewers of the world from
nowhere within it - and in this capacity we remain open to judgments
of value, both general and particular. The possibility of
agent-neutral values is evident as soon as we begin to think from
this standpoint about the reality of any reasons whatever. If we
acknowledge the possibility of realism, then we cannot rule out
agent-neutral values in advance.
Realism is therefore the fundamental issue. If there really are
values and reasons, then it should be possible to expand our
understanding of them by objective investigation, and there is no
reason to rule out the natural and compelling objective judgment
that pain is impersonally bad and pleasure impersonally good. So
let me turn now to the abstract issue of realism about values.
9. Like the presumption that things exist in an external world,
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 113
the presumption that there are real values and reasons can be
defeated in individual cases, if a purely subjective account of the
appearances is more plausible. And like the presumption of an
external world, its complete falsity is not self-contradictory. The
reality of values, agent-neutral or otherwise, is not entailed by the
totality of appearances any more than the reality of a physical
universe is. But if either of them is recognized as a possibility,
then its reality in detail can be confirmed by appearances, at least
to the extent of being rendered more plausible than the alternatives.
So a lot depends on whether the possibility of realism is
admitted in the first place.
It is very difficult to argue for such a possibility. Sometimes
there will be arguments against it, which one can try to refute.
Berkeley’s argument against the conceivability of a world independent
of experience is an example. But what is the result when
such an argument is refuted? Is the possibility in a stronger position?
I believe so: in general, there is no way to prove the possibility
of realism; one can only refute impossibility arguments, and
the more often one does this the more confidence one may have
in the realist alternative. So to consider the merits of an admission
of realism about value, we have to consider the reasons
against it. I shall discuss three. They have been picked for their
apparent capacity to convince people.
The first argument depends on the question-begging assumption
that if values are real, they must be real objects of some other
kind. John Mackie, for example, in his recent book Ethics, denies
the objectivity of values by saying that they are not part of the
fabric of the world, and that if they were, they would have to be
“entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly
different from anything else in the universe.” Apparently he has
a very definite picture of what the universe is like, and assumes
4 J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977),
p. 38.
114 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
that realism about value would require crowding it with extra
entities, qualities, or relations - things like Platonic Forms or
Moore’s non-natural qualities. But this assumption is not correct.
The impersonal badness of pain is not some mysterious further
property that all pains have, but just the fact that there is reason
for anyone capable of viewing the world objectively to want it to
stop, whether it is his or someone else’s. The view that values are
real is not the view that they are real occult entities or properties,
but that they are real values: that our claims about value and
about what people have reason to do may be true or false independently
of our beliefs and inclinations. No other kinds of truths
are involved. Indeed, no other kinds of truths could imply the
reality of values.5
The second argument I want to consider is not, like the first,
based on a misinterpretation of moral objectivity. Instead, it tries
to represent the unreality of values as an objective discovery. The
argument is that if claims of value have to be objectively correct
or incorrect, and if they are not reducible to any other kind of
objective claim, then we can just see that all positive value claims
must be false. Nothing has any objective value, because objectively
nothing matters at all. If we push the claims of objective
detachment to their logical conclusion, and survey the world from
a standpoint completely detached from all interests, we discover
that there is nothing - no values left of any kind: things can be
5 In discussion, Mackie claimed that I had misrepresented him, and that his
disbelief in the reality of values and reasons does not depend on the assumption
that to be real they must be strange entities or properties. As he says in his book,
it applies directly to reasons themselves. For whatever they are they are not needed
to explain anything that happens, and there is consequently no reason to believe in
their existence. But I would reply that this raises the same issue. It begs the question
to assume that explanatory necessity is the test of reality in this area. The
claim that certain reasons exist is a normative claim, not a claim about the best
explanation of anything. To assume that only what has to be included in the best
explanatory picture of the world is real, is to assume that there are no irreducibly
normative truths.
There is much more to be said on both sides of this issue, and I hope I have
not misrepresented Mackie in this short footnote.
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 115
said to matter at all only to individuals within the world. The
result is objective nihilism.
I don’t deny that the objective standpoint tempts one in this
direction. But I believe this can seem like the required conclusion
only if one makes the mistake of assuming that objective judgments
of value must emerge from the detached standpoint alone.
It is true that with nothing to go on but a conception of the world
from nowhere, one would have no way of telling whether anything
had value. But an objective view has more to go on, for its
data include the appearance of value to individuals with particular
perspectives, including oneself. In this respect practical reason is
no different from anything else. Starting from a pure idea of a
possible reality and a very impure set of appearances, we try to
fill in the idea of reality so as to make some partial sense of the
appearances, using objectivity as a method. To find out what the
world is like from outside we have to approach it from within:
it is no wonder that the same is true for ethics. And indeed, when
we take up the objective standpoint, the problem is not that values
seem to disappear but that there seem to be too many of them,
coming from every life and drowning out those that arise from
our own. It is just as easy to form desires from an objective standpoint
as it is to form beliefs. Probably easier. Like beliefs, these
desires and evaluations must be criticized and justified partly in
terms of the appearances. But they are not just further appearances,
any more than the beliefs about the world which arise from
an impersonal standpoint are just further appearances.
The third type of argument against the objective reality of
values is an empirical argument. It is also perhaps the most
common. It is intended not to rule out the possibility of real
values from the start, but rather to demonstrate that even if their
possibility is admitted, we have no reason to believe that there
are any. The claim is that if we consider the wide cultural variation
in normative beliefs, the importance of social pressure and
other psychological influences to their formation, and the difficulty
116 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
of settling moral disagreements, it becomes highly implausible
that they are anything but pure appearances.
Anyone offering this argument must admit that not every
psychological factor in the explanation of an appearance shows
that the appearance corresponds to nothing real. Visual capacities
and elaborate training play a part in explaining the physicist’s perception
of a cloud-chamber track, or a student’s coming to believe
a proposition of geometry, but the path of the particle and the
truth of the proposition also play an essential part in these explanations.
So far as I know, no one has produced a general account
of the kinds of psychological explanation that discredit an appearance.
But some skeptics about ethics feel that because of the way
we acquire moral beliefs and other impressions of value, there are
grounds for confidence that no real, objective values play a part
in the explanation.
I find the popularity of this argument surprising. The fact
that morality is socially inculcated and that there is radical disagreement
about it across cultures, over time, and even within
cultures at a time is a poor reason to conclude that values have
no objective reality. Even where there is truth, it is not always
easy to discover. Other areas of knowledge are taught by social
pressure, many truths as well as falsehoods are believed without
rational grounds, and there is wide disagreement about scientific
and social facts, especially where strong interests are involved
which will be affected by different answers to a disputed question.
This last factor is present throughout ethics to a uniquely high
degree: it is an area in which one would expect extreme variation
of belief and radical disagreement however objectively real the
subject actually was. For comparably motivated disagreements
about matters of fact, one has to go to the heliocentric theory, the
theory of evolution, the Dreyfus case, the Hiss case, and the
genetic contribution to racial differences in I.Q.
Although the methods of ethical reasoning are rather primitive,
the degree to which agreement can be achieved and social
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 117
prejudices transcended in the face of strong pressures suggests that
something real is being investigated, and that part of the explanation
of the appearances, both at simple and at complex levels, is
that we perceive, often inaccurately, that certain reasons for action
exist, and go on to infer, often erroneously, the general form of
the principles that best accounts for those reasons.
The controlling conception that supports these efforts at
understanding, in ethics as in science, is realism, or the possibility
of realism. Without being sure that we will find one, we look for
an account of what reasons there really are, an account that can
be objectively understood.
I have not discussed all the possible arguments against realism
about values, but I have tried to give general reasons for skepticism
about such arguments. It seems to me that they tend to be
supported by a narrow preconception of what there is, and that
this is essentially question-begging.
10. Let me close this lecture by indicating what I plan to discuss
next week. So far I have been arguing against skepticism,
and in favor of realism and the pursuit of objectivity in the
domain of practical reason. But if realism is admitted as a possibility,
one is quickly faced with the opposite of the problem of
skepticism. This is the problem of over-objectification: the temptation
to interpret the objectivity of reasons in too strong and unitary
a way.
In ethics, as in metaphysics, the allure of objectivity is very
great: there is a persistent tendency in both areas to seek a single,
complete objective account of reality - in the area of value that
means a search for the most objective possible account of all reasons
for action: the account acceptable from a maximally detached
standpoint.
This idea underlies the fairly common moral assumption that
the only real values are agent-neutral values, and that someone can
really have a reason to do something only if there is an agent-neutral
118 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
reason for it to happen. That is the essence of consequentialism:
the only reason for anyone to do anything is that it would be
better in itself, considering the world as a whole, if he did it.
(The idea also finds a reflection in Professor Hare’s view about
the only kind of judgment that moral language can be used to
express: for his claim that moral judgments are universally prescriptive
means that they depend on what one would want to
happen, considering the question from all points of view - rather
than on what one would think people had reason to do, considering
the question in this way. Consequently, any principle that was
moral in his sense would have to be agent-neutral.)
In the next lecture I shall try to explain why ethics has to be
based not only on agent-neutral values like those that attach to
pleasure and pain. We can no more assume that all reasons are
agent-neutral than that all reality is physical. I argued earlier that
not everything there is can be gathered into a uniform conception
of the universe from nowhere within it. If certain perspectives
evidently exist which cannot be analyzed in physical terms, we
must modify our idea of objective reality to include them. If that
is not enough, we must admit to reality some things that cannot
be objectively understood. Similarly, if certain reasons for action
which appear to exist cannot be accommodated within a purely
agent-neutral system - or even perhaps within a general but agentrelative
system - then we may have to modify our realist idea of
value and practical reason accordingly. I don’t mean to suggest
that there is no conflict here. The opposition between objective
reasons and subjective inclinations may be severe, and may require
us to change our lives. I mean only that the truth, if there is any,
will be arrived at by the exploration of this conflict rather than by
the automatic victory of the most transcendent standpoint. In the
conduct of life, of all places, the rivalry between the view from
within and the view from without must be taken seriously.
III. ETHICS
1. In this lecture I want to take up some of the problems that
must be faced by any defender of the objectivity of ethics who
wishes to make sense of the actual complexity of the subject.
There will be some parallels between what I say here and what I
said in the first lecture, about the interpretation of objectivity with
regard to the mind. Here also the treatment will be rather general
and very incomplete. Essentially I shall discuss some examples in
order to give grounds for believing that the enterprise is not
hopeless.
In the second lecture I distinguished between agent-relative and
agent-neutral values. Agent-neutral values, if there are any, are the
values of things good or bad in themselves, things that there is
reason for anyone to want or not to want. Agent-relative values, on
the other hand, while they are also general, are defined relatively.
They are specified by reference to the agent for whom they provide
reasons. For example, if there were a reason for everyone to
want the world to be a happier place, independently of the effect
of this on him, that would be an agent-neatral value. If on the
other hand each person had reason to want only his own happiness
and the happiness of others whom he cared for, that would
be an agent-relative value.
This contrast is central to an important set of issues about
moral objectivity and its limits. Certain ethical positions, those
sometimes called consequentialist, admit only agent-neutral values.
That is, they hold that ethics is concerned only with what should
happen, and never independently with what people should do.
But the hegemony of agent-neutral values is challenged by two
broad types of reasons that appear to be agent-relative in form, and
120 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
whose existence seems to be independent of agent-neutral values.
It is these that I propose to discuss today.
The first type of reason stems from the desires, projects, commitments,
and personal ties of the individual agent, all of which
give him reasons to act in the pursuit of ends that are his own.
These I shall collect under the general heading of reasons of
auton om y.
The second type of reason stems from the claims of other
persons not to be maltreated in certain ways. What I have in mind
are not agent-neutral reasons for everyone to want it to be the case
that no one is maltreated, but agent-relative reasons for each individual
not to maltreat others himself, in his dealings with them
(e.g., by violating their rights, breaking his promises to them, etc.).
These I shall collect under the general, ugly, and familiar heading
of deontology. Autonomous reasons would limit what we are
obliged to do in the service of agent-neutral values. Deontological
reasons would limit what we are permitted to do in the service of
either agent-neutral or autonomous ones.
I am not sure whether all these agent-relative reasons actually
exist. The autonomous ones are fairly intelligible; but while the idea
behind the deontological ones can, I think, be explained, it is an
explanation which throws some doubt on their validity. The only
way to find out what limits there are to what we may or must do
in the service of agent-neutral values is to see what sense can be
made of the apparent limits, and to accept or reject them according
to whether the maximum sense is good enough.
Taken together, autonomous, agent-neutral, and deontological
reasons cover much of the territory of unreflective bourgeois
morality. Common sense suggests that each of us should live his
own life (autonomy), have some significant concern for the general
good (agent-neutral values), and treat the people he deals
with decently (deontology). It also suggests that these aims may
produce serious inner conflict. Common sense doesn’t have the
last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it should be examined
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 121
before it is discarded.
Attempts have been made to find room for some version of
both these types of apparent exception to agent-neutral ethics in a
more complex agent-neutral system, using developments of consequentialism
like rule-utilitarianism and motive-utilitarianism.
I shall not try to show that these reductions of the agent-relative to
the agent-neutral fail. Instead I shall present an alternative account
of how the exceptions might make sense independently. The account
in both cases depends on certain discrepancies between what can
be valued from an objective standpoint, and what can be seen
from an objective standpoint to have value from a less objective
standpoint.
2. Let me begin with autonomy.
Not all the sources of subjective reasons are as simple as
sensory pleasure and pain. These simply evoke an awareness of
their value, without thought, choice, or deliberation, and I argued
earlier that this makes it reasonable to affirm their value directly
from an objective standpoint by judging that they are impersonally
good or bad. Difficult as it may be to carry out, each of us has
reason to give significant weight to the simple sensory pleasure or
pain of others as well as to his own. I believe that when these
values occur in isolation, the results can be rather demanding. If
you and a stranger have both been injured, for example, and you
have one dose of painkiller, and his pain is much more severe
than yours, you should give him the painkiller. Not for any complicated
reasons, but simply because of the relative severity of the
two pains, which provides an agent-neutral reason to prefer the
relief of the more severe. The same may be said of other basic
elements of human good and evil.
But most human values are not like this. Though some human
interests give rise to agent-neutral values (and not only pleasure and
pain) I now want to argue that not all of them do. If I have
a bad headache, anyone has a reason to want it to stop. But if for
122 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
instance I badly want to become a first-rate pianist, not everyone
has a reason to want me to practice. I have a reason to want to
practice, and it may be just as strong as my reason for wanting my
headache to go away. But other people have very little reason,
if any, to care whether I become a first-rate pianist or not. Why
is this?
I think it is easier to believe in this distinction than to explain
it.
There are two ways in which a value may be conditional on a
desire: the value may lie either outside or inside the conditional,
so to speak. In the former case, a person’s having X if he desires
X has agent-neutral value: satisfaction of the desire has objective
utility that everyone has reason to promote. In the latter case, if a
person desires X, his having X has agent-relative value for him:
‘having’ the value is conditional on having the desire, and satisfaction
of the desire does not have agent-neutral utility.
Roughly, (and I really mean roughly) I think involuntary
desires belong in the first category and desires that are adopted
belong in the second. Most of the things we pursue, if not most
of the things we avoid, are things we choose. Their value to us
depends on our individual aims, projects, and concerns, including
particular concerns for other people that reflect our relations with
them, and they acquire value only because of the interest we
develop in them and the place this gives them in our lives.
When we look at such desires objectively, from outside, we
can acknowledge the validity of the reasons they give for action,
without judging that there is an agent-neutral reason for any of
those things to be done. That is because, when we move to the
objective standpoint, we are not occupying the perspective from
which these values have to be accepted. Their diversity and their
dependence on the history and circumstances of the agent insures
this. From a point of view outside the perspective of my ambition
to become a first-rate pianist, it is possible to recognize and understand
that perspective and so to acknowledge the reasons that arise
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 123
inside it; but it is not possible to accept those reasons as one’s
own, unless one adopts the perspective rather than merely recognizing
it.
So objective understanding of such reasons does not imply
objective acceptance of them; because in order to have and act on
them one must occupy the perspective of a particular life and its
aims. Whether you are subject to their value depends on what
your values are. A bad headache, on the other hand, can be
recognized as bad independently of the values of the person whose
headache it is: it has nothing to do with his personal values. So
you do not have to be him to have reason to want it to go away.
Its badness is agent-neutral, and you have a reason to want it to stop
whatever your values are.
There is nothing incoherent in wanting to be able to play all
the Beethoven piano sonatas by heart, while thinking that impersonally
it doesn’t matter whether one can do this. In fact one
would have to be deranged to think it did matter impersonally.
It doesn’t even matter much impersonally that if someone wants
to play all the Beethoven sonatas by heart, he should be able to.
It matters a little, so that if he is incapable of achieving it, it
would be better if he didn’t want to. This is because the realization
of a personal ambition is pleasant and its frustration is painful,
so the agent-neutral values of pleasure and pain come into
effect here. But even that is a rather weak agent-neutral value, since
it is not the impersonal correlate of the agent-relative reasons deriving
directly from the ambition, whose object is not pleasure. If an
interest is developed by the agent himself through his choices and
actions, then the objective reasons it provides are primarily agentrelative.
Any agent-neutral reasons stemming from it must express
values that are independent of the particular perspective and system
of preferences of the agent.
The general values of pleasure and pain, satisfaction and
frustration, fill this role to some extent, as I have said, though
only to the extent that they can be detached from the value of the
124 The Tanner Lectures on HumanValues
object of desire whose acquisition or loss produces the feeling.
This, incidentally, explains the appeal of hedonism to consequentialists:
it reduces all value to the impersonal common denominator
of pleasure and pain.
But what there is not, I believe, is a general agent-neutral value
of the satisfaction of desires and preferences. The strength of an
individual’s personal preferences in general determines what they
give him reason to do, but they do not determine the agent-neutral
value of his getting what he wants. That is because their satisfaction
has value only from the standpoint of the values expressed in
those preferences. There is no independent value of preferencesatisfaction
per se which preserves its force even from an impersonal
standpoint.
This rather harsh position can be modified somewhat by admitting
that there is another, more general, level at which agent-neutral
values do appear when one considers the area of personal preferences
objectively. That is the level of the background of choice,
liberty, and opportunity which makes the development and pursuit
of voluntary concerns possible. Someone’s having the freedom
and the means in a general way to lead his life is not a good that
can be appreciated only through the point of view of the particular
set of concerns and projects he has formed. It is a quite
general good, like the goods of health, food, physical comfort,
and life itself, and if agent-neutral value is going to be admitted at
all, it will naturally attach to this. People have reason to care
about the liberty and general opportunities of others as they have
reason to care about their physical comfort. This is not equivalent
to assigning agent-neutral value to each person’s getting whatever
he wants.
If this hypothesis of two levels of objectification is correct,
then there is not a significant reason for something to happen
corresponding to every reason for someone to do something. Each
person has reasons stemming from the perspective of his own life
which, though they can be publicly recognized, do not in general
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 125
provide reasons for others and do not correspond to reasons that
the interests of others provide for him. He has some agent-neutral
reasons to consider the interests of others, but the personal claims
of autonomy, if they have significant weight, will allow him to
pursue his own aims to some extent at the expense of those others.
Since agent-relative reasons are general and not purely subjective,
he must acknowledge that the same is true of others with respect
to him.
All this is based on the assumption that an agent-neutral objectification
of this large category of individualistic subjective reasons
does not make sense. But of course that doesn’t entail that an agentrelative
objectification is correct, instead. There is a radical
alternative: it could be that these reasons have no objective validity
at all, agent-relative or agent-neutral. That is, it might be said by
some utilitarian extremist that if there isn’t an agent-neutral reason
for me to learn the Beethoven sonatas by heart — if it wouldn’t
be a good thing in itself; if the world wouldn’t be a better place
for my being able to play all the Beethoven sonatas — then I have
no reason of any kind to learn them, and I had better get rid of my
desire to do so as soon as possible.
That is a logically possible move, but not, I think, a plausible
one. It results from the aim of eliminating perspective from the
domain of real value to the greatest possible extent, and that aim
is not based on anything, so far as I can see. We should certainly
try to harmonize our lives to some extent with how we think the
world should be. But there is no necessity, I believe, to abandon
all values that do not correspond to anything desirable from an
impersonal standpoint, even though this may be possible as a
personal choice — a choice of self-transcendence.
If there are, objectively, both agent-relative and agent-neutral
reasons, this raises a problem about how life is to be organized so
that both can be given their due. Just to offer a footnote about the
relation between ethics and political theory, one way of dealing
with this problem is to put much of the responsibility for securing
126 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
agent-neutral values into the hands of an impersonal institution like
the state. A well designed set of political and social institutions
should function as a moral buffer to protect personal life against
the ravenous claims of impersonal good, and vice versa.
3. Let me turn now to the obscure topic of deontological constraints.
These are agent-relative reasons which depend not on the
aims or projects of the agent but on the claims of others. Unlike
autonomous reasons, they cannot be given up at will. If they exist,
they restrict what we may do in the service of either agent-relative
or agent-neutral goals.
Whatever their explanation, they are conspicuous among the
moral appearances. Here is an example to focus your intuitions.
You have an auto accident one winter night on a lonely road.
The other passengers are badly injured, the car is out of commission,
and the road is deserted, so you run along it till you find
an isolated house. The house turns out to be occupied by an old
woman who is looking after her small grandchild. There is no
phone, but there is a car in the garage, and you ask desperately
to borrow it and explain the situation. She doesn’t believe you.
Terrified by your desperation, she runs upstairs and locks herself
in the bathroom, leaving you alone with the child. You pound
ineffectively on the door and search without success for the car
keys. Then it occurs to you that she might be persuaded to tell you
where they are if you were to twist the child’s arm outside the
bathroom door. Should you do it?
It is difficult not to see this as a serious dilemma, even though
the child’s getting his arm twisted is a minor evil compared with
your friends’ not getting to a hospital. The dilemma must be due
to a special reason against doing such a thing. Otherwise it would
be obvious that you should choose the lesser evil, and twist the
child’s arm.
Common moral intuition recognizes several types of deontological
reasons - limits on what one may do to people or how
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 127
one may treat them. There are the special obligations created by
promises and agreements; the restrictions against lying; the prohibitions
against violating various individual rights, rights not
to be killed, injured, imprisoned, threatened, tortured, coerced,
robbed; the restrictions against imposing certain sacrifices on
someone simply as means to an end; and perhaps the special claim
of immediacy, which makes distress at a distance so different from
distress in the same room. There may also be a deontological
requirement of fairness, of evenhandedness or equality in one’s
treatment of people. (This is to be distinguished from any agentneutral
value thought to attach to equality in the distribution of
benefits, considered as an aspect of the assessment of states of
In all these cases it appears that the special reasons, if they
exist, cannot be explained simply in terms of agent-neutral values,
because the particular relation of the agent to the outcome is
essential. Deontological constraints may be overridden by agentneutral
reasons of sufficient strength, but they are not themselves
to be understood as the expression of agent-neutral values of any
kind. It is clear from the way such reasons work that they cannot
be explained by the hypothesis that the violation of a deontological
constraint has high negative agent-neutral value. Deontological
reasons have their full force against your doing something - not
just against its happening.
For example, if there really are such constraints, the following
things seem to be true. It seems that you shouldn’t break a
promise or tell a lie for the sake of some benefit, even though you
would not be required to forego a comparable benefit in order
to prevent someone else from breaking a promise or telling a lie.
And it seems that you shouldn’t twist the arm of a small child
to get its grandmother to do something, even if the thing is quite
important — important enough so that it would not be reasonable
to forego a comparable benefit in order to prevent someone else
from twisting a child’s arm. And it may be that you shouldn’t
affairs.)
128 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
engage in certain kinds of unfair discriminatory treatment (in an
official role, for example) even to produce a good result which
it would be unreasonable to forego in order to prevent similar
unfairness by others.
Some may simply deny the plausibility of such moral intuitions.
Others may say that their plausibility can be subtly
accounted for in terms of agent-neutral values, and that they appear
to involve a fundamentally different type of reason for action
only if they are inadequately analyzed. As I have said, I don’t
want to take up these alternative accounts here. They seem to me
essentially revisionist, and even if from that point of view they
contain a good deal of truth, they do not shed light on the deontological
conceptions they are intended to replace. Sometimes, particularly
when institutions and general practices are involved in
the case, there may be an agent-neutral justification for what looks
initially like an agent-relative restriction on action. But I am convinced
there are many cases that evoke a different type of moral
intuition. Right or wrong, it is this type of view that I want to
explore and understand. There is no point in trying to show in
advance that the controversy does not exist.
One reason for the resistance to deontological constraints is
that they are formally puzzling, in a way that the other reasons
we have discussed are not. We can understand how autonomous
agent-relative reasons might derive from the specific projects and
concerns of the agent, and we can understand how agent-neutral
reasons might derive from the interests of others, giving each of us
reason to take them into account. But how can there be agentrelative
reasons to respect the claims of others? How can there be
a reason not to twist someone’s arm which is not equally a reason to
prevent his arm from being twisted by someone else?
The agent-relative character of the reason cannot come simply
from the character of the interest that is being respected, for that
alone would justify only an agent-neutral reason to protect the
interest. And the agent-relative reason does not come from an aim
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 129
or project of the individual agent, for it is not conditional on what
the agent wants. Deontological restrictions, if they exist, apply to
everyone: they are mandatory and may not be given up like personal
ambitions or commitments.
There is no doubt that ideas of this kind form an important
part of common moral phenomenology. Yet it is tempting to think
that the whole thing is a kind of moral illusion resulting either
from innate psychological dispositions or from crude but useful
moral indoctrination. But this hypothesis faces problems in explaining
what the illusion is. It may be a good thing if people
have a deep inhibition against torturing children even for very
strong reasons, and the same might be said of other deontological
constraints. But that does not explain why we cannot come to
regard it as a mere inhibition which it is good to have. An illusion
involves a judgment or a disposition to judge, and not a mere
motivational impulse. The phenomenological fact that has to be
accounted for is that we seem to apprehend in each individual case
an extremely powerful agent-relative reason not to torture a child.
This presents itself as the apprehension of a truth, not just as a
psychological inhibition. And the claim that such an inhibition is in
general very useful does nothing to justify or explain the conviction
of a strong reason in every individual case. That conviction
is what has to be analyzed and accounted for, and accepted
or rejected according to whether the account gives it an adequate
justification.
4. I believe that the traditional principle of double effect,
despite problems of application, provides a rough guide to the
extension and character of deontological constraints, and that
even after the volumes that have been written on the subject in
recent years, this remains the right point of convergence for efforts
to capture our intuitions.6 The principle says that to violate
6 A good statement of a view of this type is found in Charles Fried's recent
book, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).
130 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
deontological constraints one must maltreat someone else intentionally.
The maltreatment must be something that one does or
chooses, either as an end or as a means, rather than something
one’s actions merely cause or fail to prevent, but that one doesn’t
aim at.
It is also possible to foresee that one’s actions will cause or
fail to prevent a harm that one does not intend to bring about or
permit. In that case it is not, in the relevant sense, something one
does, and does not come under a deontological constraint, though
it may still be objectionable for impersonal reasons. (One point
worth stressing: the constraints apply to intentionally permitting
as well as to intentionally doing harm. Thus in our example,
there would be the same kind of objection if with the same end in
view you permitted someone else to twist the child’s arm. You
would have let it happen intentionally, and that would be different
from a failure to prevent such an occurrence because you were
too engaged in doing something else which was more important.)
So far this is just moral phenomenology: it does not remove
the paradox. Why should we consider ourselves far more responsible
for what we do (or permit) intentionally than for consequences
of action that we foresee and decide to accept but that
do not form part of our aims (intermediate or final) ? How can
the connection of ends and means conduct responsibility so much
more effectively than the connection of foresight and avoidability ?
It is as if each action produced a special perspective on the
world, determined by intention. When I twist the child’s arm
intentionally I incorporate that evil into what I do: it is my creation
and the reasons stemming from it are magnified from my
point of view so that they tower over reasons stemming from
greater evils that are more ‘distant’ because they do not fall within
the range of intention.
That is the picture, but how can it be correct ?
I believe that this is one of those cases in which the removal
of paradox is not a philosophical advance. Deontological reasons
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 131
are essentially problematic, and the problem is an instance of the
collision between subjective and objective points of view. The
issue is whether the special, personal perspective of agency has
fundamental significance in determining what people have reason
to do. The question is whether, because of this perspective, I can
have sufficient reason not to do something which, considered
from an external standpoint, it would be better if I did. That is,
things would be better, what happened would be better, if I
twisted the child’s arm than if I did not. But I would have done
something worse. If considerations of what I may do, and the
correlative claims of my victim, can outweigh the substantial impersonal
value of what will happen, that can only be because the
perspective of the agent has an importance in practical reasoning
that resists domination by a conception of the world as a place
where good and bad things happen, and have their value without
perspective.
I have already claimed that the dominance of this agent-neutral
conception of value is not complete. It does not swallow up or
overwhelm the agent-relative reasons arising from those individual
ambitions, commitments, and attachments that are in some sense
chosen. But the admission of what I have called autonomous
agent-relative reasons does not imply the possibility of deontological
reasons. The two are very different. The special paradox of
deontological reasons is that although they are agent-relative, they
do not express the subjective autonomy of the agent at all. They are
demands. The paradox is that this partial, perspectival respect
for the interests of others should not give way to an impersonal
respect free of perspective. The deontological perspective seems
primitive, even superstitious, by comparison: merely a stage on the
way to full objectivity. How can what we do in this narrow sense
be so important?
5. Let me try to say where the strength of the deontological
view lies. We may begin by considering a curious feature of
132 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
deontological reasons on which I have not yet remarked. Intention
appears to magnify the importance of evil aims by comparison
with evil side effects in a way that it does not magnify the
importance of good aims by comparison with good side effects.
We are supposed to avoid using evil means to produce a good
end, even though it would be permissible to produce that good
end by neutral means with comparably evil side effects.
On the other hand, given two routes to a legitimate end, one
of which involves good means and neutral side effects, and the
other of which involves neutral means and slightly better side
effects, there is no reason to choose the first route. Deontological
reasons tell us only not to aim at evil; they don’t tell us to aim at
good, as a means. Why should this be? What is the relation
between evil and intention, or aiming, that makes them clash in a
special and intense way?
The answer emerges if we ask ourselves what is the essence
of aiming, what differentiates it from merely producing a result
knowingly ?
The difference is that action intentionally aimed at a goal is
guided by that goal. Whether the goal is an end in itself or only
a means, action aimed at it must follow it and be prepared to
adjust its pursuit if deflected by altered circumstances. Whereas
an act that merely produces an effect does not follow it, is not
guided by it, even if the effect is foreseen.
What does this mean? It means that to aim at evil, even as a
means, is to have one’s action guided by evil. One must be prepared
to adjust it to insure the production of evil: a falling off in
the level of the desired evil must be grounds for altering what one
does so that the evil is restored and maintained. But the essence
of evil is that it should repel us. If something is evil, our actions
should be guided, if they are guided by it at all, toward its elimination
rather than toward its maintenance. That is what evil
means. So when we aim at evil we are swimming head-on against
the normative current. Our action is guided by the goal at every
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 133
point in the direction diametrically opposite to that in which the
value of that goal points. To put it another way, if we aim at evil
we make what we do in the first instance a positive rather than
a negative function of evil. At every point, the intentional function
is simply the normative function reversed, and from the point
of view of the agent, this produces the acute sense of doing something
awful.
If you twist the child’s arm, in our example, your aim is to
produce pain. So when the child cries, “Stop, it hurts!” his objection
corresponds in perfect diametrical opposition to your intention.
What he is pleading as your reason to stop is precisely your
reason to go on. If it didn’t hurt, you would twist harder, or try
the other arm. You are pushing directly and essentially against the
normative force intrinsic to your goal, for it is the production of
pain that guides you. It seems to me that this is the essence of
deontological constraints. What feels peculiarly wrong about
doing evil intentionally even that good may come of it is the headlong
striving against value that is internal to one’s aim.
Some corroboration of this diagnosis may be found by asking
what would be the corresponding principle governing the relation
between intention and good, as opposed to evil ? I have said that
there is no deontological requirement to aim at good-only a
requirement not to aim at evil. But the analogue of the requirement
not to aim at evil would be a requirement not to aim away
from good. To aim to prevent something good as a means to a
worthy end would have a similar quality of normative reversal,
though less acute than that of aiming at evil. And I believe there
may be deontological constraints, though not such conspicuous
ones, against deliberately preventing something good, in order
that good may come of it. (Think for example of someone who
resists ameliorating the condition of the poor because he thinks
it will reduce their anger and diminish the long-term chance of a
social revolution.) I mention the point, but will not pursue it.
But all this still leaves unsettled the question of justification.
134 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
For it will be objected that if one aims at evil as a means only,
then one’s action is not really being guided by evil but by overall
good, which includes a balance of goods and evils. So when you
twist the child’s arm, you are guided by the aim of rescuing your
injured friends, and the good of that aim dominates the evil of
the child’s pain. The immediacy of the fact that you must try to
produce evil as a subsidiary aim is phenomenologically important,
but why should it be morally important?
Here I think we have come down to a fundamental clash
between perspectives. The question is whether to disregard the
resistance encountered by my immediate pursuit of evil, in favor
of the overall value of the results of what I do. When I view my
act from outside, and think of it as resulting from a choice of the
impersonally considered state of the world in which it occurs, this
seems rational. In thinking of the matter this way, I abstract my
will and its choices from my person, as it were, and even from my
actions, and decide directly among states of the world, as if I were
taking a multiple-choice test. If the choice is determined by what
on balance is impersonally best, then I am guided by good and not
by evil.
But the self that is so guided is the objective self which regards
the world impersonally, as a place containing TN and his actions,
among other things. It is detached from the perspective of TN:
for it views the world from nowhere within it. It chooses, and
then TN, its instrument, or perhaps one could say its agent, carries
out the instructions as best he can. He may have to aim at evil,
for the impersonally best alternative may involve the production
of good ends by evil means. But he is merely following orders.
To see the matter in this light is to see both why the appeal of
agent-neutral, consequentialist ethics is so great and why the contrary
force of agent-relative, deontological ethics is so powerful
The detached, objective view takes in everything and provides a
standpoint of choice from which all choosers can agree about what
should happen. But each of us is not only an objective self but a
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 135
particular person with a particular perspective; we act in the world
with that perspective, and not only from the point of view of a
detached will, selecting and rejecting world-states. So our choices
are not merely choices of states of the world, but of actions. From
this point of view, the pursuit of evil in twisting the child’s arm
looms large. The production of pain is the immediate aim, and
the fact that from an external perspective you are choosing a
balance of good over evil does not cover up the fact that this is the
kind of action you are undertaking.
This account of the force of deontological reasons applies with
special clarity to the constraint against doing harm as a means
to your ends. A fuller deontological theory would have to explain
the different types of normative grain against which one acts in
breaking promises, lying, discriminating unfairly, and denying
immediate emergency aid. It would also have to deal with problems
about what exactly is being aimed at in cases of action that
can be described in several different ways. But I believe that the
key to understanding any of these moral intuitions is the distinction
between the internal viewpoint of the agent in acting and an
external, objective viewpoint which the agent can also adopt.
Reasons for action look different from the first point of view than
from the second.
So we are faced with a choice. For the purposes of ethics,
should we identify with the detached, impersonal will that chooses
world-states, and act on reasons that are determined accordingly ?
Or is this an evasion of the full truth about who we really are
and what we are doing, and an avoidance of the full range of
reasons that apply to creatures like us? If both personal and
impersonal perspectives are essential to us, then it is no wonder
that the reasons for action deriving from them do not fit comfortably
together.
6. I believe this is a true philosophical dilemma which has no
natural resolution. It arises out of our nature, which includes
136 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
different points of view on the world. In ethics the contest between
objective detachment and the individual perspective is
acute. We feel it in the dilemma between deciding on the basis
of action and deciding on the basis of outcome; in the dilemma
between living one’s private life and serving the general good; in
the dilemma between concern for what is actually happening and
concern for what is timeless. When we ask ourselves how to live,
the complexity of what we are makes a unified answer difficult.
It is conceivable that this may change, for we are at a very
primitive stage of moral development. Even the most civilized
human beings have only a haphazard understanding of how to
live, how to treat others, how to organize their societies. The idea
that the basic principles of morality are known, and that the problems
all come in their interpretation and application, is one of the
most fantastic conceits to which our conceited species has been
drawn. (The idea that, if we cannot easily know it, there is no
truth here, is no less conceited.) Not all of our ignorance in these
areas is ethical, but a lot of it is. And the idea of the possibility
of moral progress is an essential condition of moral progress.
None of it is inevitable.
It would be foolish to try to lay down in advance the outlines
of a correct method for ethical progress; but I believe that the
general direction that it is reasonable to follow at present is connected
to the awkward pursuit of objectivity that we have been
discussing. This does not mean that greater detachment always
takes us closer to the truth. Sometimes, to be sure, objectivity will
lead us to regard our original inclinations as mistaken, and then
we will try to replace them or bracket them as ineliminable but
illusory. But it would be a mistake to try to eliminate perspective
from our conception of ethics entirely — as much of a mistake
as it would be to try to eliminate perspective from the universe.
Though it may be equally tempting, it would be no more reasonable
to eliminate all those reasons for action that cannot be assimilated
to the most objective, impersonal system of value than it
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 137
would be to eliminate all facts that cannot be assimilated to
physics.
At the same time, I believe that the agent-relative values of individual
autonomy and of deontology are severely challenged
when we look at our lives from outside.
One sign of this is that the most common form of subjective
resistance to objective dominance is just badness. I have not discussed
this familiar phenomenon so far because while it is part of
the struggle between subjective and objective standpoints in practical
reason, it has to do neither with the content nor with the
reality of ethics. To be bad is to recognize the claims of morality
from an objective standpoint but to refuse to submit to them.
One may not admit that this is what one is doing — may offer
fake justifications or rationalizations — but recognition of the
general principles that one is defying can show up in other ways:
in one’s reaction when subjected to comparable treatment by
others, for example. Badness is not the same as amorality. On
the contrary, it shows that one accepts the reality and objectivity
of ethics. It is the most direct form of subjective resistance to that
objective standpoint that forms a part of each of us, and whose
demands can be so exhausting.
Since the subjective-objective struggle can take this form, there
is room for considerable self-deception. It is not always easy to
tell, for example, whether a morality that leaves extensive free
space in each individual life for the pursuit of personal interests is
not just a disguise for the simplest form of badness: selfishness
in the face of the legitimate claims of others. It is hard to be
good, as we all know.
I suspect that if we try to develop a system of reasons which
harmonizes personal and impersonal claims, then even if it is
acknowledged that each of us must live in part from his own point
of view, there will be a tendency for the personal components to
be altered. As the claims of objectivity are recognized, they may
come to form a larger and larger part of each individual’s con-
138 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
ception of himself, and will influence the range of personal aims
and ambitions, and the ideas of his particular relations to others.
I do not think it is utopian to look forward to the gradual development
of a greater universality of moral respect, an internalization
of moral objectivity analogous to the gradual internalization of
scientific progress that seems to be a feature of modern culture.
On the other hand, there is no reason to expect progress to be
reductive, though here as elsewhere progress is too easily identified
with reduction and simplification. Distinct individuals are
still the clients of ethics, and their variety guarantees that pluralism
will be an essential aspect of any adequate morality, however
advanced.
There have to be principles of practical reason that allow us
to take into account values that we do not share, but whose force
for others we must acknowledge. In general, the problem of how
to combine the enormous and disparate wealth of reasons that
practical objectivity generates, together with the subjective reasons
that remain, by a method that will allow us to act and choose in
the world, is dauntingly difficult.
And this brings us to a final point. There can be no ethics
without politics. A theory of how individuals should act requires
a theory — an ethical theory, not just an empirical one — of the
institutions under which they should live: institutions which substantially
determine their starting points, the choices they can
make, the consequences of what they do, and their relations to
one another. Since the standpoint of political theory is necessarily
objective and detached, it offers strong temptations to simplify,
which it is important to resist. A society must in some sense be
organized in accordance with a single set of principles, even
though people are very different.
This is inconvenient: it may seem that political theory must be
based on a universal human nature, and that if we cannot discover
such a thing we have to invent it, for political theory must
exist. To avoid such folly, it is necessary to take on the much
[NAGEL] The Limits of Objectivity 139
more difficult task of devising fair uniform social principles for
beings whose nature is not uniform and whose values are legitimately
diverse. If they were diverse enough, the task might be
impossible — there may be no such thing as intergalactic political
theory — but within the human species the variation seems to fall
within bounds that do not rule out the possibility of at least a
partial solution. This would have to be something acceptable
from a standpoint external to that of each particular individual,
which at the same time acknowledges the plurality of values and
reasons arising within all those perspectives. Even though the
morality of politics is rightly more agent-neutral than the morality
of private life, the acknowledgment of agent-relative values and
autonomy is essential even at the level that requires the greatest
impersonality.
There is no telling what kinds of transcendence of individuality
will result over the long term from the combined influence
of moral and political progress, or decline. At the moment, however,
a general takeover of individual life from the perspective of
the universe, or even from the perspective of humanity, seems
premature — even if some saints or mystics can manage it. Reasons
for action have to be reasons for individuals, and individual
perspectives can be expected to retain their moral importance so
long as diverse human individuals continue to exist.