Chapter 5 - Value
5.1
Goals imply value, and value in a teleological cosmos add another problem, on top of consciousness and cognition. In this case, it has to do with the "practical domain--the control and assessment of conduct." Like cognition depends on consciousness, value (good/bad, right/wrong) depends on cognition: identifying values, thinking about reasons for and against. If values are objectively real, what does this mean? This is harder to describe than cognition or consciousness, because subjective value systems are fairly easy to understand and defend. For example, a subjectivist position might say that moral truth depends on our own motivational dispositions and responses--what seems good for us individually. A realist account would say that we try to find objectively true values, and our responses can be correct or incorrect.
There is some overlap: pleasure and pain, for example, are "inseparable from our natural responses of attraction and aversion to them." It wouldn't be pain (i.e., bad) if it wasn't unpleasant. Appearance and reality coincide here. But not so when we move to "the evaluation of absent experiences," e.g., those in the future or of other beings, or complex examples where values conflict. For subjectivists, this will depend on our disposition (we're motivated for self-interest, including future benefit and harm, which can include a benevolent disposition or attachment to social institutions advancing the general welfare. The value depends on our sentiment. For the realist, it will depend on our identifying the right answer, "because our dispositions are in accord with the actual structure and weight of values in the case at hand." We don't hold off an an action that will benefit us slightly but greatly harm another simply because we're motivated to do so, but because of the reasons involved: the fact that the harm is to someone else is NOT a reason to disregard that harm, and the reason for avoiding their harm is greater than the reason of our own slight benefit.
5.2
What is it about 'others' that gives us a reason for action, if not simple benevolence? Realists deny that it is "something more fundamental than values" (whether supernatural or natural) that makes them true or not (e.g., psychological dispositions). In other words, it's not a metaphysical theory. And while some value judgments are based in natural facts (e.g., if I don't brake, I will run over that dog), the general moral truth is nothing but itself: "it counts in favour of doing something that it will avoid grievous harm to a sentient creature." The facts and situations in examples like this one lead to "more general or basic evaluative truths" (just like reason forms categories, generalizations, etc.). Like physical, psychological, arithmetical and geometrical truths, moral truths are true in themselves. They don't need to be grounded in something else, as materialists see mental facts grounded in behaviour, or idealists see physical facts grounded in subjective experience.
A realist sees moral sense as "a faculty that aims to identify those facts in our circumstances of choice that count for and against certain courses of action, and to discover how they combine to determine what course would be the right one, or what set of alternatives would be permissible or advisable and what others ruled out." In that sense it's kind of like logic: If X, then Y. It's hard to prove whether any domain like this (physical world, maths, morality, aesthetics) is true in itself or simply true because we have a tendency to reach the same conclusions (e.g., grammar or etiquette). Keeping in mind the difficulties involved, Nagel thinks that support for realism "can come only from the fruitfulness of evaluative and moral thought in producing results, including corrections of beliefs formerly widely held and the development of new and improved methods and arguments over time."
5.3
What are the implications? For one, "Since moral realism is true, a Darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in its favour." A comprehensive world view will have to account for how the cosmos gave rise to "beings capable of thinking successfully about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on their beliefs."
Sharon Street argues that moral realism is incompatible with Darwinism, that if our value judgments are a result of natural selection, then there is no reason to expect them to conform with any moral truths independent of the mind, because such an ability would not contribute to 'reproductive fitness.' Being able to correctly read physical facts would do that (i.e., physical realism is definitely compatible with Darwinism), but moral instincts (e.g., nurturing, cooperation, etc.) are just here because they helped us survive--there's no reason that they couldn't actually be "systematically false." If we take pleasure and pain, for example (the pre-rational data for moral sense), their real "badness or goodness" is "completely superfluous" to a Darwinian understanding--pain could very well be objectively good, or even valueless, and we could be blind to this fact.
5.4
So if our basic moral responses have no ground in a moral reality, neither would the more complex systems we devise (the same way all our scientific theories would be worthless if we abandoned the idea of physical reality). But even though a moral system not grounded in reality can still be self-consistent, Nagel is convinced there is moral reality: that pain really is bad, and pleasure really is good. Again, that doesn't mean they're infallible; just starting points for moral reasoning. To Darwinism, of course, this would be an illusion, "plainly contingent, response-dependent norms" (like language).
It's hard to describe the alternative, since pleasure and pain ARE biologically hard-wired and DO play a role in biological fitness. A realist would say that they do have some essential value in themselves, but that the reason they're linked with certain biological functions (like sex or injury) is unknown. They have a double role: "They are adaptive, but they are something more than that." They are also "objects of reflective consciousness," from which we can discover moral principles. Nagel thinks that Darwinism cannot explain the faculties that lead to our moral judgments.
5.5
Like consciousness and cognition, the problem of value in nature also has constitutive (what kind of beings are we?) and historical aspects (what must evolution be like to have produced us?). Not only do we detect value, but we are also motivated by it. An instinctive motivation his built into pain and pleasure itself (to stop pain and continue pleasure). But even when we're not experiencing pain or pleasure, we can still be motivated by them (working to prevent pain in ourselves and others, e.g., me giving you some DMSO to relieve your pain). In other words, we act based on a reason, not an external stimulus (as with honesty/dishonesty, justice/injustice, loyalty/betrayal). Nagel thinks this process "involves a conscious control of action that cannot be analyzed as physical causation with an epiphenomenal conscious accompaniment, and that it includes some form of free will." "It is through being recognized as reasons by a value-sensitive agent that they affect behaviour." To make a comparison, when I think, I actively recognize my reason for a certain conclusion (e.g., the sun rises to my right, therefore I must be driving north). When I act, I actively recognize my moral reason for making a certain choice (e.g., if I don't brake, I will run over that dog).
A reductive explanation of this is difficult. Value only seems to make sense in reference to consciousness, not as a combination of parts. Simple pleasure and pain may be, but not active, practical reasoning about them. This suggests an emergent answer to the constitutive question.
The biggest implication of the realist view is that consciousness "plays an active role in the world."
5.6
A realist answer to the historical questions more obscure than the Darwinian version. The thing that has to be added is this: the ability to control actions in response to reasons. (If we didn't have such an ability, we would be motivated solely by our desires, and our capacities to be guided by perceptions, memories, and theoretical reason.) Animals can't do this, and the fact that humans can suggests it has some basis in reality--it's a fact on the ground that has to be taken into account in our larger world view. It may be compatible with natural selection (or at least inimical to it), but something additional to the Darwinian account has to explain it. "As I have said, the process seems to be one of the universe gradually waking up"--physics and chemistry, organisms whose lives are filled with value ("huge quantities of pain as well as pleasure"), self-conscious beings capable of responding to and being motivated by values. Things could go well or badly for the earliest organisms (i.e., they had a "good"). For self-conscious beings, there came the ability to recognize that what happens to them is either good or bad, and they could then learn to think about "how these reasons combine to determine what they should do." Then, to collectively share and think about not only themselves, but others.
"Only beings capable of practical reason can recognize value, but once the recognize it, they find it in the lives of creatures without practical reason. In the broadest sense it is probably coextensive with life … It seems too simple to hold that only the value in conscious lives generates reasons. As Scanlon says, it would be callous and objectionable to cut down a great old tree just for the fun of trying out one's new chain saw."
Two things must be explained to answer the historical question: (1) "the appearance of value in the myriad forms it takes in the variety of lives capable of having a good," (2) "the appearance of reasons for actions and of those beings capable of recognizing them and acting on them." Whatever explains the origins of life would also explain the first one. But for the second, is whatever accounts for reason enough to also account for value? Nagel doesn't think so. General cognitive ability does NOT necessarily imply the capacity to recognize and respond to reasons for action. "Practical reason is a development of the motivational system and of the will, not merely a development of the system for forming beliefs."
But there IS something 'subjective' about value: it's tied to the content of the particular form of life. Bees and humans have different values. In other words, "value must be seen as pluralistic: The domain of value, if there is such a thing, is as rich and complex as the variety of forms of life, or at least of conscious life. … since value realism can accommodate agent-relative reasons for action, the recognition of what is objectively valuable in the life of one creature does not automatically settle the question of what reasons it implies for the actions of another." Value is objective, but it takes many forms. Life and consciousness come "already freighted with value," and only further along the evolutionary ladder, this fact can be recognized.
A causal explanation (in contrast to teleological and intentional) is as difficult as a reductive one. It would only be by accident that anything would come to have objective value. A teleological answer, on the other hand, would say that "life is a necessary condition of the instantiation of value, and ultimately of its recognition." The world would have a natural propensity to "give wrist to beings of the kind that have a good"--all actual and possible forms of life. Evolution would exist in order to bring value into the world, in a great variety of forms. This implies "the emergence of both good and evil." The world is not purely benign, tending towards the good. "In fact, no teleological principle tending toward the production of a single outcome seems suitable. Rather, it would have to be a tendency toward the proliferation of complex forms and the generation of multiple variations in the range of possible complex systems." "In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value."
This view acknowledges Darwinian evolution and natural selection, but its explanation for the existence of DNA and the forms it makes available for natural selection. Natural teleology, based on some tendency to form life not found in the laws of physics and chemistry, might provide an alternative to the two "miracle" accounts: "either in the sense of a wildly improbably fluke or in the sense of a divine intervention in the natural order."
"And once there are beings who can respond to value, the rather different teleology of intentional action becomes part of the historical picture, resulting in the creation of new value. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--the all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively."
"When we ask ourselves, for example, whether revenge is a true justification or just a natural motive, or what kind of weight we should give to the interests of strangers of of other species, we should think of ourselves as calling on a capacity of judgment that allows us to transcend the imperatives of biology."
Chapter 6 - Conclusion
In summary, the Darwinian account fails to provide an adequate constitutive or historical account of the universe. It's popularity is "a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense."
"It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity's present stage of intellectual development. But I believe that we cannot know this, and that it makes sense to go on seeking a systematic understanding of how we and other living things fit into the world."
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