





































Microsoft Word - EiF-2-final.docx


[Expositions 8.2 (2014) 11–25]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics 
 
REGAN LANCE REITSMA 
King’s College, PA 

 
 

“What counts as a good explanation depends heavily on an understanding of what it is that has to 
be explained.” (Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos [2012], 102) 

 
“[E]veryone, even in common life, is forced to conduct himself in greater or lesser degree like a 
scientist […]. [And yet] [w]e don’t know how far we ought to trust our ordinary vulgar methods 
of reasoning.” (Philo, from David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion [1776], 5) 

 
 

I. A Question 
 
Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (2012) has provoked from commentators what at first glance 
seem to be contradictory objections about, of all things, his intellectual confidence. One reviewer 
describes Nagel as seemingly “unconvinced by his own ideas.”1 Others, cited in the introduction 
to this forum, have found his most significant (anti-materialist, Darwin-tweaking, value realist, 
teleological) conclusions audacious, if not completely unhinged. So, is Nagel’s book 
intellectually modest or intellectually bold? 

There are grounds in Mind and Cosmos for both judgments. 
Nagel does make remarkable claims. The subtitle of Mind and Cosmos is “Why the 

Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False”; value realism 
strikes Nagel as “glaringly” correct; non-realism about value loses credibility because of the 
“epicycles” it generates in attempting to explain away the seeming reality of value; the 
materialist’s best attempts to account for consciousness and for some aspects of cognition are 
“flagrantly implausible”; Nagel thinks the universe both has a “cosmic predisposition” to form 
“life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them” and is, through producing 
reflective creatures such as us, “gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”2 

That said, more often than not the tone of Mind and Cosmos, unlike its subtitle, is notably 
modest. Nagel consistently attempts to reveal his guiding presuppositions, and several times he 
presents one of his argumentative beginning points as (no more than) an “ungrounded 
intellectual preference.”3 To give one example, Nagel dismisses “intentional” explanations of the 
origins of human consciousness and cognition (such as that a personal god deliberately created 
us with the ability to reflect and reason) without claiming to have powerful arguments for this 
dismissal—he’s remarked more than once that he simply doesn’t “want the universe to be like 
that.”4 (Intellectual preference, indeed!) Further, Nagel sometimes describes his own exercise in 
positive theory-construction as “inconclusive,” as providing only an “admissible conjecture” or 
two, even as speculative.5 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  12 
 

So, which is it? Is Nagel timorous or temerarious? Worse, is he, at least in Mind and Cosmos, 
scattershot in his judgments? You don’t have to be Aristotle to find yourself wondering whether 
audacious conclusions can sensibly be constructed on a foundation of ungrounded intellectual 
preferences. What, if anything, justifies—what, if anything, even explains—Nagel’s unusual 
admixture of intellectual modesty and intellectual boldness? Is there something, some more or 
less unified, philosophical outlook that holds together Nagel’s higher-order attitudes about his 
own beliefs and his own theorizing? 

I think so. Though there are most certainly other factors at work, part of what explains 
Nagel’s general bearing in Mind and Cosmos is his philosophy of philosophizing. Nagel is a 
thinker who finds the world truly puzzling. In his theorizing Nagel exemplifies, I will argue, an 
attitude of irony-tinged critical engagement classically expressed by Philo in Hume’s Dialogues 
Concerning Natural Religion. Nagel’s honesty about his beginning points, his “decision” to give 
subjectivity and objectivity “equal standing,” his openness to “mystery,” and his complicated 
views about the power and limits of reason all seem to ground, in his thinking, a certain 
philosophical license both to challenge what he sees as the intellectual status quo and to 
speculate. 

None of this should be surprising. Nagel has evinced this general, Philo-style outlook before, 
for instance in his widely-respected, 1971 essay “The Absurd.” There he applied a lesson he 
takes himself to have learned from Philo’s reflections on philosophical skepticism to questions 
about the meaning of life. In Mind and Cosmos, readers see at work, I think, the same 
intellectually engaged, truth-seeking, but philosophically bemused mentality applied to topics 
such as metaethics. 

Nagel’s book is difficult to assess. It raises in my mind big questions about philosophical 
reasoning itself. For example, after reading his chapter “Value,” I find myself asking 
fundamental questions about metaethical theorizing, such as: How much authority should I give 
whatever value realist intuitions I happen to have? Should I privilege instead, as many non-
realists do, the abstemious impulse to explain as much as possible about the moral life in terms 
of the categories preferred by modern science?6 Or should I be willing to construct, or even to re-
construct, my metaphysical outlook in the light of whatever value realist intuitions I happen to 
have? Even more deeply, how, pray tell, to settle—with even a modicum of intellectual 
comfort—into a set of answers to such fundamental questions? 
 
II. Nagel’s Philosophy of Philosophizing 
 
Throughout his career, Nagel’s thinking has been characterized by the belief that philosophizing 
is ultimately grounded in, for lack of a better word, a certain choice about how best to respond to 
various tensions, especially tensions between subjectivity and objectivity, that arise within our 
lives as reflective creatures.7 Nagel evinces this belief about philosophizing for the first time in 
“The Absurd.” In this section, I attempt to describe (what I’m calling) Nagel’s philosophy of 



13  Reitsma 
 

philosophizing. In the next and last section, I consider the role this broad attitude to the reflective 
life plays in Nagel’s metaethical thinking. 

“The Absurd” is about the meaning of life. But in this essay Nagel attempts not so much to 
answer the question whether life ultimately has meaning as to analyze why, when thoughtful 
people consider “life as a whole,” they experience—whether episodically or systematically—a 
sense of its absurdity. This perception can arise, Nagel emphasizes, even as we are pursuing our 
most self-defining, heartfelt, and effective life pursuits.8 For example, for a period of his life, 
Tolstoy felt acutely a sense of the absurdity of all of his bustling activity at the same time that he 
knew he was writing books of profound intellectual and cultural significance.9 Why? What leads 
reflective people—even some enviably successful people—to this judgment about their lives? 

First, a question of basic definition. To make it clear why life as a whole can seem absurd, it’s 
useful to begin with a general idea of what it means to call any situation “absurd.” In ordinary 
life, Nagel says, “a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between 
pretension or aspiration and reality.”10 Nagel provides several colorful examples: “someone 
gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already passed; a notorious criminal is 
made president of a major philanthropic foundation; you declare your love over the telephone to 
an answering machine; as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.”11 

Nagel supposes that if life as a whole seems absurd, we must perceive—though perhaps only 
dimly—“an inflated pretension or aspiration which is inseparable from the continuation of 
human life.”12 In Nagel’s analysis, the philosophical sense of absurdity arises because of a 
profound “collision within ourselves.”13 We are able to occupy two, conflicting vantage points, 
both exceedingly difficult to escape. What clashes in us, Nagel intimates, is the “pretension” that 
our lives and their central pursuits are truly important, or perhaps our aspiration to do with our 
lives something truly worthwhile, and the “reality” that, when we step back from these pursuits, 
they can seem arbitrary and their importance open to doubt. 

Here’s how Nagel speaks of life’s “pretension.” When we live our lives, we generally do so, 
Nagel says, with “seriousness.” We behave as though our choices and our activity truly matter. 
Most of us, as Nagel puts it, “sweat” over our appearance, or our career decisions, or our 
children’s welfare, or how to build God’s good kingdom, or how to get out of work to watch 
today’s Dutch World Cup match: “we cannot live lives without energy and attention, nor without 
making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others.”14 

The issue, Nagel emphasizes, is that we “humans have the special capacity to step back and 
survey ourselves” from perspectives more “objective” than our own personal cares and 
concerns.15 We can take up, for instance, the vantage point of a spectator.16 There is always, at 
every moment, the “perpetual possibility” that we can take a backward step away from our lives, 
our decisions, our cares, commitments, and concerns and wonder, sub specie aeternitatis, 
whether they truly matter. From such a highly disengaged vantage point, we seem like scurrying 
ants. Like ants, we do, no doubt, “succeed” at some of our pursuits. But the impact on the world 
of even our greatest successes seems trivial when we look at them from an eternal standpoint. 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  14 
 

From this view, our lives appear, Nagel says, “curious and slightly surprising,” even “sobering 
and comical.”17 

What should you and I do about this? What is the best response, the very best response, to this 
“inescapable” collision? 

I imagine some readers might wonder whether the collision is truly inescapable, or whether it 
can be dispelled by thoughtful reflection. It’s clear that in “The Absurd” Nagel thinks the 
perception that our lives as a whole are absurd is “fundamentally correct.”18 If someone senses 
that his life as a whole is absurd because he feels the force of the judgment that his strivings do 
not appear, from the perspective of eternity, to be truly significant, then he is glimpsing, Nagel 
thinks, a profoundly important truth about human life. As Nagel puts it, this doubt “cannot be 
laid to rest”; we are “full of doubts” we can’t answer, but also “full of purposes” we can’t 
abandon.19 And so, if we choose to persist in living, this amounts to “the dragooning of an 
unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like 
a human life.”20 

Nagel doesn’t think it the better part of wisdom to ignore this “discrepancy.” Perhaps we can’t 
anyhow. Nagel construes us as, at some level, recognizing—though “perhaps dimly”21—the 
absurdity of our lives. To return to my earlier example, Tolstoy, who initially considered 
questions about the meaning of life childish embarrassments, persistently attempted to set them 
aside. But against his will, they kept cropping back up. Admittedly, most of us, confronted with 
the problem, do at some level, Nagel says, “ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, 
continuing to live with nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them.”22 But this tension-
filled, half-ignorance doesn’t satisfy Nagel. Ignoring a tension isn’t the same as resolving it, and 
in “The Absurd” Nagel seeks out a better, more lucid, more considered response. 

How to discover one? Here’s one idea. Perhaps reflection on ordinary life will lead us to some 
helpful practical advice. Nagel points out that in ordinary circumstances when we find ourselves 
in an absurd situation, we typically attempt to change things for the better. There are at least 
three possible ways to escape ordinary instances of absurdity: modify the relevant pretensions 
and aspirations, change reality so that it better fits the relevant pretensions and aspirations, or 
abscond. 

With your pants at your ankles and the queen’s scepter on your shoulder, you’ll need, I 
suppose, to decide whether you are willing to down-grade your life-long pursuit of being 
considered an indisputably great man among men; whether you are going to double down to 
prove, contrary to the present evidence, that you are truly worthy of being considered so; or 
whether it is time to flee the public eye entirely. Any of these three strategies would mean that 
there is no longer a collision between the way things really are and the way you proudly believe 
or deeply hope they are, maybe because the relevant pretensions or aspirations no longer exist. 

Is there any useful practical advice here? Do any of these three broad strategies provide a 
good model for those of us who feel, whether intermittently or systematically, that our whole 
lives are absurd? The brief answer, Nagel thinks, is no. The discrepancy that prompts the 



15  Reitsma 
 

philosophical sense of absurdity is especially difficult to escape, and to the degree that it is 
escapable, trying to do so is profoundly inadvisable. 

Take the option of modifying our pretensions and aspirations. To modify the relevant 
“inflated” pretension, it would be useful, first, to be able to identify it very precisely. Nagel 
doesn’t. But he does indicate that if modifying our pretensions is tantamount to not living 
seriously, we can’t really modify them—at least not without great difficulty and profound 
(“dissociative”) cost. Many of us do have cares and concerns, and some of these cares are 
inexorable. Can you stop caring about your appearance? About wanting to find an aspirin to get 
rid of your headache? Can you drum up in yourself any desire no longer to care about your 
children’s welfare? Further, can we desist treating at least some concerns as basic concerns? 
Nagel suggests: “no,” any choice involves taking something, some goal or end or value, as 
important. Even the would-be suicide who is attempting to flee the life he perceives as absurd 
can’t escape, at least in his suicidal act itself, the charge of seriousness, as he is taking the 
absurdity of his life as something that he has reason to flee. 

How about the second option? Can we modify reality? Nagel doesn’t discuss this option at 
much length. At times, Nagel seems to operate from the assumption that our behavior, no matter 
what we do, is not truly important from the most objective vantage point we can occupy; at 
others, he simply regards this vantage point as raising legitimate, even unanswerable, doubts 
about the true value of what we pursue. In any case, reading between the lines, Nagel’s answer is 
“no.” 

No doubt, you can attempt to take on goals that are larger and “more objective.” If what 
you’ve been striving for to this point in your life is, say, personal leisure or physical beauty, you 
might wonder whether your pursuits are especially trivial and self-absorbed and whether the best 
response is to commit yourself to broader pursuits, pursuits that matter from a vantage point 
more expansive than your own comfort or popularity. Some people—hedonists in a mid-life 
crisis—might decide, accordingly, to commit to morality, a vantage point that attends to the 
welfare not merely of you but of all people. 

So, what if we were to suppose that the basic problem is that our lives aren’t being lived in 
pursuit of sufficiently “large enterprises”? At this point in his argument, Nagel doesn’t talk 
metaphysics, he talks epistemology; he doesn’t claim that nothing truly matters. Instead, 
commitment to larger enterprises, Nagel emphasizes, isn’t immune from the same basic doubts 
that can vex narrower concerns. From a highly objective perspective, we can doubt the 
importance of whatever we care about from our own subjective perspectives, even an expansive 
commitment to social justice or to building God’s everlasting kingdom. 

There is, to recall, a third option: absconding. We could choose to remove ourselves from our 
absurd lives by fleeing the scene, that is, by committing suicide. Nagel discourages this response 
for several reasons. Committing suicide would be, Nagel says, “hasty.” True enough, once dead, 
you can no longer be accused of taking your life more seriously than a disengaged spectator 
could. Collision avoided. But the act of suicide presumes that living an absurd life is, all things 
considered, not only a bad thing but worse than death. Again, that takes something, the desire not 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  16 
 

to live absurdly, seriously. And Nagel might think, though he doesn’t say it, that this presumes 
that we know, or have very good reason to suppose, that there isn’t anything that truly matters, 
which we don’t know, or at least don’t know that we know. 

Nagel also discourages us from wallowing. If we think greater objectivity reveals that our 
activity is meaningless, should we continuously mutter, “Life is meaningless. Life is 
meaningless”? Or if we grant merely that greater objectivity in the very least raises legitimate 
doubts about our implicit pretensions of meaningful activity, should we mutter, “I can’t know 
with certainty that my pursuits truly matter. I can’t know with certainty that my pursuits truly 
matter”? What good would that do? Such a response strikes Nagel as unattractively self-pitying. 
And, at least near the end of “The Absurd,” he seems to think this strategy reflects a missed 
lesson. If nothing truly matters, then the fact that your pursuits don’t matter doesn’t matter itself 
and so doesn’t call for despair. 

At the end of his analysis, Nagel gestures at what he takes to be the very best response to the 
philosophical sense of the absurdity of life. To put it tersely, reflection on absurdity shouldn’t 
significantly change our day-to-day strivings (whatever they happen to be); it should change, 
instead, our general attitude toward all of our strivings (whatever they happen to be). The 
philosophical perception of absurdity should suffuse your strivings with “a peculiar flavor,” an 
attitude that Nagel calls “a certain irony and resignation.”23 Unable to abandon some of our 
central pursuits and the seriousness with which we pursue them, “we return to our lives, as we 
must, [. . .] our seriousness laced with irony.”24 

There’s no need to despair, Nagel tells us. The aspect of ourselves that leads to questions 
about whether our life pursuits are truly significant is “a manifestation of our most advanced and 
interesting characteristics.”25 Recognition of absurdity is possible only because “we possess a 
certain kind of insight—the capacity to transcend ourselves in thought.”26 Better to be, in other 
words, Socrates feeling absurd than a pig blithely satisfied, or a lifeless corpse. 

It’s natural to ask, though, what Nagel has in mind when he encourages a life lived in “ironic 
resignation,” and in what ways it should “flavor” our lives. Seemingly for clarification, Nagel 
turns to Hume’s Philo. 

Philo believes that philosophical skepticism raises more questions about our ordinary beliefs 
and how we generally form them than “reason” can satisfactorily answer. Think about Descartes 
and his Meditations. In ordinary life, you and I generally trust, among other things, our sensory 
perceptions, our memory, and our reasoning faculties, whether mathematical or logical. We build 
a large edifice of beliefs on the basis of such faith. But should we trust these belief-forming 
processes? They do, of course, sometimes mislead us. Is there then some way to ensure—at least 
in some cases—that the way the world appears to us is the way it truly is? Can we be sure that, 
when we gaze at what seem to be medium-sized objects at fairly close proximity, this is a 
veridical perception? That we’re not, for instance, presently dreaming, or being deceived by an 
all-powerful, all-knowing demon whose sole goal is to trick us into nothing but false beliefs? 

In the Meditations, Descartes attempts to argue that our everyday reasoning is trustworthy, 
even “demon proof.” But as both Pascal and Hume classically object, in arguing that our 



17  Reitsma 
 

reasoning faculties, including our logical faculties, are trustworthy, Descartes is forced to rely 
upon the very same reasoning faculties to get the argument off the ground—a clear case of 
circular reasoning. As Philo puts it, “We don’t know how far we ought to trust our ordinary 
vulgar methods of reasoning,”27 and yet, to form any kind of structure of belief, we find 
ourselves having to rely on these methods. The upshot is that, as Nagel puts it, once skeptical 
hypotheses are raised, there are inevitably, if we’re lucid and honest, more “frameable questions” 
than satisfactory answers.28 

What to do about this? In his own voice, Hume thinks philosophical skepticism can’t erase a 
kind of unsupported natural confidence we generally display in our ordinary processes of 
forming beliefs about the world. And in a famous passage, Hume indicates his penchant for 
setting aside these “melancholy” reflections by playing backgammon with his friends for as long 
as it takes for the unhappy psychological effects of these skeptical concerns to peter out.29 That 
strategy amounts to ignoring the tension between our earnestly striving for true beliefs and 
wondering whether we can trust our everyday belief-forming mechanisms. As we’ve already 
seen in his reflections on absurdity, Nagel wants more than ignoring the problem.  

And so, Nagel turns to Hume’s Philo, who does say a bit more. Melancholy reflections about 
skeptical hypotheses don’t lead Philo to a highly revisionary set of beliefs, for instance to a 
remarkably smaller set. Philo does think, however, that reflection on skeptical hypotheses should 
matter. In his view, a person who has thought intelligently about philosophical skepticism will be 
different from, wiser than, someone who hasn’t. Clear-eyed awareness of skeptical hypotheses 
does lend to a person’s belief system—here’s the phrase Nagel borrows—“a peculiar flavor.”30 

So, a similar “collision” occurs in our theoretical life if we reflect upon our reasoning patterns. 
If I regard my system of beliefs as being well-grounded, but then see that I can’t provide non-
circular justifications of some of my most influential assumptions, I might feel a “discrepancy” 
between my “aspirations” (to true and justified beliefs) and “reality” (my worrying doubts that I 
am failing to attain them). Or, I might see myself as “a very reasonable person,” with a well-
grounded structure of beliefs, then notice that my reasonings are grounded in “unsupported 
natural confidence,” and wonder whether I’ve been caught, like the vainglorious knight, with my 
pants at my ankles. And yet, we can’t do without basic assumptions; we can’t do, probably, 
without a fairly extensive edifice of beliefs. Can we quit being “serious” about our believing 
lives, even as there are more “frameable questions” than satisfactory answers? Some skeptical 
questions, Nagel emphasizes, are not particularly far-fetched. We can easily be led to suspect 
that many of our beliefs are the consequence more of contingent factors such as where we were 
born than of careful reasoning. We can easily suspect that our vaunted belief in our own freedom 
is mistaken. And so on. The grounds for doubt can begin to pour in. 

For better or worse, I confess to being impressed with Nagel’s broad reflections, both about 
skepticism and about absurdity, in “The Absurd.” Nagel seems to be onto something. Not only 
does the essay bring much-needed clarity to an old puzzle about the philosophical perception of 
absurdity, it helps us understand what’s so intractable about this perception and why it can 
arise—forcefully—for most any reflective person. More, a whole philosophical bearing, a whole 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  18 
 

attitude to practical and theoretical thinking, seems to emerge from this paper. (And Nagel’s deft 
writing lends that philosophical bearing significant attraction.) The reader can sense Nagel’s 
piercing intelligence and his intellectual modesty. His spirit, bemused about the prospects of a 
life of careful thinking, simply won’t quit seeking out the truth even so, and even if it makes him 
seem (to himself) a bit ridiculous. 

That said Nagel’s broad philosophical bearing isn’t as clear as we might like. As mentioned, it 
would be helpful to think very precisely about what “inflated pretensions” we (allegedly) more 
or less inescapably bring to our lives. And what precisely are we forced to be “resigned” to? Is it 
that for the rest of our lives we will be arguing from basic premises and treating some normative 
considerations as basic? (I suppose I can live with that; it can even seem to be a banal point.) Is it 
that we are forced to act as though we truly or wholeheartedly believe even when a part of us, 
and a venerable part at that, does not? Acting as though we truly regard our pursuits as of 
objective value when part of us does not? 

Also, there seem to be some very significant practical lessons afoot. But what are they? 
Clearly, Nagel doesn’t want us to quit striving, both after “important” practical goals and after 
the truth. And just as clearly Nagel wants certain second-order attitudes to hover over our 
“serious” pursuits. Which attitudes, though? Perhaps intellectual humility. Perhaps a properly 
bemused attitude toward our own strivings should lead us to a certain type of tolerance for other 
(thoughtful) people, whose strivings have lead them to bend in other directions than we have. If 
we take our cue from Nagel’s allusion to Philo, perhaps there is even an edifying lesson about 
intellectual friendship here. Whereas Philo and Cleanthes, who have very different stripes of 
mind, are able to converse with “unreserved intimacy,” Demea, who demands that his 
interlocutors agree with his starting points, is cut off from such enjoyable and affirming 
conversation and friendship.31 

I suppose we can all nod our heads at humility, tolerance, and intellectual friendship. But does 
Philo’s outlook also warrant idiosyncrasy in philosophical starting points? Re-thinking 
metaphysics in light of realist intuitions? 
 
III. Nagel’s Metaethics 
 
To understand the worldview at work in Mind and Cosmos, we need to recognize Nagel has 
changed his mind in at least one important way since he wrote “The Absurd.” One of his 
operating assumptions has been flipped upside down. In “The Absurd,” the reader—or at least 
this reader—is left with the very strong sense that Nagel does not think there are objective 
values. As mentioned, at times 1971 Nagel merely insinuates that our “pretension” that what we 
pursue has objective values is, when we step back from it, doubtable. But at times he seems to 
assume more: that the taking of the (more) objective viewpoint of the “spectator” of our lives 
reveals that our central pursuits do not have any claim to be real values. (Recall Nagel’s 
argument that since nothing truly matters, there is truly no reason for despair that our life 
pursuits don’t truly matter.) By the time Nagel writes Mind and Cosmos, his thinking is no 



19  Reitsma 
 

longer governed by the stronger, more metaphysical assumption. He is a value realist. He 
continues to think value realism is subject to doubt, but he calls his value realism a “defeasible 
presumption.” Is this, too, a commitment, however seriously it is held, that is to be flavored by 
ironic resignation? 

Let’s see. 
As a value realist, Nagel holds that there are basic, mind-independent evaluative truths, 

among them moral truths. In the normal run of human life, we confront a variety of “oughts”: 
“Don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” “Don’t take a 
dive in a soccer game,” “Don’t torture animals”—in all these cases, we ought not. This type of 
experience, a confrontation with an “ought,” is a quotidian feature of “the mundane 
existence…of value in our lives,”32 and it naturally raises the question, sometimes called the 
normative question, of whether we should grant the relevant “ought” normative authority (and, if 
so, why). 

Certainly, some “oughts” do not warrant being treated as normative. If the central point of the 
rules of grammar is to help writers produce clear, flowing prose, the rule against sentence-ending 
prepositions is invalid: it leads too often to stilted sentences (such as Churchill’s witty reductio 
ad absurdum, “That is a rule up with which I will not put”). And some “oughts,” even if they 
should be treated as normative, aren’t basic. The moral rule against diving in soccer, let’s 
suppose, should be followed. But it certainly isn’t a fundamental evaluative or moral rule; it’s an 
application of a more general moral principle against behaving unfairly. And so, if we were to 
examine critically the normative question about “don’t dive,” we would need to inquire into the 
validity of the more basic rule from which the moral rule against diving is derived, along with 
whatever facts are relevant. 

In Nagel’s all-things-considered view, the “oughts” of etiquette and grammar are not basic, 
mind-independent, evaluative truths. They’re social constructions.33 And explaining their 
validity, to the degree that some of these rules enjoy it, requires us to appeal to common human 
motives and conventions. The reasons we ought to follow them, if we should, are grounded in 
concerns we bring to the context of practical deliberation.34 

By contrast, in Nagel’s view some “oughts”—among them moral “oughts” such as “torturing 
animals is wrong”—are basic, mind-independent, social-convention-independent, and valid. 
Claims such as “torturing animals is wrong” are, Nagel says, “just true in their own right.”35 As 
Nagel sees it, the “explanation” for why we ought to follow them is that they are real, objective 
values; their status as normative does not depend on any attitudes we personally bring to the 
context of practical deliberation. 

In Nagel’s broad outlook, the hard work of practical deliberation, once the relevant objective 
values have been glimpsed, is to discern the “actual structure and weight” of these various 
objective values.36 So it turns out that, in Nagel’s complete world picture, the world isn’t bereft 
of objective values; it’s replete with them. Not wanting to be anthropocentric, Nagel thinks that 
many objective values aren’t values that you and I will be able to incorporate into our practical 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  20 
 

lives; instead, we should commit, most directly, to those objective values that tie to our particular 
“form of life.”37 

How does Nagel articulate and defend this view in Mind and Cosmos? 
In the philosophical literature, everyday moral practice is sometimes treated as providing 

prima facie evidence in favor of value realism. Everyday moral practice seems to be predicated 
on realist assumptions. This idea is likewise the starting point for Nagel’s thinking: as a value 
realist, Nagel treats everyday moral experience as, in this respect, getting things right. But as we 
also speak of “truth” when we discuss the rules of grammar and etiquette, we clearly cannot just 
take for granted that everyday experience is reliable in this regard. This leads to Nagel’s claim 
that value realism is a “defeasible presumption.” And he frames his metaethical discussion in the 
following way: should we maintain this presumption or regard it as “defeated”? Obviously, 
Nagel argues for maintenance. 

In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel’s metaethical theorizing seems to me to fit into two categories, 
which initially seem to be in tension. First, Nagel attempts to diffuse the various, long-standing 
objections that value realism is, in some sense, a philosophically extravagant hypothesis. For 
example, Nagel attempts to strip away “metaphysical baggage” often ascribed to value realism, 
lest it motivate the reductionist impulse to explain away the prima facie intuition that there are 
“real values.” But second, Nagel attempts to reveal the “pervasive” implications of value realism 
for constructing our best anthropology and our best metaphysics. In other words, value realism 
should lead us to make (or even re-make, if we’re metaphysical naturalists) our metaphysical 
outlook. The tension is—to put it in colloquial terms—that the first, diffusing strategy is 
supposed to lead to the conclusion that value realism isn’t really a big deal, while the second 
strategy is to reveal what a big deal it truly is. 

With respect to his diffusionary strategy, Nagel remarks that, in any domain in which there are 
truths, some will be basic. So, assuming value realism, there will be basic evaluative truths. 
Nagel emphasizes that, in his view, value realism does not posit any “new” elements in the 
universe. Evaluative truths “exist” in the same sense that valid logical rules exist: when we try to 
think carefully through arguments, we recognize that modus ponens is a valid reasoning method, 
and arguing in a circle isn’t. A basic, valid rule of logic exists only in the sense that it has a 
certain kind of explanatory or justificatory value: to justify why I accept the conclusion of an 
argument that has the form modus ponens (and the premises of which are true), I need only 
appeal to the logical truth that “modus ponens is a valid rule.” Likewise, Nagel thinks that, to 
justify why I take aspirin for a headache, I need only appeal to the basic evaluative truth that 
“pain is bad” (along with the fact that aspirin is a cure). 

What about the standard objections to value realism? For instance, what about the existence 
and extent of moral disagreement? Nagel isn’t so impressed. He thinks it is common to 
exaggerate the levels of moral disagreement, at least in the basics. Moreover, there are disputes 
about empirical, logical, and numerical questions, too, but these disputes don’t generally lead us 
to doubt scientific, logical, or mathematical realism. After all, there are explanations for such 
disputes other than that such domains lack truths. Some disputants haven’t learned to think 



21  Reitsma 
 

successfully empirically, logically, or numerically, and sometimes irrelevant motives or concerns 
jigger the thinking. For any valid domain of reasoning, there will be people who don’t learn to 
practice it successfully, and some of these people will be otherwise intelligent and well-intended. 

Also, Nagel relies heavily on an analogy. When it comes to sensory perception and our 
theorizing about it, Nagel is strongly inclined to treat realism about empirical matters as a 
“defeasible presumption,” one which we do not ultimately have adequate reason to reject even 
though people disagree, scientists even disagree, sometimes about empirical issues. Recall, with 
respect to our ordinary methods of reasoning, that there are more “frameable questions” than 
satisfactory answers; but Nagel does not regard this skeptical worry as an adequate reason to 
reject realism about empirical matters. More or less, Nagel thinks we should approach evaluative 
and moral realism in the same way. He chooses to trust, among other “vulgar methods of 
reasoning,” his value realist intuitions. Of course, doubts can be raised, and so value and moral 
realism “may be impossible to establish decisively”; but sticking with a belief in the original 
realist intuition is “not unjustified.”38 Treat value realism as the default position, and there 
simply isn’t a compelling reason, Nagel thinks, to leave it. 

To reiterate, Nagel’s second strategy is to argue that value realism does have implications, 
even “pervasive” implications, for our everyday evaluative thinking and for our metaethical 
theorizing. As noted in the introduction to this forum, Nagel accepts the argument made by 
Sharon Street that, though the existence of real values isn’t logically inconsistent with 
Darwinism, the thesis is a fifth wheel to a purely Darwinian outlook.39 And yet, value realism 
“seems” to Nagel “glaringly correct,” leading him to respond to Street’s modus pollens with a 
modus tollens.40 Darwinian mechanisms aren’t, he concludes, the only factor in our development 
into a morally engaged species. Since Nagel isn’t disposed to think that the still, small voice of a 
god has encouraged us to notice evaluative truths, he sees himself as needing an account that 
explains how we come to recognize such truths. So, from metaethical theorizing, the argument 
moves quickly, and dramatically, to speculation about the telos of the universe.  

Other “big conclusions” flow into the discussion as breathtakingly quickly as the modus 
ponens to modus tollens move. We should posit, Nagel suggests: (1) that we have a moral sense 
that is able to discover moral truths; (2) that our moral judgments are able to motivate our 
behavior independent of desires (such as impartial benevolence); and, (3) that teleological value 
realism accords, perhaps better than other metaethical theories, with the very slow but steady 
advance of moral knowledge in human history. I suppose Nagel is correct at least this far: “What 
counts as a good explanation depends heavily on an understanding of what it is that has to be 
explained.”41 
 
IV. What To Conclude? 
 
Does Nagel’s philosophy of philosophizing explain Nagel’s striking admixture of intellectual 
modesty and intellectual boldness? It seems to play a significant role. Though Nagel regards 
value realism as “glaringly correct,” he admits it only “seems” so to him. The pose he strikes is 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  22 
 

of a person who simply hasn’t been able to shake, after considerable flights of reflection, this 
intuition, which he ends up both defending as an “admissible conjecture” and using as the 
beginning point of significant psychological, historical, and metaphysical speculation. How 
better to describe this than as a form of “bemused confidence” in his own theorizing? 

Does this philosophy of philosophizing justify Nagel’s thinking? As I stated earlier, I’m not 
entirely sure what to think about Nagel’s metathics. So much seems to turn on how ultimately to 
assess the realist intuitions that drive Nagel to a cascade of big conclusions. (Of course, in 
fairness to Nagel, the chapter “Value” is probably less a sustained argument for his value realist 
views and their “pervasive” implications than a distillation of the arguments he’s been making 
for some time. And so the “big conclusions” come fast and furious partly because he is sketching 
his views rather than fully arguing for them.) To answer the question, we’d need to think 
carefully about whether it truly is our lot in intellectual life, as Nagel supposes along with other 
thinkers such as Pascal and Hume, that we can build our edifices—no matter how intelligent and 
observant—on nothing much better than an “admissible conjecture” or two. 

In the end, it’s fairly obvious to me that Nagel doesn’t warrant—he is too thoughtful, too 
intelligent, and too intellectually honest to warrant—some of the condescending accusations 
Demea-like critics have levied at him. Philo’s general bearing deserves more respect. 
 
 

Notes 
 

1. Chorost 2013. 

2. Nagel 2012, 106, 100, 92, 118, 82, 112. 

3. Ibid., 25. 

4. This claim first appears in The Last Word (Nagel 1997, 130) and is repeated in Nagel’s 
recent “The Core of Mind and Cosmos” (Nagel 2013). 

5. Nagel 2012, 119. 

6. Admission: I suppose I previously have. Though I don’t consider myself a metaphysical 
naturalist, I’m guilty of what Nagel describes as constructing “epicycles” on behalf of 
Humean subjectivism, a form of value non-realism. See Reitsma 2014. 

7. See Avramides 2006. 

8. Nagel 1971, 720–721.  

9. See Tolstoy 1905. 

10. Nagel 1971, 718. 



23  Reitsma 
 

11. Ibid. 

12. Ibid. 

13. Ibid., 721. 

14. Ibid., 719. 

15. Ibid., 720. 

16. Ibid., 725. 

17. Ibid., 725 and 720. 

18. Ibid., 718.  

19. Ibid., 721, 725. 

20. Ibid., 726. 

21. Ibid., 718. 

22. Ibid., 719. 

23. Ibid., 724.  

24. Ibid. 

25. Ibid., 726. 

26. Ibid., 727. 

27. Hume 1776, 5. 

28. Nagel 1971, 723–724.  

29. Hume 1739–1740, 144. 

30. Hume 1776, 5. 

31. Sessions 2002, especially chapter 16. 

32. Nagel 2012, 92. 

33. Ibid., 99–100.  

34. Ibid., 93. 

35. Ibid., 98. 



The Peculiar Flavor of Nagel’s Metaethics  24 
 

36. Ibid., 95.  

37. Ibid., 114–115. 

38. Ibid., 100. 

39. Ibid., 105. 

40. Ibid., 107. 

41. Ibid., 102. Accordingly, I’m not sure I understand why Nagel says that value realism “is a 
metaphysical [theory] only if the denial of a metaphysical position like naturalism itself 
counts as a metaphysical position” (97). 

 

Works Cited 
 

Avramides, Anita. 2006. “Thomas Nagel: The View From Nowhere.” In Central Works in 
Philosophy, edited by J. Shand, 227–246. Durham, England: Acumen Press. 

Chorost, Michael. 2013. “Where Nagel Went Wrong.” The Chronicle Review, May 13. 
http://chronicle.com/article/Where-Thomas-Nagel-Went-Wrong/139129/ (accessed July 
6, 2014). 

Hume, David. 1739–1740. Treatise of Human Nature. 
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/hume1739book1.pdf (accessed July 10, 2014).  

_____. 1776. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 
http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/hume1779.pdf (accessed July 6, 2014). 

Nagel, Thomas. 1971. “The Absurd.” The Journal of Philosophy 68: 716–727. 

_____. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press. 

_____. 1997. The Last Word. New York: Oxford University Press. 

_____. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature 
Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

_____. 2013. “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’.” The New York Times, August 18. 
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-core-of-mind-and-cosmos/?_r=0 
(accessed July 6, 2014). 

Reitsma, Regan Lance. 2014. “How a Modern-Day Hume Can Reject a Desire 
Categorically.” The European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 9.2: 48–66. 



25  Reitsma 
 

Sessions, William Lad. 2002. Reading Hume’s Dialogues: A Veneration for True Religion. 
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  

Tolstoy, Leo. 1905 [1882]. My Confession, translated by Leo Wiener. London: J.M. Dent and 
Sons. 


