





































Microsoft Word - EiF-3-final.docx


[Expositions 8.2 (2014) 26–37]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Explaining Value: Nagel on Normative Realism and the Teleology of 
Evolution 
 
MICAH LOTT 
Boston College 
 
 
In chapter 5 of Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel argues that value realism shows that 
“something is missing from Darwinism, and from the standard biological conception of 
ourselves.”1 A major part of what is missing is the right sort of explanation for the historical 
process that brought into existence value and beings like ourselves who can consciously 
recognize value. An adequate explanation of that process, Nagel suggests, would be teleological 
in character, with value as the telos that explains the emergence and evolution of living things.2 
As he says, “On a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because it is 
part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life, with all its possibilities of 
development and variation. In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there 
is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”3 

To some readers, such a teleological explanation of life’s development will seem outrageous, 
even absurd. In this essay, I will not challenge the possibility of such an explanation. But I wish 
to raise some doubts about Nagel’s claim that value realism calls for historical teleology of this 
sort. Before doing so, I will attempt to clarify Nagel’s line of thought. 

Nagel presents his view in conversation with the work of Sharon Street, in particular her 
“Darwinian dilemma” for realist theories of value.4 Street argues that realism is incompatible 
with a Darwinian view of how evolution has shaped our moral and evaluative faculties. Nagel 
agrees with this claim. However, whereas Street maintains that we should give up realism, Nagel 
draws the alternative conclusion—we should revise the Darwinian account. 

In spite of Nagel’s presentation, I think it is ultimately misleading to interpret his argument in 
the context of Street’s work. In the next section, I will explain why Street’s Darwinian dilemma 
is really a distraction from Nagel’s chief concerns. With Nagel’s argument in better focus, I will 
then argue that we can accept the sort of antireductionism and value realism that Nagel favors, 
without embracing a teleological account of the process of evolution. 
 
Darwinism and Realism: Clarifying the Issues 
 
As Nagel understands it, realism about value is the view that there are fundamental evaluative 
and moral truths that are true in their own right, and not made true by our attitudes or 
dispositions. Realists maintain that “when our value judgments are correct, it is because our 
dispositions are in accord with the actual structure and weight of values in the case at hand.”5 
Nagel contrasts realism with subjectivism, according to which value judgments depend for their 



27  Lott 
 

truth on us—i.e., on our attitudes or dispositions or motivations. The dispute between realism 
and subjectivism is thus “a dispute about the order of normative explanation.”6 

In a series of articles, Sharon Street has argued that Darwinian evolution poses a dilemma for 
realism. Street understands realism in roughly the same way as Nagel, as the view that “there are 
at least some evaluative facts or truths that hold independently of all our evaluative attitudes.”7 
Street’s argument begins with the claim that evolution has exerted a profound influence on our 
basic evaluative tendencies, and that these tendencies in turn shape our normative judgments. 
Street then asks: What is the relationship between evolutionary influences on our judgments, and 
the normative truths posited by realism, which hold independently of our attitudes and 
judgments? One possibility is that evolution has selected our evaluative tendencies because they 
help us reliably track the independent normative truths, and thus evolution has been pushing us 
toward those truths. But this “tracking account” of our faculties is scientifically untenable, for it 
is much less plausible than the alternative “adaptive link account,” according to which our 
evaluative tendencies were selected because they promoted reproductive fitness. The other 
possibility is that there was no connection between evolutionary influences on our faculties and 
normative truths. What promotes reproductive fitness is one thing, and independent truths 
normative are another. While scientifically acceptable, this possibility means that it would be a 
massive coincidence if evolution has in fact shaped us to form reliably true beliefs about 
normative truths. As Street says: 

 
Of course it’s possible that as a matter of sheer chance, some large portion of our 
evaluative judgments ended up true, due to a happy coincidence between the 
realist’s independent evaluative truths and the evaluative directions in which 
natural selection tended to push us, but this would require a fluke of luck that’s 
not only extremely unlikely, in view of the huge universe of logically possible 
evaluative judgments and truths, but also astoundingly convenient to the realist.8 
 

Given the improbability of such a coincidence, we should conclude that evolution’s influence on 
our evaluative faculties was not pushing us toward normative truths, but away from them. In all 
likelihood, “the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was 
thoroughly contaminated.”9 And thus we should conclude that our faculties of normative 
judgment do not lead reliably to true beliefs. Rather, “all our reflection over the ages has really 
just been a process of assessing evaluative judgments that are mostly off the mark in terms of 
others that are mostly off the mark.”10 And therefore we should be skeptics about our ability to 
know normative truths. So realists have two options: embracing an untenable “tracking account,” 
or embracing normative skepticism. That is Street’s Darwinian dilemma. 

Although Nagel frames his position in relation to Street’s argument, he never actually states 
her dilemma in its complete form. As Nagel correctly points out, part of Street’s argument is that 
“from a Darwinian perspective, the hypothesis of value realism is superfluous—a wheel that 
spins without being attached to anything.”11 But Nagel doesn’t explain why this superfluity 
matters to Street. The reason is that she believes that, given this superfluity, we have no grounds 



Explaining Value  28 
 

for thinking that our judgment-forming faculties are reliable. It would be a massive coincidence 
if our faculties were to lead us to recognize correctly the independent normative truths. And 
therefore if normative truths are independent of us as the realist supposes, we ought to conclude 
that we lack all knowledge of them. Moral realism leads to skepticism about moral knowledge. 

Nagel doesn’t spell out these points about coincidence, reliability, and knowledge. Nor does 
he consider the two most prominent types of reply to Street’s argument. The first type of reply 
rejects Street’s claim that evolutionary processes have exerted such a thorough-going influence 
on us that our normative judgments must be seen as the products of evolutionary forces.12 The 
second type of reply grants a role to evolution in shaping our beliefs, but maintains that our 
faculties might still be reliable in leading us to normative truth, on account of some “pre-
established harmony” or third factor. For example, David Enoch argues that it is plausible to 
suppose that it was evolutionarily beneficial to believe that our survival is good. And thus 
evolution has shaped us—for reasons of reproductive fitness—to be inclined to believe that our 
survival is good. However, it is also plausible to assume that our survival is good, in the realist 
sense. Thus, although evolution did not push us toward this belief because it was true, 
nevertheless evolution shaped us to reliably form the true belief that our survival is good: “The 
fact that (roughly speaking) survival is good pre-establishes the harmony between the normative 
truths and our normative beliefs.”13 Other authors have made arguments with a similar structure 
with respect to our beliefs about the moral standing of persons and the badness of pain.14 The 
crucial point for this kind of reply is that, even without a “tracking account,” we can explain why 
it is no coincidence that we reliably form true judgments about normative matters. And thus 
realism need not lead to skepticism. 

What interests me here is not whether either of these replies to Street’s argument (or some 
combination of them) is successful. Rather it is that Nagel does not even consider these replies. 
This is further evidence, I think, that while Nagel agrees with Street that value realism is 
superfluous to the Darwinian story, he has a different view of why this superfluity is important. 
For Nagel, the significance of the superfluity is not that it threatens to force the realist into moral 
skepticism. Rather the significance is that an adequate explanation of the process whereby value 
comes about should not make value’s appearance and recognition into a side effect or “lucky 
accident.” And according to Nagel, reckoning with this point leads us toward a teleological 
account of the evolutionary process. 

We can identify four steps in Nagel’s line of thought. The first step is the very basic 
assumption that the universe is fundamentally intelligible.15The second step is identifying certain 
features of the universe as “significant” or “systematic,” such that they require explanation and 
cannot be seen merely as “brute facts.” The third step is an argument that explaining something 
requires more than just knowing the immediate cause of an event. Rather, “explanation, unlike 
causation, is not just of an event, but of an event under a description. An explanation must show 
why it was likely that an event of that type occurred.”16 To illustrate this point, Nagel gives the 
example of tapping “3,” “+,” “5,” and “=” into a pocket calculator, and seeing the figure “8” 
appear on the screen. We could identify the physical causes of the figure on the screen—e.g., the 



29  Lott 
 

electrons in the calculator’s circuits. But a physical-causal explanation does not yet explain why 
the calculator gave the right answer—it doesn’t explain its giving the right answer as such. “To 
explain the result under that description, we must refer to the algorithm governing the calculator, 
and the intention of the designer to give it a physical realization.”17 

These first three steps apply not only to matters of value but to explanation in general, 
including the explanation of consciousness and cognition (treated in chapters 3 and 4, 
respectively, of Mind and Cosmos). Joined to value realism, these three steps amount to the idea 
that the existence and recognition of value are among the significant features of our world that 
require explanation as such. For Nagel, this means having an answer to the question: Why is the 
universe such that it contains value and creatures who can recognize it—and why is it like that 
under that description? 

We can make this question more specific, however, by taking a fourth step. This consists in 
recognizing that value comes into the world with the emergence of life, and indeed that value is 
coextensive with life, and that different kinds of normative reality correspond to different forms 
of life. As Nagel says: 

 
What is the actual history of value in the world, so far as we are aware of it? 
Nothing in this domain can be regarded as obvious, but in the broadest sense, it 
seems to coincide with the history of life. First, with the appearance of life even in 
its earliest forms, there come into existence entities that have a good, and for 
which things can go well or badly. Even a bacterium has a good in this sense, in 
virtue of its proper functioning, whereas a rock does not. Eventually in the course 
of evolutionary history there appear conscious beings, whose experiential lives 
can go well or badly in ways that are familiar to us. Later some descendants of 
those beings, capable of reflection and self-consciousness, come to recognize 
what happens to them as good or bad, and to recognize reasons for pursuing or 
avoiding those things. They learn to think about how these reasons combine to 
determine what they should do. And finally they develop the collective capacity 
to think about reasons they may have that do not depend only on what is good or 
bad for themselves.18 

 
With this picture of value and life in place, we can now refine our earlier question into a more 
specific one: Why did the historical process of evolution, through which life arose and 
developed, occur as it did, such as to give rise to value and creatures who recognize it? And 
because value and its recognition demand explanation as such, an adequate answer to this 
question about the process of evolution will not represent value and its recognition as a “lucky 
accident,” or as something superfluous to the process. But that is exactly how a Darwinian 
accounts represents value and its recognition, and thus a Darwinian account provides an 
inadequate explanation. 

In contrast, a teleological view of the evolutionary process explains the existence and 
recognition of value as such. For on that view, the emergence and development of life took place 
as it did partly because this process led to value and its recognition. As Nagel says, “part of the 



Explaining Value  30 
 

explanation for the existence of that process and of the possibilities on which natural selection 
operates would be that they bring value into the world, in a great variety of forms.”19 

It is clear, I think, that we do not need Street’s dilemma to articulate the line of thought that 
leads Nagel from value realism to a teleological explanation of evolution. Nor do the two most 
prominent types of reply to Street’s dilemma address the points that Nagel has in mind. Thus I 
conclude that Street’s argument is mostly a distraction from Nagel’s own reasons for thinking 
that value realism pushes us toward a historical teleology. 

 
From Value Realism to Historical Teleology? 
 
Having distinguished these issues, we can now ask: How convincing is Nagel’s argument that 
value realism calls for a teleological explanation of the evolutionary process? To answer this 
question, it will be helpful to consider the over-arching aim of Mind and Cosmos. That aim is to 
argue against a materialist (or, equivalently, reductionist) view of the natural order, and to 
explore the possibilities for non-materialist and anti-reductionist understandings of the cosmos. 
By materialist, Nagel means the view that “everything can be accounted for at the most basic 
level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology.”20 The materialist claims that reality 
consists ultimately only of physical facts, and he hopes to explain thought, purpose, and value in 
terms of such facts. The non-materialist holds that other forms of explanation are needed to 
understand and explain reality. In brief, “there are some things that the physical sciences cannot 
fully account for.”21 

Nagel has long been critical of reductionism.22 But Mind and Cosmos goes beyond his earlier 
writings in sketching a positive alternative picture of the natural order. As he says, “Even if the 
dominance of materialist naturalism is nearing its end, we need some idea of what might replace 
it. […] A genuine alternative to the reductionist program would require an account of how mind 
and everything that goes with it is inherent in the universe.”23 

I believe that what leads Nagel to historical teleology is neither antireductionism as such, nor 
value realism as such, nor the combination of the two. Rather it his notion of what “a genuine 
alternative” to reductionism must look like. I will now try to explain what I mean by this, and 
then raise some doubts about Nagel’s ideal of “comprehensive self-understanding.”24 

To see the issue, we can begin with an argument about living things that Nagel does not 
consider, but which has clear antireductionist implications of its own. In recent years, Michael 
Thompson has argued that we can conceive of something as living only by viewing it in light of 
some life-form concept, such as “the monarch butterfly” or “the African elephant.” Thompson’s 
basic argument goes as follows: In order to represent anything as living, we must interpret 
certain things as vital processes of an organism—as eating, swimming, etc. To be alive just is to 
be the subject of some vital processes, and thus representing an individual as living requires 
representing some things as vital processes. However, if an individual is considered in isolation 
from any conception of its life-form, then there is nothing to determine the appropriate 
description of what is happening qua vital process. For very different physical-chemical 



31  Lott 
 

happenings can amount to the same life process across different life-forms—e.g., “hunting” or 
“reproducing” can be instantiated in different physical-chemical happenings in individuals of 
different species. And the same physical-chemical happening can amount to different vital-
processes in different life-forms. As Thompson points out, mitosis is a part of reproduction in an 
amoeba, and part of self-maintenance in a human being.25 Considered in isolation from an 
understanding of the life-form in which these processes are occurring, there is nothing to fix the 
vital-description one way or another, nothing to determine that this physical-chemical happening 
counts as “hunting,” “reproducing,” etc. Thus, to grasp what is going on here and now with an 
organism, and even to see it as living, we must interpret an individual organism through some 
conception of its life-form.26 

Such a life-form conception, Thompson goes on to show, can be articulated in a system of 
“Aristotelian categoricals,” which express the characteristic features and activities of the life-
form—e.g., “the bald eagle has two wings,” “tiger moths produce clicks to jam the echolocation 
systems of predator bats.” Aristotelian categoricals express the function of different parts and 
activities of the life-form: “they articulate the relations of dependence among the various 
elements and aspects and phases of a given kind of life.”27 An organized system of such 
categoricals gives “one’s interpretation or understanding of the life-form shared by the members 
of that class.”28 

Thompson’s argument is antireductionist insofar as it demonstrates that our understanding of 
living things can never be reduced to the kind of physical-chemical descriptions that might 
equally describe non-vital activity. To see something as a vital part or process requires bringing 
to bear some implicit understanding of the life-form. And every life-form conception involves a 
grasp (however dim) of the functional relations among the parts and processes of the life-form. 
Thus to view something as living, we must employ some idea (perhaps mistaken) of how various 
things play a part in the life of this sort of creature. This is a teleological mode of understanding. 
And thus a teleological mode of understanding is unavoidable for getting anything into view as 
living. 

For my purposes here, it does not really matter if Thompson’s arguments are convincing. The 
point I wish to stress is that, in spite of their antireductionist implications, Thompson’s claims 
are fully compatible with a Darwinian story of how particular life-forms came into existence. 
Thompson’s reflections show what we are doing when we represent something as living. But 
these reflections are neutral on questions about how living things came into being, or why the 
world is such as to having living things at all. If successful, Thompson’s arguments demonstrate 
that any Darwinian explanations must presuppose another, non-Darwinian form of thought. For 
we must already employ life-form concepts even to have a topic for Darwinian explanations and 
to provide us with the materials of that explanation. To represent something as a “gene,” for 
example, is already to engage in life-form thought, since we cannot represent something as a 
gene apart from some wider context provided by a life-form conception. Even so, Thompson’s 
reflections do not challenge the Darwinian explanation of the origin of life-forms. And the 
irreducible teleology of life-form thought certainly does not require the different kind of 



Explaining Value  32 
 

teleology that is Nagel’s focus—a teleology within the historical process of evolution whereby 
life-forms came into existence. 

Consider now a different set of antireductionist claims, more directly related to issues of 
value. In his book The Retrieval of Ethics, Talbot Brewer argues that, in order to view something 
as an action, we must have some sense of what the agent took be good in what she was doing. 
Drawing on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Brewer argues that explaining something as an 
action requires more than identifying certain causes of an occurrence, even if those causes are 
beliefs and desires. For beliefs and desires will not make sense of the action—not make it 
intelligible qua action—unless they reveal what the agent took to be good or valuable. As 
Brewer says: 

 
[C]iting a desire can contribute to the rationalizing explanation of an action only 
insofar as it helps us to understand what the agent saw in the action such that it 
seemed worth choosing. It we can’t see how a performance might be traced to 
some source of subjective appeal, then we have not yet seen why it counts as an 
action rather than mere obsession…To bring an agent into view requires that we 
come to see how the world of value might possibly appear to another, and this 
interpretive task cannot succeed with just any goal-directed bodily motions.29 

 
Brewer goes on to argue that in order to make sense of our lives—and especially of “dialectical 
activities” such as friendship—we must understand ourselves as (dimly) apprehending objective 
goods and values. Brewer’s arguments are complex, and the details are not important for my 
point. What matters is that Brewer’s position is clearly antireductionist on questions of value. 
(He says that his own view is premised upon “value realism.”30) However, Brewer's view does 
not seem to require any particular further view of how agents came into existence, or why the 
world is such as to have agents and the values that they recognize. On a plausible reading of 
Brewer’s position, his claim is of the following form: If we wish to make our actions and our 
lives intelligible in the fullest way possible, then we must employ a mode of understanding that 
makes reference to objective values. Thus the cost of abandoning value realism is becoming 
opaque to ourselves as agents, and becoming inarticulate about our activities. Understood this 
way, Brewer’s position is analogous to Thompson’s point about livings things—it about what we 
are doing when we represent ourselves as agents. (This does not mean, of course, that values are 
not real, or that values are merely something we “project onto” the world—just as Thompson’s 
arguments do not show that life is something we “project onto” the world.) 

With Thompson and Brewer in mind, let us return to Nagel’s argument about evolution and 
positive alternatives to reductionism. We can now distinguish more clearly between two 
questions. One question is what forms of intelligibility we require to understand ourselves and 
the natural order. This is the question that Nagel poses to frame the disagreement between 
materialists and antireductionists. The materialists whom Nagel opposes claim to know “that 
mentalistic, teleological, and evaluative intelligibility in particular have been left behind for good 



33  Lott 
 

as fundamental forms of understanding.”31 On this issue, the positions of Thompson and Brewer, 
respectively, place them on the side of Nagel against the materialists. With Thompson, we can 
say that understanding living things as such involves a form of intelligibility that is irreducibly 
teleological, requiring a thought about what plays a part in the life of the organism. With Brewer, 
we can say that understanding agents as such involves a form of intelligibility that is irreducibly 
evaluative, requiring some grasp of the goodness that an agent finds in what she is doing. 

A second question is what sort of intelligibility is appropriate to the historical process of 
evolution. Here, Nagel suggests we ask: Why did the historical process of evolution give rise to 
value and creatures who recognize it, and why did it do this under that description? And 
historical teleology emerges as Nagel’s answer to that question. But neither antireductionism nor 
value realism requires us to pose the question as Nagel does. We might believe that reality 
includes organisms and agents and values and irreducibly normative truths, and we might hold 
that none of these things can be understood using only the concepts of the physical sciences, 
while at the same time holding that Nagel’s question has no answer, or is misguided. 

Now, if Thompson is correct, our thought about the historical process of evolution 
unavoidably involves life-form concepts, since we are thinking about the evolution of living 
things. But neither this point, nor realism about value shows that in approaching the historical 
question of life’s origins we should seek a form of understanding that goes beyond the 
Darwinian account. Rather, it might be that the Darwinian story is all there is to say about the 
historical question, even though Darwinian explanation cannot replace other forms of 
understanding. On this kind of antireductionism, we simply have different modes of 
understanding—different kinds of concepts—that are appropriate to different domains of reality 
and different questions we ask. This is not a concession to materialism or reductionism. It does 
not show that values or normative truths are not real, or that they are replaceable with other 
modes of intelligibility. We can still insist that it is mistaken to attempt to replace all 
“mentalistic, teleological, and evaluative intelligibility” with the intelligibility of the physical 
sciences. But equally, we might be unable to integrate the different forms of intelligibility into a 
single mode of understanding, such that the historical account will also explain value as such. 

This is why I said earlier that what leads Nagel to historical teleology is neither realism nor 
antireductionism as such, nor the combination of the two. This is also why it is potentially 
misleading to say that “an evolutionary self-understanding would almost certainly require us to 
give up moral realism—the natural conviction that our moral judgments are true or false 
independent of our beliefs.”32 For we should distinguish between two claims: (1) that Darwinian 
evolution explains how our species came into existence, and (2) that Darwinian explanations are 
the key to our self-understanding. An antireductionist might accept (1), while insisting that what 
has come into existence—the now-existing selves that we seek to understand—cannot be made 
(fully) intelligible with evolutionary forms of explanation. 

The sort of antireductionism I have been sketching will, I believe, count for Nagel as 
“quietism.” As Nagel characterizes it, quietism is an antireductionist position that rests content 
with an “internal understanding” of our own point of view, rather pursuing a “transcendent self-



Explaining Value  34 
 

understanding.”33 By “transcendent” Nagel means a self-understanding that places our own point 
of view into a larger perspective in which we have “the fundamental level of explanation of 
everything.”34 Such a perspective aspires to an “all-encompassing form of understanding.”35 For 
Nagel, quietism’s refusal to seek such all-encompassing understanding is untenable: 

 
But while internal understanding is certainly valuable, and an essential 
precondition of a more transcendent project, I don’t see how we can stop there 
and not seek an external conception of ourselves as well. To refrain we would 
have to believe that the quest for a single reality is an illusion, because there are 
many kinds of truth and many kinds of thought, expressed in many different 
forms of language, and they cannot be systematically combined through a 
conception of a single world in which all truth is grounded. That is as radical a 
claim as any of the alternatives.36 

 
I am unsure how to assess Nagel’s remarks against quietism and its “pluralistic method.”37 There 
seems to be a large gap between an “all-encompassing form of understanding,” on the one hand, 
and something that is mere “internal understanding,” on the other. Is it not possible to have 
various forms of “external understanding,” each of which places our point of view in some more 
external or “objective” viewpoint, but none of which encompasses or subsumes all the others? If 
so, it seems Nagel is wrong to characterize a pluralistic antireductionism as refusing to seek an 
external conception of ourselves. 

That said, I feel the force of Nagel’s thought that is terribly unsatisfying to explain the origins 
of life—and everything that has come with it—in a way that makes it all seem like a lucky 
accident, or a marvelous side effect of other processes.38 This sense of being unsatisfied is 
perhaps related to what Albert Camus identified as the source of the absurd. According to 
Camus, the absurd arises from a confrontation between our longing for absolute understanding 
and the fact that the world simply is not understandable in the ways we desire it to be. As he 
says, “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the 
confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human 
heart.”39 For Camus, the absurd arises only because human reason is able to understand and 
explain many things within its proper sphere—the sphere of human experience. Efficacious in 
this sphere, however, human reason inevitably seeks to go beyond it. This is our “appetite for 
understanding” and “nostalgia for the absolute.” The absurd “is born precisely at the very 
meeting-point of that efficacious but limited reason with the ever resurgent irrational.”40 

It is not hard to imagine Camus characterizing the lack of satisfaction that I (and Nagel) feel 
with the “lucky accident” view as the result of asking for a kind of explanation that reason is 
unable to give. Looked at this way, the desire for an explanation of mind and value as such is an 
instance of desiring a form of intelligibility that belongs to the human sphere, but is just not there 
to be found in the unreasonable world.41 

All of this, of course, does not yet consider the theological possibilities for framing and 
addressing these issues. 
 



35  Lott 
 

Notes 
 

1. Nagel 2012, 111. 

2. Nagel also considers, and rejects, an explanation of the process in terms of divine 
intentionality. For considerations of space and simplicity, I set aside here the possibility 
of divine intentionality and focus on Nagel’s own answer to the questions he raises. 

3. Nagel 2012, 122–123. 

4. Street 2006. See also: Street 2008 and Street 2011. 

5. Nagel 2012, 100. 

6. Ibid., 102. 

7. Street 2006, 110. 

8. Ibid., 122. 

9. Ibid., 124. 

10. Ibid. 

11. Nagel 2012, 109. 

12. This line of reply might be developed by casting doubt on the idea that having normative 
beliefs would actually have been advantageous to our ancestors. See Parfit 2011, 534–
542. It might also be developed by arguing that, whatever the evolutionary influences on 
our evaluative tendencies, these tendencies do not determine the outcome of our 
normative reasoning. Rather, we are capable of “stepping back” from whatever 
tendencies for belief that evolution has left us with, and our judgments are best explained 
as outcomes of the reasoning that follows after we have stepped back. See Shafer-Landau 
2012. 

13. Enoch 2010, 431. 

14. See Wielenberg 2010 and Skarsaune 2011. 

15. Nagel 2012, 18–20. 

16. Ibid., 47. 

17. Ibid., 48. 

18. Ibid., 117–118. 

19. Ibid., 121. 

20. Ibid., 13. 



Explaining Value  36 
 

21. Ibid., 14. 

22. See Nagel 1986. 

23. Nagel 2012, 15. 

24. Ibid., 29. 

25. See Thompson 2008, 55. 

26. For an in-depth treatment of these issues, see part 1 of Thompson 2008. 

27. Thompson 2008, 78. 

28. Ibid., 73. 

29. Brewer 2009, 35–36. 

30. Ibid., 274. I am unsure how much Brewer and Nagel agree on the term “realism,” but I 
don’t think the differences matters for my point. 

31. Nagel 2012, 20. 

32. Ibid., 28. 

33. Ibid., 29–31. 

34. Ibid., 21.  

35. Ibid. 

36. Ibid., 30. 

37. Ibid. 

38. For a nice summary of Nagel’s thought on this point, see Nagel 2012, 32. 

39. Camus, 1991, 21. 

40. Ibid., 36. 

41. For Nagel’s own early reflections on absurdity and meaning, see his essay “The Absurd” 
in Nagel 1991. 

 

Works Cited 
 

Brewer, Talbot. 2009. The Retrieval of Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: 
Vintage Books. 



37  Lott 
 

Enoch, David. 2010. “The epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to 
understand it, and how to cope with it.” Philosophical Studies 148: 413–438. 

Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. 

_____.1991. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

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

Parfit, Derek. 2011. On What Matters, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Shafer-Landau, Russ. 2012. “Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism, and Moral 
Knowledge.” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 7: 1–37. 

Skarsaune, Knut. 2011. “Darwin and Moral Realism: Survival of The Iffiest.” Philosophical 
Studies 152: 229–243. 

Street, Sharon. 2006. “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value.” Philosophical 
Studies 127: 109–166. 

_____. 2008. “Reply to Copp: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Varieties of Realism Worth 
Worrying About.” Philosophical Issues 18: 207–228. 

_____. 2011. “Mind-Independence without the Mystery: Why Quasi-Realists Can’t Have It 
Both Ways.” In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 6, edited by Russ Shafer-Landau, 1–
32. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Wielenberg, Erik J. 2010. “On the evolutionary debunking of morality.” Ethics 120: 441–
464. 


