Part of philosophy’s concerns has always been with mortal life: how to understand it and how to live it. Nagel’s essays in Mortal Questions are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Questions about our attitudes towards death, sexual behavior, social inequality, war and political power are shown to lead to more traditional philosophical problems about personal identity, consciousness, freedom and value. Nagel's approach to these issues is to place more emphasis on problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. According to him, simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true. On the contrary, they are usually grounds for thinking it false.
Nagel’s focus is always on the arguments for and against the issues and not on dead philosophers. This original book aims at a form of understanding that is both theoretical and personal in its lively engagement with what are literally issues of life and death.
The book has 14 chapters and this SDG will cover two chapters per session for a total of 7 sessions.
Weekly topics
1. Death: If death is the unequivocal and permanent end of our existence, is it a bad thing to die? There is disagreement. He presents arguments for and against the claim that death is not bad so long as not premature or painful.
2. The Absurd: Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd and some even feel it vividly and continually. Nagel maintains that the standard arguments that life is absurd fail as arguments, but they attempt to express something that is fundamentally correct. He examines what is correct about the claim that life is absurd.
3. Moral Luck: Kant maintained that good or bad luck should not influence our moral judgements of a person or a person’s actions. Actions performed with good intentions can turn out badly; and those with bad intentions can have a positive effect. According to Kant, what counts from a moral point of view is whether the action proceeds from a good will. Nagel presents arguments for and against Kant’s position asking, for example, how should we assess actions that are not done under a person’s control?
4. Sexual Perversion: We possess a concept of sexual perversion. Nagel examines the idea, defending it against the charge of unintelligibility and identifying what about human sexuality admits of perversions.
5. War and Massacre: Nagel argues that restrictions on the conduct of warfare are neither arbitrary nor merely conventional but have a moral basis.
6. Ruthlessness in Public Life: Nagel contends that the great modern crimes are public crimes; committed by people who play roles in political, military, and economic institutions. Nagel contends that there is a discontinuity between individual morality and public morality that is not justified.
7. The Policy of Preference: The author asks If a black person or a woman is admitted to a law school or medical school, or appointed to an academic or administrative post in preference to a white man who is in other respects better qualified and if this is done in pursuit of preferential policy or to fill a quota, is it unjust? He presents arguments for and against the claim that such actions are unjust. We will consider the recent U.S. Supreme Court's decision overturning Harvard University's racial enrollment policies.
8. Equality: Nagel contends that there are four types of equality: political, legal, social and economic. He asks what is the basis for the value of equality and how should it be defended when it conflicts with other values.
9. The fragmentation of Value: Even when one is sure about the outcomes of alternative courses of action and knows how to distinguish the pros and cons flowing from the alternatives, one may be unable to make an evaluative judgment about what to do. Genuine dilemmas are of this kind. Nagel identifies five fundamental types of value that give rise to basic moral conflicts: (1) obligations to specific people, (2) constraints on actions deriving from general rights everyone possesses; (3) considerations of utility; how one’s actions affect the welfare of others; (4) perfectionist ends or values; and (5) commitment to one’s own projects. Nagel evaluates these sources of moral conflicts.
10. Ethics without Biology: Nagel asks whether a biological approach to ethics can teach a great deal about it. If ethics is simply a behavioral pattern or habit, then yes. If it is an inquiry that can be approached by rational methods and has standards of justification and criticism, then no. Nagel argues ethics does not have a biological foundation.
11. Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness: Nagel focuses on examples of brain dissection in order to examine the physical basis for mind.
12. What it is Like to be a Bat? In one of the most cited discussions of the nature of consciousness, Nagel raises the question of the nature of consciousness possessed by bats. His purpose is to reflect on the nature of consciousness that is not limited to human beings.
13. Panpsychism: Nagel addresses the view that basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties even if not part of living organisms.
14. Subjective and Objective: Nagel argues that the so-called objective view of reality is an incomplete view because it ignores aspects of reality that are irreducibly subjective, such as the mind and experience.
Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel; Supreme Court Decision: Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. To be handed out and used in connection with Topic 7