Philosopher Thomas Nagel writes: “Since we are evidently the products of evolution, and ultimately of a cosmic process that led to the development first of unicellular organisms and then of conscious agents before eventually producing intelligent beings capable of value judgments, the conception of the natural order that made this process possible must be expanded. An adequate conception of the cosmos must contain the resources to account for how it could have given 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 own beliefs.
“If we leave the issue of determinism aside, the distinctive conception of human beings that is implied by value realism is that they can be motivated by their apprehension of values and reasons, whose existence is a basic type of truth, and that the explanation of action by such motives is a basic form of explanation not reducible to something of another form, either psychological or physical. I give you aspirin because I know it will relieve your headache, thereby manifesting my recognition that this fact counts in favor of the action. And this is not merely a superficial description of something else, which is the real, underlying explanation.
“Human action, in other words, is explained not only by physiology, or by desires, but by judgments. We are the subjects of judgment-sensitive attitudes, in Scanlon’s phrase,1 and those judgments have a subject matter beyond themselves. We exist in a world of values and respond to them through normative judgments that guide our actions. This, like our more general cognitive capacities, is a higher development of our nature as conscious creatures. Perhaps it includes the capacity to respond to aesthetic value as well—construed realistically as a judgment-independent domain that our experiences and judgments reveal to us.
“As with cognition in general, the response to value seems only to make sense as a function of the unified subject of consciousness, and not as a combination of the responses of its parts. In that respect it is different from those experiences of pleasure and pain that provide some of the most important raw material of value: they might be explained reductively through some form of psychophysical monism. But practical reasoning and its influence on action involve the unified conscious subject who sees what he should do—and that suggests an emergent answer to the constitutive question. On the other hand, the problem of how to reconcile the unity of the subject, such as it is, with a reductive account of the mental afflicts psychophysical monism at every level.
“The most important metaphysical aspect of a realist view of practical reason is that consciousness is not epiphenomenal and passive but that it plays an active role in the world. This is part of the ordinary view we have of ourselves, but it adds to the mere psychophysical irreducibility of experiential consciousness, a further respect in which the materialist form of naturalism fails to provide a complete account of the nature of human beings.2 Whether practical reason is emergent or reducible to activity at the micro level through some form of psychophysical monism, value realism requires consciousness to be active and rules out epiphenomenalism in human action. (A subjectivist view of value may also be incompatible with epiphenomenalism, but that is far from clear: subjectivism might be consistent with the possibility that our conscious value judgments are all side effects of the physiological causes of action.)
“Subjectivism interprets our value judgments as an outgrowth and elaboration, made possible by our linguistic and rational capacities, or our natural motivational dispositions, nothing more. Realism interprets them as the result of a process of discovery, starting from initial appearances of value that are comparable to perceptual beliefs and moving (we hope) toward a better understanding of how we should live. If realism is true, practical reason in this sense is one of our cognitive faculties.
“It is clear that unlike realism, subjectivism lends itself, at least speculatively, to a Darwinian account of how creatures capable of having values might have arisen. At least this question does not add anything to the difficulties for such an account already presented by the problem of consciousness and of reason in general. Value begins, on this view, from our desires and inclinations, which are natural facts of animal and human psychology, and higher-level value judgments are motivational elaborations from this base, generated by experience, refection, and culture.
“On a realist view, by contrast, the historical question is much more obscure, partly because the result is obscure. We want to know what has to be added to the standard Darwinian picture to account for the appearance through evolution of creatures like us, who can control their actions in response to reasons. While this capacity must be consistent with the influence of natural selection in that it is not inimical to reproductive fitness, and therefore not liable to be extinguished by natural selection, its appearance on the evolutionary menu would have to be explained by something else.
“Value realism must make sense of the fact that the biological evolutionary process and the physical and chemical history that preceded it have given rise to conscious creatures, to the real value that fills their lives and experiences, and ultimately to self-conscious beings capable to judgment-sensitive attitudes who can respond to and be rationally motivated by their awareness of those values. The story includes huge quantities of pain as well as pleasure, so it does not lend itself to an optimistic teleological interpretation. Nevertheless, the development of value and moral understanding, like the development of knowledge and reason and the development of consciousness that underlies both of those higher-order functions, forms part of what a general conception of the cosmos must explain.
“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 experimental lives can go well or badly in ways that are familiar.
“In looking for a historical explanation, a realist must suppose that the strongly motivational aspects of life and consciousness appear already freighted with value, even though they find their place in the world through their role in the lives of the organisms that are their subjects. The pleasures of sex, food, and drink are wonderful, in addition to being adaptive. Value enters the world with life, and the capacity to recognize and be influenced by value in its larger extension appears with higher forms of life. Therefore the historical explanation of life must include an explanation of value, just as it must include an explanation of consciousness.”3
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