Thomas Nagel: life is necessary for value

I write in chapter 2 of my book Doing Environmental Ethics (2019), that Philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book Mind and Cosmos argues: “It is trivially true that if there are organisms capable of reason, the possibility of such organism must have been there from the beginning. But if we believe in a natural order, then something about the world that eventually gave rise to rational beings must explain this possibility. Moreover, to explain not merely the possibility but the actuality of rational beings, the world must have properties that make their appearance not a complete accident: in some way the likelihood must have been latent in the nature of things. So we stand in need of both a constitutive explanation of what rationality might consist in, and a historical explanation of how it arose; and both explanations must be consistent with our being, among other things, physical organisms.”

He concludes, therefore, that the view of evolution crediting only random events as causal has “to expand to accommodate this additional explanatory burden, as I have argued it must expand beyond materialism to accommodate the explanation of consciousness.”

This is a significant challenge, for: “if we hope to include the human mind in the natural order, we have to explain not only consciousness as it enters into perception, emotion, desire, and aversion but also the conscious control of belief and conduct in response to the awareness of reasons—the avoidance of inconsistency, the subsumption of particular cases under general principles, the confirmation or disconfirmation of general principles by particular observations, and so forth. This is what it is to allow oneself to be guided by the objective truth, rather than just by one’s impressions. It is a kind of freedom—the freedom that reflective consciousness gives us from the rule of innate perceptual and motivational dispositions together with conditioning. Rational creatures can step back from these influences and try to make up their own minds.”

Furthermore, Nagel reasons: “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.” For as rational beings, we recognize that “evolution has given rise to multiple organisms that have a good, so that things can go well or badly for them, and that in some of those organisms there has appeared the additional capacity to aim consciously at their own good, and ultimately at what is good in itself.” Therefore, Nagel concludes: “Value enters the world with life, and the capacity to recognize and be influenced by value in its large extension appears with higher forms of life.” And this means, “value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”[1]

In a splendid image, Nagel writes: ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.’”[2]

1 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press, 2012), 1-84.

2 Richard Brody, “Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real,” The New Yorker (July 16, 2013), https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/thomas-nagel-thoughts-are-real.