Nagel on Reason | Mises Institute

One of the dominant superstitions of our time is that truth is relative and not absolute. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel says in The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997),

A vulgar version of this skepticism about reason is epidemic in the weaker regions of our culture. . . The relativistic qualifier—“for me” or “for us”—has become almost a reflex  and. . .it is often generalized into an interpretation of most deep disagreements of belief or method as due to different frames of reference, forms of thought or practice, or forms of life, between which there is no objective way of judging but only a contest for power. (The idea that everything is “constructed” belongs to the same family.)

An example of this view comes from so-called “standpoint epistemology.” Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (1990) argues that,

Black [sic] women’s experiences generate a distinctive standpoint and a distinctive epistemology, grounded in lived experience, dialogue, and an ethic of care. Black women, because of their lived experience of racism and sexism, have access to distinct forms of knowledge that are not fully accessible to white people.

Nagel presents a philosophically deep criticism of the relativist view, and this is the subject of my column for this week.

One of his key points is that challenges to reason contradict themselves because the arguments given in the challenge rely on reason. For example, the statements that standpoint epistemology make about black women are made as if they were true without qualification. Nagel remarks in this connection,

In order to have the authority it claims, reason must be a form or category of thought from which there is no appeal beyond itself—whose validity is unconditional because it is necessarily employed in every purported challenge to itself. This does not mean that there is no appeal against the results of any particular exercise of reason, since it is easy to make mistakes in reasoning or to be completely at sea about what conclusions it permits us to draw. But the corrections or doubts must come from the further applications of reason itself. We can therefore distinguish between criticisms of [particular] reasoning and challenges to reason.

Another way of putting the relativist claim is that it contrasts “subjective” and “objective.” Truth, it is alleged, is subjective. Nagel neatly refutes this:

To put it schematically, the claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report about what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no reason to accept.

Some people might respond by saying that although Nagel may be right about some types of theoretical reasoning like physics, it is another story about morality. As you might expect, Nagel does not buy this:

To take some crude but familiar examples, the only response possible to the charge that a morality of individual rights is nothing but a load of bourgeois ideology, or an instrument of male domination, or that the requirement to love your neighbor is really an expression of fear, hatred, and resentment of your neighbor, is to consider again, in light of these suggestions, whether the reasons for respecting individual rights or caring about others can be sustained, or whether they disguise something that is not a reason at all. And this is a new moral question… One cannot just exit from the domain of moral reflection. It is simply there.

Nagel’s approach leads him to challenge an argument of the great libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick in his book The Nature of Rationality (Princeton University Press, 1993). Nozick contends that our finding certain things self-evident stems from the fact that evolution through natural selection has brought them about. For example, if you think that it’s cowardly to abandon your family in case of danger, this is because this belief has survival value and evolution has “hardwired” us to have it.

Nagel says that, “Nozick is operating here with the idea that the facts and reality are what they are independent of what we think, and I shall follow him in this.” In other words, Nozick isn’t a reductionist who thinks that reality just is what people think it is. Like Nagel, he distinguishes between what we think and what is really “out there” in the world.

But he [Nozick] insists that our finding something self-evident is no guarantee that it is necessarily true, or true at all—since the disposition to find it self-evident could have been an evolutionary adaptation to its being only approximately, and contingently, true. The proposal is supposed to be an explanation of reason but not a justification of it. Although it “grounds” reason in certain evolutionary facts, this is a causal grounding only. These facts are not supposed to provide us with grounds for accepting the validity or reliability of reason. . . But what is it intended to provide? It seems to be a proposal of a possible naturalistic explanation of reason that would, if it were true, make our reliance on reason “objectively” reasonable—that is, a reliable way of getting at the truth.

In other words, if someone objects to Nozick that giving an evolutionary explanation of why we hold beliefs about the world doesn’t show that we are justified in holding these beliefs, he thinks that Nozick would answer, “I’m not trying to do that.”

Nagel then proceeds to what he takes to be the decisive point. Nozick can’t stop with the answer that he is not trying to justify reason.

But is this hypothesis really compatible with continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge about the nonapparent character of the world? In itself, I believe an evolutionary story tells against such confidence. Without something more, the idea that our rational capacity was the product of natural selection would render reasoning far less trustworthy than Nozick suggests, beyond its original “coping” function. . . Unless it is coupled with an independent basis for confidence in reason, the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening rather than reassuring. . . I can have no justification for trusting a reasoning capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself—that is, believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers. . . The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content.

In the simplest way I can put the matter, Nagel is saying that “truth” and “evolutionary success” are different concepts, neither of which entails the other. Reason must always have the last word.