The Possibility of Altruism

by Thomas Nagel

Just as there are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action. This book defends a conception of ethics, and a related conception of human nature, according to which altruism is included among the basic rational requirements on desire and action.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Science, Religion, Psychology

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. He is well-known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings.

Thomas Nagel was born to a Jewish family in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil from Oxford University in 1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls. Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from 1966 to 1980), where he trained many well-known philosophers including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, who is now his colleague at NYU. In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Nagel is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2008, he was awarded a Rolf Schock Prize for his work in philosophy, the Balzan prize, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford University.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas Nagel visited Loyola University during my first semester there while taking David Ozar's Survey Ethics course. Naturally, most of us from class attended his lecture up in the scenic Hussey Lounge atop Damen Hall. He was not a particularly good speaker. It was my first visit to the lounge and I must admit to being distracted by the lovely panorama of the Loop to the south and the Lake to the east.

The book was better, though I have trouble understanding why there is a controversy about the idea of altrustic behavior--enough that Professor Nagle has devoted much of his career to arguing on the pro side of it.

It is a commonplace in evolutionary biology and psychology to distinguish between individual- and species-survival drives. Indeed, the sociobiology fad of the time was substantially based upon the biological evidence. One can, of course, reduce such species-survival drives as our caring for children to a kind of genetic selfishness, but that is perspectival and does not change the fact that we are often motivated in the interests of other individuals.

It seems to me that a fruitful approach to the "problem" is to question the whole self/other distinction, recognizing that the senses of agency/responsibility/selfhood vary between cultures and eras. To take a familiar example of this, consider the many cases in the bible of a member of a family/clan/nation performing an act which the entire collective is identified with--sometimes on to many generations. Consider, for instance, the doctrine of original sin, that "in Adam's fall, so fell we all", as well as that of our redemption through the efficacy of Jesus' sacrifice millenia ago.

From another angle, consider the psychological commonplace of questioning the integrity of the person as agent. Instead, the "person" is regarded as a kind of shorthand reference to an individual body, while the "personality" is regarded as being made up of more-or-less associated complexes. Our culture favors well-integrated complexes of course, the association of bodies with ethical agents being convenient, but recognizes that this is a fiction insofar as, say, law makes exception for "crimes of passion", religions (and the arts) honor certain states of possession, and psychotherapy profits off of various modes of disintegration and maladjustment.

Rather than questioning altruism, why not question the notion of selfishness? What is the "self" anyway? Our culture has a tendency to think of it as being somehow foundationally atomic, individual in the sense of being indivisible. But it might just as well be seen as an ever-changing compromise formation which may, for a time, under certain pressures, appear as solid as a diamond, but which certainly has not the gem's perdurance. Just as our ever-changing bodies ultimately decompose entirely, so too, and often much more suddenly, do our selves. Indeed, bodies occasionally last longer than selves.

Furthermore, the notion of having a unique self or soul does not stand up to analysis. What would constitute such uniqueness? Our private thoughts and memories perhaps? But how do we apprehend this inner, private life of our selves? I do it entirely in terms of the most common, public semiotic and symbolic forms. I know myself in terms of language, very broadly defined, and the languages used are ones taught me by others, understandable to others. Indeed, I know "myself" as an other. Indeed, and this is important, there is a real sense in which "altruism" to oneself is as vitally problematic as altruism to others. Masochism, self-destructiveness in many forms, are common phenomena if not universal.

[Pat Reeder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd honestly give this 3.5 stars if I could. I guess I decided to "round up" to 4. This book offers some very striking arguments against moral skepticism. They are common sense and ultimately persuasive. However, they are presented in the most abstract way possible---few examples and little to no interaction with the voluminous relevant literature. I usually find Nagel's writing to be lively and engaging, but this book is like eating a dry cracker when thirsty. The conclusion chapter could probably be read alone and almost everything would be gained from the text.

[Isabella · Rating 3 out of 5]

growing on me. enjoyed both constructions of his prudential and altruistic argument. the bulk of the book was preemptively fending off sceptics and might have muddied my understanding of each specific premise as a result, and felt redundant at times. the claim that motivation to act is implicit in a reason to act is left wide open to the question of to what and from where do we owe our sense of moral obligation.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

the obscene argument of why you should die for your king, and his kingly regime.

[Ana Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tuve que leer este libro para mi clase de filosofía y damn Nagel tenia DEMASIADO tiempo para pensar. Mi capitulo favorito fue creo del 5-8 cuando habla de como va mano a mano instrumental principle con practical reasoning y como si tienes desire for an end igual tienes un desire para hacer los means y como tienen el mismo value. Igual la parte del timeless being con las razones que tenemos detrás ciertas acciones TRIPPY. Si alguien le interesa les mando mis notes de todo el libro. #livelaughlovephilosophy

[Frederico · Rating 2 out of 5]

Analytic philosophers like Nagel almost always disappoint me when discussing ethics - they fail to give good enough reasons to believe one should be acting differently.

[Anthony DiGiovanni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nagel Is Not My Bagel

(I no longer endorse this review; I think I was confusing motivations with reasons.)

I wanted to like this book.  I really wanted to be convinced that rationality itself can provide people with reasons to be altruistic (funnily enough, the exact opposite of Ayn Rand's thesis).  But such a position requires the impossible: the existence of objective value.

Nagel writes carefully and thoroughly on this subject, and some parts of his argument are quite interesting and made this book worth reading.  He offers a modification of the "veil of ignorance" that asks the reader to imagine living the life of every other person in the society whose rules are being planned in a thought experiment similar to Rawls's.  The sections on prudence, that is, the practical reasoning concerned with a person's future self, were thought-provoking.

Still, the main argument simply isn't persuasive because it relies on premises that seem self-contradictory to me.  Value (here I mean "use" value, loosely speaking, as opposed to exchange value) is a relation between an agent (a "valuer") and an object (the "valued").  It makes no sense to speak of something being valuable irrespective of any sentient beings actually valuing it.  Hence value can only be subjective - I don't know what it would even mean for value to be objective, except to say that given that someone values X (subjectively), and attainment of X requires Y, then that person objectively should value Y (assuming no other contradictory values).  That is only instrumental value, which isn't sufficient to prove Nagel's point, i.e. that people can have reasons to act that are not dependent at all on their desires or preferences.

Nagel just asserts that desires aren't the only sources of reason for action, without providing any counterexample that stands up to scrutiny.  What makes the second half of this book so irritating to read is the fact that he makes that assertion early on, and bases the rest of reasoning on the premise that desire-free reasons for action are possible.  One of his main arguments is that the emotion of resentment presupposes the existence of objective value, because if Bob has no reasons to care about Ashley's well-being except insofar as he desires her well-being, and Bob does in fact not desire this, Ashley has no reason to resent Bob for treating him callously.  The problem here is that Nagel is assuming resentment is always a rational emotion, but I see no reason to think this is so.  It's entirely possible and probable that social forces and evolution have constructed the emotion of resentment as a means of inflicting shame upon the resented, which helps maintain the moral order (i.e. it helps people stay accountable to each other).  This is useful, but not necessarily "rational" if Bob truly has no reasons for respecting Ashley (because he is a psychopath, let's say).

On that note, I want to clarify that just because I reject the view that altruism is rationally required of all people, that doesn't mean I think people have no reasons to be altruistic.  Far from it!  Moral objectivists like to dismiss subjective morals as "merely" subjective, but subjectivity is essential for morality.  If morality were divorced from desire, what could possibly motivate you to be moral?  The fact is that most of us do in fact desire that other people have good lives, not just ourselves, and that can be an enormously strong psychological motive for the most noble actions and values we cherish.  Just because Bob the psychopath has no reason to care, it doesn't follow that the rest of us don't.  It would be nice if morality had the power to convince Charlie Manson not to murder (for that matter, it's not clear how objective morality like Nagel's would convince anyone any more reliably than subjective morality), but even if it doesn't, it convinces us that we should stop him from murdering.  Asking for more than that is, I think, an unrealistically high expectation.

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das vorliegende Buch The Possibility of Altruism von Thomas Nagel untersucht Nagel die philosophischen Grundlagen des Altruismus und versucht zu zeigen, dass altruistisches Verhalten rational begründbar ist. The Possibility of Altruism ist das Ergebnis seiner Dissertation, die er unter der Leitung von John Rawls, Autor von A Theory of Justice, verfasst hat. Leitend ist die Frage, wie Altruismus möglich ist, wenn unsere Motivation normalerweise auf Eigeninteresse beruht. Er definiert Altruismus nicht als aufopferungsvolle Selbstlosigkeit, sondern als die grundsätzliche Bereitschaft, im Interesse anderer Personen zu handeln, ohne dass hierfür egoistische Motive erforderlich sind.
Für Nagel beruhen die moralischen Anforderungen, die wir an uns selbst stellen, auf objektiven Prinzipien, die sowohl für uns selbst als auch für andere gelten. Nach Nagel müssen wir in der Lage sein, unsere eigene Situation sowohl aus einem persönlichen als auch einem unpersönlichen Blickwinkel zu betrachten. Dann verstehen und akzeptieren diese objektiven Prinzipien. Seine Argumentation für objektive Gründe hat mehrere Konsequenzen:
1 Ablehnung des Egoismus
2 Altruismus lässt sich begründen
3 Moralische Prinzipien sind universell
4 Eine Werttheorie wird notwendig
Die Diskussion zwischen Internalismus und Externalismus in der Ethik wird von Nagel eingehend thematisiert. Er vertritt eine internalistische Position, die besagt, dass die Wahrheit ethischer Aussagen selbst die Motivation für moralisches Handeln garantiert. Anders gesagt: Die Wahrheit einer ethischen Aussage muss die Motivation zum moralischen Handeln garantieren. Wünsche können dabei nicht die einzige Grundlage für unsere Motivation sein.
Nagel interpretiert Vorsicht, Prudence als die Berücksichtigung zukünftiger Konsequenzen unserer Handlungen, unabhängig davon, ob es um Eigeninteresse oder das Wohl anderer geht.
In The Possibility of Altruism unterscheidet Nagel zwischen subjektiven und objektiven Gründen.
Subjektive Gründe sind Gründe, die für eine bestimmte Person gelten, weil sie in einer bestimmten Beziehung zu dem Grund steht.
Objektive Gründe hingegen sind Gründe, die unabhängig von der Beziehung einer bestimmten Person zu dem Grund gelten. Dass es objektive Gründe gibt, wird im Buch gezeigt. Sie entspringen einer fundamentalen Struktur der praktischen Vernunft selbst. Nagel erkennt Parallelen zu Kant an, betont jedoch einen wesentlichen Unterschied: Während Kant die Freiheit als Quelle moralischer Motivation betrachtet, sieht er die Anerkennung der Realität anderer Personen als Grundlage für moralisches Handeln.

[Clemens · Rating 2 out of 5]

By examining phenomena like prudence and altruism Nagel hopes to reveal more about human nature and what motivates human being to act. According to him primitive motivational theories which always require a desire at the core of a motive which leads to action are not able to sufficiently explain how humans are capable acting in practical foresight or selfless only with the benefit of others as an object of desire.

In the case of prudence, for instance, it seems to be a miracle how human beings could have desires with objects in the future. Nagel proposes that it were way more rational to assume that there are so called timeless reasons which lead us to act. Because of our capability of recognizing that there is no reason to regard any time span of our life as less important than another we become motivated to buy salad on Saturday, when we know that we will be hungry on Sunday but there won‘t be the opportunity to buy salad due to closed supermarkets. Therefore, our desire doesn‘t have another unmotivated desire at it‘s core but rather timeless reasons.

There seems to be a parallel to altruism. Nagel argues that subjective reasons are not capable of explaining why we altruistically motivated. There have to be objective reasons which lead us to recognize that pain elimination, for instance, is a desirable object regardless of who the person feeling the pain is. This is due to the fact that we recognize that we are just one individual between many others and there is no reasons to regard others as less important than oneself.

This is a vague overview of Nagel‘s statements which didn‘t really convince me. This might partly because I didn‘t have the ambition to understand all arguments in their depth since Nagel neither writes engaging nor structures his argument very well. Besides that, although Nagel maybe doesn‘t try to make claims about human nature, he asserts, however, that the motives which stem from altruistic action in terms of the way he defines it are selfish in a sense and opposed to egoism. I don‘t hold that view for really sustainable if one acknowledges the outcome of various disciplines like evolutionary anthropology, psychology and social biology. Warning a person that they have a wasp on their burger is as much altruistic as a bird making sounds to warn other bird of his group that there is a predator around. I think many of those situations can be explained also in terms of self interest of an individual. Nagel argues that any of the opposing arguments would be obliged to entail that an individual cannot have desires of others as objects. However, this is only the case, if one agrees with his conception of altruism which is already questionable at best. Overall I‘m just not really satisfied with his proposal.

[Heather Hoyt]

Read for research. This was quite difficult, a bit removed from examples and actual life. My favorite point is that reasons can be independent of time, which is why we can do things like plan for the future and feel regret about the past. For example, I had/have/will have a reason to refill the pellet stove so that it won't run out of pellets and make my house cold. Since I neglected to respond to that reason a few days ago, I felt regret. I should have put pellets in the stove--that "should" meaning that a reason existed. Similarly, I need to go do it soon right now, because the pellets will run out soon.

I felt it was less successful at explaining altruism. Altruism is hard to separate from any sentiment, and yet that was precisely the project.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Was a bit disappointed by this tbh.

It is a good and original book, and Nagel is always good if I'm fair. But I read this thinking this is supposed to be the book that changed so many people's minds on the issue of whether people can be altruistic. But it's not really about that. The sense of 'possible' is really narrowly focussed. I mean of course it's possible that people are altruistic in a sense - it's not incoherent. What it's really about is a very particular conception of the metaphysics of norms, and although it's very clever it's not really convincing.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

To say that altruism and morality are possible in virtue of something basic to human nature is not to say that men are basically good. Men are basically complicated; how good they are depends on whether certain conceptions and ways of thinking have achieved dominance, a dominance which is precarious in any case.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to write a brief review on this book, because there doesn't seem to be any other one's besides Erik's. Unfortunately, I find his review irrelevant, and misguided. I don't mean that as disrespectful, but towards the end ranting about what the 'self" is, well, it's quite frankly irrelevant to this particular book. And I think there are some misunderstandings about the book (although, I could be wrong, because it doesn't appear his review says much at all about the book itself).

First, the refreshing thing about this book is that it is intended as an objective moral sense. That means we get to throw out all the nonsensical relativists, existentialists, and post-modernist pseudo-intellectuals. That's the first part that is great about the book. However, from there I think it is all downhill. Firstly, Nagel doesn't really argue much of anything here. He says that something be ethical in and of itself is not motivation enough to do that action. Fair enough, I disagree, but lets continue. He then goes on to say that desires alone do not motivate us to act a certain way. For instance, a feeling of hunger does not motivate me to put a quarter in a vending machine and get Doritos (although, that is certainly a good choice). He says that it is a mixture of reason and desire. Reason is what decides HOW to quench that desire. Fair enough. I will grant you that point, as well. Lastly, he then goes on to argue that because we can be motivated by future prudential reasons, that is to say, we are motivated by the future necessities (say, if we suspect we may get in a car accident, we might buy a safer car), then we can also have altruistic motivations.

Needless to say, I didn't find his arguments all that convincing. They are interesting, nonetheless, and probably deserve some recognition. All in all, though, I do not think that this book is really that great and slightly overrated by liberal ethicist enthusiasts. They are probably better off sticking to John Rawls.

[Alfred Yun · Rating 4 out of 5]

By contrasting with the notion of prudence, Nagel effectively argues for the possibility of objective moral motivation. Similar to the way we view our future selves as one of several person stages that constitutes a person, we can view ourselves as one amongst many --leading us to make judgments such as "It is wrong to rape a child for any person." Such insight, perhaps the most important one in this book, that follows even in his later works is the notion of impersonal judgment. Much of this book's argument rests upon the fact that we are able to view ourselves from a distance --impersonally. I won't go too much into detail here, since I will be writing a lengthy blogpost on this book soon.

This book is certainly not an easy read: it is dense, full of jargon, and rigorous analysis. Nonetheless, it is clear, insightful, and an ultimately salient work on ethics.

[Byrd Alyssa]

While absolutely intriguing, the Possibility of Altruism, is a seriously academically challenging read. I hope to get through more of it, but am afraid this may continue to be a task I am not yet ready for.

[Ann Garth]

I did not expect to repeatedly laugh out loud while reading a dense philosophy book, but then this book happened.