The possibility of altruism: are there agent-neutral reasons that any rational agent has reason to consider, alongside agent-relative reasons?

Thomas Nagel, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Practical reason has two structurally distinct kinds: agent- relative reasons (reasons grounded in the agent's own projects, relationships, and concerns) and agent-neutral reasons (reasons that apply impersonally — concerning, paradigmatically, the welfare of others or the value of states of affairs in themselves).1 Egoism, the view that practical reason is restricted to agent-relative reasons only, is incoherent.

The egoist can take an objective standpoint on her own situation and recognize that the same considerations that give her reason to attend to her own welfare apply, by parity, to similar situations of others; the egoist who refuses to draw that inference is committing a structural failure of practical reasoning.2 The argument is not a Kantian transcendental derivation of altruism from the structure of agency; it is the simpler claim that the standpoint from which I consider my own good is one I can also occupy with respect to others, and occupying it generates reasons I have not invented.

The hybrid view — agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons coexist, with the integration of the two an ongoing task rather than a derivation from one to the other — is the structural core of my ethics across The Possibility of Altruism, The View from Nowhere, and Equality and Partiality.34

Sources

  1. If I am right so far, primitive pleasures and pains provide at least agent-relative reasons for pursuit and avoidance— reasons that can be affirmed from an objective standpoint and that do not merely describe the actual motivation of the agent. What interests me is the next question. Do pleasure and pain have merely agent-relative valué or do they provide neutral reasons as well?
    The View from Nowhere, p. 166
  2. But this is a mere classification without motivational content—without the acceptance of a justification for wanting anything. Therefore when one adds the personal premise, the resulting introduction of such content is much more than a change in point of view. It is an additional judgment about the same situation, which can be made only INTERPRETATION OF OBJECTIVE REASONS 123 from the personal standpoint.
    The Possibility of Altruism, p. 133
  3. The question then is whether we are all equally unimportant or all equally important, and the answer, I think, is somewhere in between. The areas in which we must continué to be concerned about ourselves and others from outside are those whose valué comes as cióse as possible to being universal.
    The View from Nowhere, p. 179
  4. But perhaps action wouldn't likewise become senseless if one denied the existence of practical reasons: One could still be moved by impulse and habit, without thinking that what one did was justified in any sense—even by one's inclinations—in a way that admitted generalization. However, this seems a very implausible option.
    The Last Word, pp. 99–100

Where the argument is made

  • The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton 1970), the entire book, especially Part I on subjective vs objective reasons and Part III on the rationality of altruism
  • The View from Nowhere (1986) Chapter 8 on values, Chapter 9 on ethics
  • Equality and Partiality (Oxford 1991) on the hybrid view
  • 'The Limits of Objectivity' (Tanner Lectures 1980)

How the argument was received

The Possibility of Altruism (1970) was Nagel's first book and is the founding statement of the agent-neutral/agent-relative framework that has shaped contemporary practical philosophy. Williams's "Internal and External Reasons" (1980) is the major opposing view, restricting reasons to those internal to the agent's motivational set; the Williams-Nagel disagreement is one of the central debates in late-twentieth-century moral philosophy. Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters develop a parallel reasons-fundamentalist defense of agent-neutral normativity. Korsgaard's Kantian constitutivism provides a different route to similar conclusions through the structure of agency. Scheffler's The Rejection of Consequentialism (1982) develops the hybrid view in the philosophical-tradition direction.