Mortal Questions

The book's most famous essay asks a question that sounds almost like a joke: what is it like to be a bat? Nagel is entirely serious. A bat navigates the world by echolocation, building a picture of its surroundings from reflected sound. There is, presumably, something it is like to be that creature, some way the world seems from inside its experience. And here is the trouble: no amount of information about the bat's brain, its neurons, its wiring, tells us what that inner life is like. We could know every physical fact about the animal and still have no idea what it is like to be one.

Nagel uses the bat because it is alien enough to make the point unavoidable, but the point is about us. Consciousness has a subjective character — there is a particular way things feel and appear from the standpoint of the one having the experience. This first-person quality is real, and yet it slips through the net of objective description that science provides. The physical account is a view from outside that anyone could in principle occupy. Experience is a view from a single place. You cannot get to the second by piling up more of the first.

We like to believe that people can only be blamed for what is within their control. A person is not responsible for the weather, the family they were born into, or what a stranger does. Nagel takes this principle — as reasonable a moral idea as exists — and shows that we do not actually live by it, and probably cannot. He calls the problem moral luck: the way our moral judgments depend, constantly and inescapably, on factors nobody chose.

His examples are ordinary and damning. Two drivers are equally careless; one happens to have a child step into the road, the other does not. The first is a killer, tormented, perhaps prosecuted; the second drives home and forgets it. The only difference is luck, yet we judge them differently and cannot fully talk ourselves out of it. A soldier's virtue or cowardice may never be tested if the war never reaches his town. The Nazi functionary might, in another decade, have been a mild bureaucrat who never harmed anyone. What a person becomes morally depends heavily on circumstances they did not arrange.

Step back from the individual essays and the same fault line runs through all of them. Death matters because of the future a person loses — but who is that persisting person, and why do their possibilities weigh on us now? Consciousness resists science because it is tied to a single point of view. Responsibility frays because the free agent, seen from outside, dissolves into causes. In each case Nagel arrives at the same wall: the collision between the world as it appears to a subject and the world as described from no place at all. This is what the whole book is finally about, and why he later called the objective standpoint the view from nowhere.

What is unusual is his refusal to pick a winner. The dominant instinct in philosophy, and in the science it admires, is to treat the objective view as the real one and the subjective as a local distortion to be explained away. Nagel resists that move. The objective view is not more true; it is a different truth, one that systematically omits the very things — the feel of experience, the standpoint of the agent, the significance of a particular life — that the questions were about in the first place. To flatten everything into the impersonal is to lose the data the philosophy was meant to account for.

The book that looked like fourteen unrelated essays turns out to be one long argument made from many angles. Start anywhere Nagel starts — at a graveside, in a bat's cave, at the wheel of an unlucky car — and follow the thread honestly, and you end at the same seam in the world, where the life lived from inside and the world described from outside meet and fail to close. Death, mind, freedom, value: all cases of the same larger difficulty wearing different clothes.