Thomas Nagel vs Ronald Dworkin on Moral Objectivity (2007)

A few select clips of Thomas Nagel and Ronald Dworkin discussing moral objectivity in a panel that was part of the 2007 Holberg Prize Symposium in honor of Ronald Dworkin. You should watch the full video, which can be found here: • Holberg Prize Symposiu...
#Philosophy #Ethics

[@TheDerstine]

this is so good

[@cloudoftime]

13:40 Dworkin: "And it isn't as if we could come up with some piece of natural history that would magically supply in and of itself a moral argument." This seems like a category mistake and rhetorical exaggeration. I don't know what magic would have to do with it. But there can be naturalistic explanations for how moral concepts arose; there would not be naturalistically founded moral arguments. These are distinct categories, and unless someone can tell me what I might be missing, this appears to be an erroneous conflation.

[@Philosophy_Overdose]

Well, unless you smuggle in values or something normative from the very outset, you’re presumably going to need some sort of magic to be able to make values appear out of mere facts alone.

[@pectenmaximus231]

I think it would be a matter of precisely what argument you were making at the time. If you just want to supply some kind of context for how people may have come to hold a belief, or rather how they rationalised their belief or found it sustained, then pointing to historical conditions might make sense. But if you suggest that the substance of their beliefs are to be found directly in the conditions, then I think that is something entirely different.

[@Lampredi4]

⁠@@Philosophy_Overdoseyou’ve given us MacIntyre before and he had a pretty clever way out of the fact-value distinction. Some facts have value embedded in them when their facticity is reliant on their proper functioning - a watch should work well if it is a watch was the example he had used in After Virtue iirc - though it, or even its Heideggerian antecedents, haven’t much been accepted in wider philosophy

[@TheHunterGracchus]

It sounds to me as if you're agreeing with Dworkin. The "magic" is the belief that mere naturalism transcends the categorial leap from nature to morality.

[@Philosophy_Overdose]

​​​​​​@@Lampredi4 If values are embedded in the facts from the beginning, then, even though one is getting out values, one still isn't doing the impossible and getting those values out of pure facts alone. In other words, the entanglement of fact and value is perfectly consistent with the fact that you can’t get values from descriptive facts alone. That is, one cannot get the normative from the purely descriptive, even if the two are to some extent entangled and the normative is there from the outset.

[@StopFear]

RIP Dworkin

[@Khuno2]

Seems like cleaving fitness from knowledge would entail miracles... Blackburn and Dworkin had a rather amusing (if not tense) written exchange, I believe.

[@StopFear]

Can you elaborate?

[@Khuno2]

​@@StopFear ​ Well, the reasoning goes something like hominids wouldn't survive long enough to pass on their genes if they couldn't accurately model and respond to their environments. Yet, they did...therefore, humans and human ancestors evolved truth tracking/approximating capacities. To assume the contrary (that human survival has nothing to do with justified true belief) would render it so unlikely as to be miraculous. It's a response to the evolutionary defeater argument Prof. Nagel sketched at the beginning of the clip. This doesn't distinguish degrees of consciousness (e.g., orangutans from humans), nor single and multicellular organisms that we don't usually attribute consciousness to, but can respond to stimuli in their environments (e.g., algae and trees). So if humans evolved capacities to track the truth, does that apply to their abilities to recognize and integrate ethical truths? Or are "ethical truths" merely evolved altruistic traits that aided human biological fitness, but have nothing to do with objective right and wrong? I don't think that the strength of one's convictions resolves this problem.