Mortal Questions

"Long-time fan of Nagel's defenses of rationality and essays on the philosophical problem of the soul."

"This is a wonderful book, and completely different from Singer’s, although it’s also a series of chapters on different themes to do with life and death. He has a wonderful essay on equality, a great essay on war, and essays on consciousness as well, which is what makes living things different from dead things. What I love about Nagel is his ability to identify what really matters about a subject, and to write about it without getting caught in too much nitty-gritty detail. He’s a beautiful writer, and this and his subsequent book The View From Nowhere are two of my favourite philosophy books . Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Nagel introduces in this book something that is completely counterintuitive until one thinks more deeply about it, namely panpsychism – the idea that inanimate objects might have atoms in which there is a conscious element. That sounds very weird until you think about human beings. We are created out of physical stuff, so where does the magical stuff of consciousness come from? Perhaps the answer is that the little bits of stuff which we thought was physical also contains within it some of this subjectivity, even if at a subatomic level. That seems crazy, but when you think about it, it has some plausibility to it. That’s a very good question. The reason why you can’t throw yourself is because you’re not fat enough. That’s why the fat man has to be fat. The correct solution to the problem is to jump yourself and not kill anybody, but you can’t do that in this case, because you’re not fat. Quite possibly."

"A lot of people begin, like I did, with philosophy because it sounds so interesting – a love of wisdom and so on. But our first introduction to the subject can be, sometimes, a bad one. I put this book on my list to say if you think philosophy might be interesting then you need a good introduction. I think that this book is a really good introduction to the field because, rather than getting all cloaked in the detailed analytics and the symbolic language of logic, he goes for the big questions that we think philosophy is supposed to be about. What sense can we make of death and how do we understand that? How do we understand the role of luck? Does Mark Zuckerberg deserve his billions, or was he lucky? How do we understand that? How does that apply to the question of how much we feel is ours, versus how much other people have a claim on? For instance, what is my moral responsibility to people in poverty, or people begging on the street? A lot of the book takes these big philosophical questions and shows us how to relate them to our daily lives. How to analyse and understand our experiences, actions and reactions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I thought it was brilliant as an introduction to the field of philosophy . My favourite chapter is called ‘The Fragmentation of Value.’ Because I’m a political scientist I’m interested in how it is that rational people can disagree, and disagree for millennia, about things. How do we come to a mutual understanding and agreement? What he does in that chapter is lay out how we have different ways of valuing stuff in the world. His main point is that it might not be possible to fit them all together in an equation – they’re just different, and there may not be a way to fit them all together. We can have a utilitarian sense of value. We add up what would be the best thing to do A or B? A has this overall consequence and B has that overall consequence. Whichever has the better overall consequence, we should do that. This is utilitarian. Utility maximisation. Then we also have, I forget what language he used, but we have personal preferences. That’s my child. I can see the fact that A is better overall, but it’s going to hurt my child – suddenly it’s not clear to me whether the better choice is A or B. One of the wonderful things that Nagel does in that chapter is say that it’s also not clear – once you have this conflict – that there’s any argument that should lead you to accept A over B because of this relationship value that you have. You are a parent, you have a child. That’s a unique set of duties and responsibilities (and love) that is just not captured anywhere in the utilitarian logic. Then we have questions about time, people who are alive now or people in the future, how do we weigh those things? That chapter helped me to see underneath so many debates and conflicts that happened in my personal life and in the world around me. To recognise that you are arguing one source of value and another person is arguing another. That’s why some of these debates go on forever. “Reading philosophy allows us to look at all the chaos of life, step above it and understand it” As a political scientist, I can look at things today and see that we’re having these raging debates about immigration. You have all sorts of utilitarian arguments. Look at the economic statistics of how immigration creates growth, how it creates jobs, how diversity leads to the development of new industries – all of this. Then, you have another argument that says immigration is changing the nature of society and culture. Do we value that, or do we discount it? This debate rages in society ­– and there is no answer – because both arguments have a valid piece of the truth. This is related to fake news and how every political tribe has its own version of reality. Part of it is misinformation, of course. But if we really want to understand what is going on we must recognise that fundamentally these different debates are grounding themselves in very different values. Reading philosophy is helpful. It allows us to look at all the chaos of life, step above it and understand it. I think that this is the best introductory book that I have found and it continues to be useful for me. Especially if you want to look smart at cocktail parties!"

"Nagel is one of the great English-speaking philosophers still working today. He’s an interesting contrast to Kołakowski, who deals with these very abstract ideas. Many of the ideas Nagel deals with are quite concrete, and he’s very clear in his writing style. There are some classic papers in here. The one in which he asks what it’s like to be a bat is an amazing canonical paper about the subjective nature of experience and how forms of reductionism can’t deal with it. That’s still very much a live issue. His essay on sexual perversion is brilliant and has been very influential. ‘Moral Luck’ and ‘The Fragmentation of Value’ raise fundamental questions in ethics. The nice thing about this book, particularly for teenagers, is that you can pick it up in any order, just read ten pages of a chapter, and then you’re done. The essays are short and accessible, and you can take them in bite-sized chunks. He’s one of those annoying people who seems to make brilliant contributions to any topic you try to think about. He’s done stuff on the philosophy of consciousness (that’s very important); he’s done work recently on whether you can reduce everything to materialism, saying no, you can’t; he’s done work on ethics, and ‘moral luck’ is a whole mini-industry in the academy now. He wrote one of germinal papers in that area. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The preface of this book contains a lot of philosophical wisdom. He talks about his approach and sums it up by saying he thinks you should trust problems over solutions. We have a strong tendency to want a neat system that will give us solutions and answers, whereas actually a lot of the time the niggling worries and intuitions we have leftover are very valuable. We risk pushing these out or ignoring them if we have a tidy system. And I think the other thing that’s really nice is that he says in philosophy you have to tolerate not being able to have an opinion for a long time, which is quite difficult to do."