In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Thomas Nagel. Known for his landmark essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, Nagel has challenged generations of thinkers to grapple with the limits of objectivity, the nature of consciousness, and the role of reason in ethics.
We explore why subjective experience resists scientific explanation, what it means for morality if we take both the personal and impersonal points of view seriously, and why Nagel believes that materialism alone cannot account for the appearance of life and mind in the universe. He reflects on the enduring appeal of philosophical problems that never seem to go away and why that resistance to resolution is part of their power.
Nagel also talks about his intellectual influences, from Wittgenstein to Rawls, and the surprising philosophical legacy of the “bat article.” We discuss the limits of empathy across species, whether the suffering of a lobster might be just as morally significant as that of a human, and why Nagel doubts we can put numbers on pain.
In a deeply honest final segment, Nagel reflects on his own life, its good fortune, its moral limits, and what it means to live well even without seeing oneself as particularly admirable. Along the way, we touch on utilitarianism, the ethics of immigration in an unjust world, the tension between moral ideals and human attachments, and the possibility of global justice.
Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
The "Bat Article" and Subjectivity of Experience
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: Okay, let’s get into your work. I can tell you that just at dinner today, my daughter, who is 18, asked me who we are talking to tonight. I told her, “Tom Nagel,” and she said, “Oh, the author of the bat article.”
THOMAS NAGEL: Oh, the bat article. Yes.
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: I guess you are famous for it. What is What Is It Like to Be a Bat? about?
THOMAS NAGEL: It’s an article in what came to be another of my major interests, the philosophy of mind. And it isn’t really about bats, although the example of the bat plays an important part in it. The real subject is the so-called mind-body problem, namely, the relation between mental events, like seeing and hearing, and the brain events that they seem to be closely associated with.
In that article, I argued against the, at that time very common and still fairly common, view that mental events could be completely identified with some neurophysiological events - that they were part of the physical world and that a complete description of them could be given in physical terms.
My claim in that article, which I still believe, is that there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to conscious mental states like feeling pain, tasting chocolate, or seeing the colour red that can’t be analysed in physical terms.
To persuade people of this, I asked them to think about bats and their very distinctive sensory capacity of echolocation, which we do not share. When you think about what it’s like for the bat to navigate through echolocation, there is a limit to what you can grasp.
You can learn a lot about the kinds of features the bat can detect via echolocation. You can learn much about the underlying physiology that makes it possible. But you won’t know what it’s like for the bat to do that, because you can’t imagine a sense you don’t have. If you try to imagine it as being like seeing, you’ll be wrong, because the bat also has vision, but it doesn’t use vision for this purpose.
By trying to focus on what we couldn’t know about the bat’s experience, I wanted to point people to the aspect of it that prevented us from knowing it—which was its subjectivity, its being tied to a particular type of point of view, which bats have but we don’t have.
The general point was that all of experience is subjective in the sense of being tied to the particular type of point of view of the sorts of creatures that can have that experience.
And there are many such types, leaving aside extraterrestrials. On this earth, there are many forms of animal consciousness, most of which are accessible to us in imagination only to a limited extent.
The contrast I was making was between the subjectivity of conscious experience and the objectivity—in the sense that it doesn’t depend on any particular point of view—of everything about the physical world. As it is described in modern physical science, it can be captured entirely quantitatively, essentially in terms of quantitatively described and measurable events and processes in space-time. So that in principle, any type of creature, if it had sufficient intelligence, could describe atomic theory and neurophysiology and the structure of the brain. But that’s because these objective physical sciences are drained of the essentially subjective qualities that make up experience.
On the Incompleteness of Materialism
PETER SINGER: I'd like to move to your 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, which, to some extent, is a continuation of the views you expressed in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? But it also has a provocative subtitle: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
Many religious believers would’ve been heartened to see a leading non-religious thinker like you publish a book with that subtitle. Were they mistaken to think that you were supporting a view of the universe that's more compatible with a theistic or spiritual worldview than the prevalent scientific view?
THOMAS NAGEL: I think that those aren’t the only two alternatives. I do think the currently widely accepted physicalist conception of the completeness of physics as a description of reality is, of course, incompatible with a religious worldview. But it’s also incompatible with a non-religious view that considers the mental an irreducible element of reality. My own disposition has always been atheistic. I’ve never had any inclination to religious belief. But I don’t think that materialism is the only alternative to that. If you accept that the mental is a fundamental aspect of reality, and that the appearance of sentient beings is a natural product in the universe's history, of the fundamental nature of reality, it entails a very different picture from materialism, because it would mean that the appearance of life is not just a fantastically improbable physical accident, somehow a side effect of particle physics, but rather that there’s something about the universe that makes the appearance of life and conscious beings natural.
The Tension Between Moral Idealism and Living Well
PETER SINGER: Susan Wolf’s famous article Moral Saints says that to be a moral saint, you wouldn’t be living well in some respects. I can certainly see that. I can see the argument that if somebody is not always acting in this impartial way, not thinking about everyone else’s well-being, or not counting everyone else’s well-being as much as their own, we ought to be fully understanding of that, given what we know about human nature. And within, obviously, other constraints about what they do, we might praise them for things they’re doing that go, to some extent, in the direction of altruism and impartial concern for others, but do not get fully there.
In my view, such people are living well by doing things that are not purely ethical, but you seem to think we should have a broader sense of morality that includes following one’s personal or partial reason as something we ought to do. Is that correct?
THOMAS NAGEL: That’s correct. Although I think both phenomena are real, and it’s not so easy to draw the line. People are morally justified in giving a certain degree of preference to their point of view. But most people go much farther than that. And even if my conception of moral requirements were correct, I think most people, including me, don’t meet them and are simply not prepared to give morality that much authority over their lives. I think for almost everybody who isn’t a moral saint, there is a gap between what, on reflection, they would think they really ought to do, and what they do. And it’s not because of hypocrisy, but because they are not prepared to be as good as they think they ought to be.
On Global Justice and Immigration
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: I wanted to ask you: what do you think is the most urgent philosophical question that we should try to answer as philosophers?
THOMAS NAGEL: I don’t know that any philosophical questions are urgent. They tend to be very long and slow.
However, I do think that some ethical questions are particularly important because people’s views about them affect how we treat each other. And I think at the moment, urgency suggests something important in the short term.
The question of what is necessary to legitimise the character of national boundaries is a fundamental one. I assume that the world will continue to have national boundaries and nation-states into the future.
These boundaries are coming under enormous practical and moral pressure because of the problems of immigration and the inequalities in the world, which lead people to want to move to countries where their chances of life are much better. This is producing very strong resistance on the part of the better-off countries.
This is obviously not a satisfactory situation, and I think we don’t currently have a conception of a fair world order with nation-states and boundary control.
I don’t think a world with open borders is a possibility. I don’t think total equalisation of the level of life in different countries is a possibility.
Against the background of nation-states with different levels of well-being, what should be done to make the situation minimally just? I think that is a question to which I don’t have an answer.
Of course, an answer isn’t going to be only a philosophical answer. But against the background of what is the case, and what is economically and politically possible, the philosophical question of how we can get closer to justice is real.
To some extent, we have created, or at least conceived of, the analogous situation in the distribution of property rights within a nation-state.
The liberal ideal is not to try to produce an impossible equality, or to abandon the institution of individual property rights, but to try to produce a situation in which it doesn’t seem extremely unjust that a person who is well off and lives in a comfortable house is justified in refusing to take in somebody who is less well off, because he would like to sleep in the spare bedroom.
We have a rough idea of socioeconomic justice within a nation-state, but we don’t have anything comparable on the global scale.
A Philosopher’s Humble Reflection on a Life Well Lived
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: We’re closing with our usual question about your own well-lived life. Do you think you’ve lived your life well?
THOMAS NAGEL: I don’t. I revert to the point I made earlier: that, like most people, I don’t feel I have lived as I morally should have in various ways.
I don’t think of myself as a particularly good person. But I feel I’ve been very lucky and had good fortune in my education and professional opportunities, and I’ve been paid for doing something I like to do. What more can you ask?
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: But we do ask about your own life, not a moral life.
THOMAS NAGEL: I think I’ve had a fortunate life, but not a particularly morally praiseworthy or admirable one, unlike Peter, who has made a huge difference in the world. More than any philosopher, a huge practical difference in the world, certainly during my lifetime, and I’m not even sure about philosophers before that. Whenever you ask anybody this question, I’m sure they can’t compare themselves to Peter, who leaves us all in the dust.
PETER SINGER: I certainly could have done better, too. But thank you for your contributions to philosophy, which we have certainly all learned from. I’ve particularly benefited from them, and I’m sure many others have too.
I enjoyed the article. It’s jargon-free discussion full of questions but with few answers. Each time I read it I wonder if Thomas Nagel had come across the work: Toward a Philosophy of the Act by Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. He started working on it in 1919 and work remained unfinished. Experts believe that his other unfinished work The Role of Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity is perhaps the second part. There are so many resonances between the two (Bakhtin and Nagel) thinkers. In non-Russian world Bakhtin is not even considered a philosopher.
Subhash Jaireth
Thinking Aloud
Yes, Singer has helped make the world a better place for all human- & animal-kind. & what a sorrier place we'd inhabit had the fascists murdered his grandparents!