[books] THOMAS NAGEL - Equality And Partiality

The thing I find so entrancing about Nagel's books on philosophy is the way he will seem to say something obvious over and over again until suddenly he arrives at a strong and interesting conclusion that requires having carefully rung the changes on what supports it. But maybe philosophers are just like that.

Nagel has a lot to say about balancing the personal perspective (which is to say, the things that I not only want, but want because I am ME and not someone else who, regardless of how much concern or loathing they might have for me personally, does not taste food as the immediate consequence of my putting it in my mouth, etc.) with the impersonal perspective in which everyone has value. Pessimistically, he doesn't think there IS an acceptable balance available to world society right now-- that any attempt to balance the liberty of the well-off with the welfare of the horribly unprivileged will either place too much of a burden on the fortunate or leave too many other people destitute beyond what decency permits, or both.

(This isn't given as an argument for complacency; he doesn't think the status quo is even close to acceptable. It's a reason against complacency, or at least against the kind of complacency that comes from assuming that if a conflict of interests has no perfect solution, it is basically a thumb-wrestling match and vain to claim one can apply ethical principles to.)

Anyway, I can't recommend Nagel highly enough, even if I also can't summarize him very well; outside of this book, I can't think of anything I've read about politics, citizenship and ethics recently that wasn't either paralyzingly depressing, or optimistic in a way that evaporated as soon as I put the book down.

One interesting point he makes is in the discussion of tolerance. The argument often comes up-- and in this form it sounds stupid, but this basic idea underlies a lot of, unfortunately, very serious political discussion-- that "hey, man, your quote-unquote tolerance is really just INtolerance of what you call intolerance, so what do you think of that?" Nagel's response is that disagreements about what is good for individuals are not the same as disagreements about what conditions it is good for individuals to make their life choices in. If tolerance for sexual freedom and opposition to homosexuality are being put on the same level, then the political positions we should compare are government discrimination against same-sex couples and active government suppression of any group that discourages homosexuality-- both of which those of us who favor 'tolerance' would probably revile, regardless of which scenario was more pleasant for us personally or even for the country as a whole. It's telling, I think, that some social conservatives don't seem to understand the difference between declining to suppress something and actively recruiting people for that thing; it's the only way that it actually makes sense to paint tolerance and intolerance as just two competitors in the same horse race. Because the two aren't parallel, the "tolerance is just INtolerance" line carries no more weight than the argument that "personal freedom" is just a code word for "bad nutrition"; yeah, okay, the lack of government-mandated diets may result in worse nutrition than the alternative, but this isn't any response to larger claims about why personal freedom is good, and it certainly doesn't make people who oppose mass force-feeding of Americans on libertarian grounds into hypocrites, even if you play word games so that "freedom" and "nutrition" somehow sound similar.