88 Quotes by Thomas Nagel

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.

A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.

equally real at all stages of his life; specifically, the fact that a particular stage is present cannot be regarded as conferring on it any special status.

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.

To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.

It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.

The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.