The Possibility of Altruism by Thomas Nagel

So a friend and I have been having some fairly intense conversations about morality and its foundations over the past year and a half. He's recently given up religious faith but has struggled in understanding how to build an ethical system apart from God - not that it's difficult to build or take oneself to have a set of normative claims in any way, which of course, it's not. Rather, he sees himself as gripped by a sharp skepticism in the fallout of his deconversion. How he feels compelled to act, doing very good work supporting human rights and raising third world orphans, seems ungrounded despite my best effort to offer explanations for good and right acts. Such explanations have been natural as with evolutionary explanations to brute fact grounding - turns out the universe just has moral facts.

There's two issues I guess that are lurking. One is the possibility of altruism, and the other, which seems only slightly broader if one has taken the pains to ground and explicate altruism as Nagel has, is how and where we ground goodness and rightness without God.

So, in an effort to tackle the first of these problems, as if it were a modular effort, we've decided to start reading Nagel's work. What follows in the next few posts will be my recapitulation of Nagel's effort so that I can get a better understanding of what he is doing and so that maybe others will become interested.