Essay #3 Prompt:
For Essay #3 you’re going to work with Thomas Nagel’s “Right and Wrong” and Kant’s 2nd formulation of the Categorical Imperative from his “The Foundations of Ethics”, pp. 31-34. (1500 words max)
The central theme of Nagel’s paper is what he calls the “force of morality”—that we when think something is unequivocally wrong, we think that that’s a decisive reason not to do it. For the first part of your essay, I would like you to do two things:
1. Explain to your reader what this “force of morality” is—what does Nagel think it’s like? Why does he find it puzzling?
2. Nagel thinks that by unpacking the question, “How would you like it if someone were to do that to you?”, we might begin to get an explanation of how it is that thinking that an action is wrong has the decisive force that it does. Explain to your reader how Nagel unpacks this question.
On the first paragraph on p. 336, Nagel argues that there’s a tension between the universality of morality and the apparent non-universality of motives. For the second part of this paper you’re going to do two more things:
3. Explain the puzzle and the three solutions that Nagel considers.
4. Regarding the second solution, Nagel asks: “What does it mean to say that a murderer had a reason not to do it, even though none of his actual motives or desires gave him such a reason?” Using some of the points that Kant makes in the course of explaining his 2nd formulation of the categorical imperative (“The Foundations of Ethics”, pp. 31-34), attempt to explain how Kant might answer this question.(To this end you should find section 5b of the IEP on Kant helpful.) Once you’ve articulated a Kantian answer, proceed to evaluate it.
If you’re having trouble explaining Kant here, you may attempt to explain how Plato might attempt to answer this question from the material we learned from “Why should I be moral?” and the Gorgias. Once you’ve articulated a “Platonic” answer, proceed to evaluate it.
Alternatively, if you’re having trouble with both Kant and Plato here, attempt to answer the question for yourself or, alternatively, attempt to argue that it’s not possible to answer the question and defend one of the other solutions Nagel discusses.
