COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 51: Universal Prescriptivism, Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, Thomas Nagel
10 Feb 2020
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Prescriptions can"t be universal: we can only guess at others" judgments since we can"t know their risk assessments, personal preferences, or moral calculus. But that means that ethics allows us to base a decision on a basis that is immoral, reducing the theory to absurdity: there is no way to objectively view the world in this way. In the pursuit of this goal, however, even at its most successful, something will inevitably be lost. We will not know exactly how scrambled eggs taste to a cockroach even if we develop a detailed objective phenomenology of the cockroach sense of taste. When it comes to values, goals, and forms of life, the gulf may be even more profound. Since this is so, no objective conception of the mental world can include it all. But in that case it may be asked what the point is of looking for such a conception.
