Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-rkxrd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T06:09:44.303Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

139 - Nagel, Thomas

from N

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2015

Jon Mandle
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Albany
David A. Reidy
Affiliation:
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Get access

Summary

Thomas Nagel (born 1937), Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, is one of Rawls’s most important philosophical interlocutors and the author of a number of influential papers about Rawls’s political philosophy (e.g. Nagel 1975, 2003). His most significant engagement with Rawls’s ideas is in Equality and Partiality (Nagel 1991). In that book, Nagel uses his central distinction between objective and subjective ways of conceiving of the world to address the feasibility of Rawls’s egalitarianism. Liberalism must leave us with enough personal space to realize the “subjective” values of our own lives. There is, however, a complementary objective discipline to ethical and political thought, namely, the impersonal demands of others as mediated via political institutions. Influenced by G. A. Cohen’s claim that Rawls’s egalitarianism focuses on the institutions of the basic structure of society to the exclusion of personal choice, Nagel seeks to ameliorate the conflict between personal values and the impersonal demands of equality (see Cohen 2008). The latter are realized in an institutional scheme; we aim, by contrast, to give subjective values sufficient free play within the scope of the personal, beyond those institutions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×