The Fragmentation Of Value

The Source Of Our Problems Is What Makes Life Worth Living

Human life, even in the most comfortable environments, can often feel extremely difficult and defeating.

One of the reasons for this is the realization that we are forced to make trade-offs between the things we care about.

You literally can’t have it all.

But even if it is a fundamental feature of the human condition that we can’t do and be everything we want to be, we are not thereby forced to lament our existence, or wish it were different.

We can learn a lot from developing a deeper understanding of the way things are and what this means for our lives.

This is one area where philosophy is, I think, especially useful.

Philosophy can help us explain what causes some of the deep problems that we are forced to deal with, and suggest new ways to think about and make sense of them so that, even if we can’t change the way things are, we can figure out how to get on with our lives.

One fundamental & renewable source of human problems is the result of a deep conflict at the root of practical life.

It is a conflict generated by the fact that values are fragmented, while practical decisions are singular.

You can only ever do one thing at a time despite the fact that there are many things you could, or maybe even should do instead.

As Thomas Nagel argues in his masterful essay “The Fragmentation Of Value”, this clash gives rise to problems in the form of what he calls practical conflicts. Nagel is careful to point out, though, that these practical conflicts are not just difficult decisions.

The reason is that difficult decisions can be caused by all sorts of things which have nothing to do with the nature of human values.

For example, you might have a difficult decision between two career opportunities because you simply lack enough information about what it would really be like to work and live in Chicago vs. New York.

A difficult decision caused by a lack of information or experience could, in principle, be resolved by acquiring more information.

What Nagel has in mind is something deeper.

Practical conflicts, Nagel argues, can be the result of what he calls “incomparable” values.

Two values are said to be “incomparable” when there is something about the values themselves which fundamentally prevents us from being able to weigh them by a single standard or scale.

Nagel writes:

“I believe that value has fundamentally different kinds of sources, and that they are reflected in the classification of values into types. Not all values represent the pursuit of some single good in a variety of settings. This great division between personal and impersonal, or between agent-centered and outcome-centered, or subjective and objective reasons, is so basic that it renders implausible any reductive unification of ethics - let alone of practical reasoning in general”.

Nagel, The Fragmentation Of Value

Some philosophers have argued that it is always possible to weigh values against each other when making a decision.

This works by taking there to be a single value, say pleasure, and then taking everything else to be valuable to the extent that it promotes pleasure.

This approach certainly provides a clean way to make decisions, since you essentially only have one variable that you have to measure, but it also distorts the nature of many values.

Consider the value of Justice.

Doing what is just very often requires sacrificing one’s pleasure to make things right.

It is reasonable to think that someone who understands Justice as simply just another way to make the world more pleasant hasn’t really understood the nature of Justice at all.

It is tempting to think that life would be so much better if values were not fragmented, but aligned towards a single end goal or purpose. We would be able to think and act in a way that always adds up to something bigger without losing anything along the way.

Instead, we are constantly forced to feel our practical identities tearing apart as different potential life paths split off and become permanently irretrievable for us.

Where does that leave us?

Although we may wish that the world didn’t require ethical reasoning and decision making and that we could simply always do what was objectively and clearly better by adding up the numbers, there is good reason to think that such a world would be a worse one to live in.

If we were to live in a “solved” world, we would lose our agency (or it might still be there but just become idle, like our appendix).

But being an agent is a significant part of what makes our lives worth living in the first place.

Being an agent is what allows us to feel a sense of pride when we succeed, and disappointment when we fail. It gives us the freedom to shape ourselves into something of our own choosing, despite there being many things we cannot change or control.

Nagel thinks that the only realistic option left for us is to recognize that we must learn to exercise and develop our ethical judgment.

We must construct arguments, justifications, and defenses of our ideas, plans, and decisions, while also acknowledging that there is no single correct answer, or objectively correct thing to do.

Nagel writes that

When faced with conflicting and incommensurable claims we still have to do something — even if it is only to do nothing … I contend that there can be good judgment without total justification, either explicit or implicit … Provided one has taken the process of practical justification as far as it will go in the course of arriving at the conflict, one may be able to proceed without further justification, but without irrationality either … What makes this possible is judgment — essentially the faculty Aristotle described as practical wisdom, which reveals itself over time in individual decisions rather than in the enunciation of general principles.

Nagel, The Fragmentation Of Value

If Nagel is right about the nature of value, then what human beings need more than answers is courage.

We must have the courage to make decisions even though we know in advance that there is never going to be a clear and easy answer for certain problems we face. We must also have the courage to live with the consequences of our choices, rather than complain about the fact that we live in a fragmented world.

We may wish the world were different such that all of our ethical choices were solved for us ahead of time, or that we simply have to pick the bigger number, but the cost of sacrificing our agency is too high.

There are certain features of human life that will always cause problems for us, and even though can’t help but try to eliminate certain problems, we can also learn to appreciate that their source is an irreducible aspect of what makes human life interesting and worth living.

-Paul