Sharon Street Colloquium

Meditation, Metaethics, and the View From Nowhere

Thomas Nagel’s account of ethical objectivity in The View From Nowhere is highly suggestive but notoriously obscure. In this talk, I review Nagel’s proposal, raise some criticisms of it, and then suggest that an appeal to the form of attention cultivated in meditation practice might be able to shed light on what Nagel calls the “objective standpoint” relevant to ethics. I close with a sketch of a constructivist metaethical proposal that draws on these ideas, and which, if it could be made to work, would vindicate a strong form of ethical objectivity without metaphysical or epistemological mystery.