I just read Thomas Nagel's 1977 essay, "Poverty and Food: Why Charity Is Not Enough." I think highly of Nagel as a philosopher, but sometimes he lets his egalitarianism get the better of him. (In other words, sometimes he's an egalitarian first and a philosopher second.) Late in the essay, Nagel takes up Garrett Hardin's argument that "food aid to the poorest countries will do harm rather than good, because by reducing the death rate without altering the birth rate it will result in larger populations and ensure a larger-scale collapse at a later date, when the world's productive capacities are exhausted" (page 60). Nagel writes: "We should be suspicious of a result which coincides so perfectly with our economic self-interest."
I was taken aback by this sentence, for all at once, Nagel left the realm of argumentation and entered the realm of (speculative) explanation. Instead of doing philosophy, in which he is competent, he does psychology, in which he is not. Instead of addressing the truth of Hardin's premises or the validity of his inferences, Nagel questions Hardin's motives (or, more generally, the motives of anyone who makes the argument). This is cynicism, not criticism. It focuses on motives, not reasons. It is an attempt to explain why the argument is made, not an attempt to find fault with the argument.
Let's turn the tables on Nagel, for two can play the cynic's game. Nagel is a university professor with a capped income. He earns far less than industrialists, agriculturalists, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, financiers, and other capitalists. Given that human beings crave status, and given that wealth is one of the main markers of status in our society, it's in Nagel's interest to decrease the wealth of those who have more than he does. In this essay, as well as in other essays and books, Nagel argues for redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. Shouldn't we be "suspicious of a result which coincides so perfectly with [his] economic self-interest"? Is it merely a coincidence that Nagel's argument works to his advantage, by bringing the wealthy down to his level?
Two questions. First, why is it almost always progressives who resort to cynicism? Second, why do those progressives who resort to cynicism not realize that it can just as easily be turned against them? Do they think that only conservatives are badly motivated? If conservatives are motivated by greed, then progressives are motivated by envy. A priori, either everyone is badly motivated or nobody is. Nagel may reply that there is evidence to the effect that conservatives, but not progressives, are badly motivated. If so, he should supply it.
