Divine command theory Main article: Divine command theory This section requires expansion.

Although not all Deontologists are religious, some believe in The 'Divine Command Theory'. 'The Divine Command Theory' is a cluster of related theories that state that an action is right if God has decreed that it is right.[7] William of Ockham, Ren Descartes and eighteenth-century Calvinists all accepted versions of this moral theory, according to Ralph Cudworth, as they all held that moral obligations arise from God's commands.[8] The Divine Command Theory is a form of deontology because, according to it, the rightness of any action depends upon that action being performed because it is a duty, not because of any good consequences arising from that action. If God commands people not to work on Sabbath, then people act rightly if they do not work on Sabbath because God has commanded that they do not do so. If they do not work on Sabbath because they are lazy, then their action is not truly speaking "right", even though the actual physical action performed is the same. If God commands not to covet a neighbour's goods, this theory holds that it would be immoral to do so, even if coveting provides the beneficial outcome of a drive to succeed or do well. Intelligent Design Nagel does not accept the rejection of Intelligent Design as non-scientific or merely religious. He wrote in 2008 that "ID is very different from creation science...Whatever the merits, however, [it] is clearly a scientific disagreement, not a disagreement between science and something else."[8] In 2009, Nagel recommended Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell as one of his "Best Books of the Year" in The Times Literary Supplement.[9] While Nagel did not accept Meyer's conclusions he endorsed his approach to "this fiendishly difficult problem" of the origin of life.[10] Many scientists and philosophers criticised Nagel's views on this matter.[11][12][13][14][15][16] Specifically, Stephen Fletcher, chemist at Loughborough University, wrote in The Times Literary Supplement, Nagel is "promot[ing] the book to the rest of us using statements that are factually incorrect."[17] Fletcher explained "Natural selection is in fact a chemical process as well as a biological process, and it was operating for about half a billion years before the earliest cellular life forms appear in the fossil record."[17]

Nagel has been highly influential in the related fields of moral and political philosophy. Supervised by John Rawls, Nagel has been a long-standing proponent of a Kantian and rationalist approach to moral philosophy. His distinctive ideas were first presented in the short monograph The Possibility of Altruism, published in 1970. That book seeks by reflection on the nature of practical reasoning to uncover the formal principles that underlie reason in practice and the related general beliefs about the self that are necessary for those principles to be truly applicable to us. Nagel defends motivated desire theory about the motivation of moral action. According to motivated desire theory, when a person is motivated to moral action it is indeed true that such actions are motivated -- like all intentional actions -- by a belief and a desire. But it is important to get the justificatory relations right: when a person accepts a moral judgment he or she is necessarily motivated to act. But it is the reason that does the justificatory work of justifying both the action and the desire. Nagel contrasts this view with a rival view which believes that a moral agent can only accept that he or she has a reason to act if the desire to carry out the action has an independent justification (an account based on presupposing sympathy would be of this kind). The most striking claim of the book is that there is a very close parallel between prudential reasoning in one's own interests and moral reasons to act to further the interests of another person. When one reasons prudentially, for example about the future reasons that one will have, one allows the reason in the future to justify one's current action without reference to the strength of one's current desires. If a hurricane were to destroy someone's car next year at that point he will want his insurance company to pay him to replace it: that future reason gives him a reason, now, to take out insurance. The strength of the reason ought not to be hostage to the strength of one's current desires. The denial of this view of prudence, Nagel argues, means that one does not really believe that one is one and the same person through time. One is dissolving oneself into distinct person stages. This is the basis of his analogy between prudential actions and moral actions: in cases of altruistic action for another person's good that person's reasons quite literally become reasons for one if they are timeless and intrinsic reasons. Genuine reasons are reasons for anyone. Comparable to the views of the nineteenth century moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick, Nagel believes that one needs to conceive of one's good as an impersonal good and one's reasons as objective reasons. That means, practically, that a timeless and intrinsic value generates reasons for anyone. A person who denies the truth of this claim is committed, as in the case of a similar mistake about prudence, to a false view of him or her self. In this case the false view is that one's reasons are irreducibly his, in a way that does not allow them to be reasons for anyone: Nagel argues this commits such a person to the view that he or she cannot make the same judgments about her own reasons third-personally that she can make first-personally. Nagel calls this "dissociation" and considers it a practical analogue of solipsism (the false belief that one's is the only mind that exists). Once again, a false view of what is involved in reasoning properly is refuted by showing that it leads to a false view of the nature of people. In his later work on ethics, Nagel no longer places as much weight on the distinction between a person's personal or "subjective" reasons and his or her "objective" reasons. In The Possibility of Altruism, if one's reasons really are about intrinsic and timeless values then, qua subjective reason, one can only take them to be the guise of the reasons that there really are -- the objective ones. In his later discussions, Nagel treats this view as an incomplete grasp of the fact that there are distinct classes of reasons and

values. In the case of agent-relative reasons (the successor to subjective reasons) specifying the content of the reason makes essential reference back to the agent for whom it is a reason. (An example might be: "Anyone has a reason to honor his or her parents.") In the case of agent-neutral reasons (the successor to objective reasons) specifying the content of the reason does not make any essential reference back to the person for whom it is a reason. (An example might be: "Anyone has a reason to promote the good of parenthood.") This emphasis on different classes of reasons and values, however, remains committed to the Sidgwickian model of thinking objectively about one's moral commitments such that one's reasons and values are only incomplete parts of an impersonal whole. The structure of Nagel's later ethical view is that all reasons must be brought into relation to this objective view of oneself. Those reasons and values that withstand detached critical scrutiny are objective; but other reasons and values that are more subjective can be objectively tolerated. However, the most striking part of the earlier argument and of Sidgwick's view is preserved: agent neutral reasons are literally reasons for anyone so all objectifiable reasons become individually possessed no matter whose they are. When one thinks reflectively about ethics, one comes to see that every other agent's standpoint on value has to be taken as seriously as his, since his perspective is just his take on an inter-subjective whole. So that which one took to be his personal set of reasons is swamped by the objective reasons of all others. This is similar to "World Agent" consequentialist views in which one takes up the standpoint of a collective subject whose reasons are those of everyone. But Nagel remains an individualist who believes in the separateness of persons so his task is to explain why this objective viewpoint does not swallow up the individual standpoint of each of us. He provides an extended rationale for the importance to people of their personal point of view. The result is a hybrid ethical theory of the kind defended by Nagel's Princeton PhD student Samuel Scheffler in The Rejection of Consequentialism. The objective standpoint and its demands have to be balanced with the subjective personal point of view of each person and its demands. One can always be maximally objective but one does not have to be. One can legitimately "cap" the demands placed on him by the objective reasons of others. In addition, in his later work, Nagel finds a rationale for so-called deontic constraints in a way Scheffler could not. Following Warren Quinn and Frances Kamm, Nagel grounds them on the inviolability of persons. The extent to which one can lead a good life as an individual while respecting the demands of others leads inevitably to political philosophy. In the Locke lectures published as the book Equality and Partiality, Nagel exposes John Rawls's theory of justice to detailed scrutiny. Once again Nagel places such weight on the objective point of view and its requirements that he finds Rawls's view of liberal equality not demanding enough. Rawls's aim to redress, not remove, the inequalities that arise from class and talent seems to Nagel to lead to a view that does not sufficiently respect the needs of others. He recommends a gradual move to much more demanding conceptions of equality, motivated by the special nature of political responsibility. Normally people draw a distinction between that which people do and that which people fail to bring about. But this thesis, true of individuals, does not apply to the state, which is a collective agent. A Rawlsian state permits intolerable inequalities and people need to develop a more ambitious view of equality to do justice to the demands of the objective recognition of the reasons of others. For Nagel, honoring the objective point of view demands nothing less.