Varieties of Moral Value

Losing an arm to rescue a child from a burning building is supererogatory. But is losing an arm to save two children more supererogatory than losing two arms to save a single child? What factors make one act more supererogatory than another? I provide an innovative account of how to compare which of two acts is more supererogatory, and show the superiority of this account to its chief rival.

Glassen distinguishes various categories of moral terms that are nowadays often confused, conflated, or neglected.

The guise of the good is the thesis that an agent can only want, or intentionally do or pursue something, if and because this seems good to the agent in some respect or other. Bernard Williams criticizes the guise of the good in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. In this paper I reconstruct and assess his hitherto unnoticed critical remarks. Williams's opposition is based on the idea that it takes an “extra step” to go from desiring or pursuing something (...) to thinking of it as good. To show this, he employs an argument from elimination (with two strands: an argument from personal ends and an argument from immediate ends), and a separate argument which I call the one‐desire argument. I review and reject two types of answers to Williams's objections: answers that explore different varieties of what it can mean to “think of as good,” and answers that focus on different varieties of goodness under the guise of which one can desire something. I then consider whether a different, but nearby thesis, namely the guise of normative reasons, can accommodate Williams's objections, concluding that this alternative also fails. I end by looking at how this debate might move forward. (shrink)

Value pluralists believe in multiple dimensions of value. What does betterness along a dimension have to do with being better overall? Any systematic answer begins with the Strong Pareto principle: one thing is overall better than another if it is better along one dimension and at least as good along all others. We defend Strong Pareto from recent counterexamples and use our discussion to develop a novel view of dimensions of value, one which puts Strong Pareto on firmer footing. We (...) conclude by defending Dimensionalism, the hypothesis that overall value relations are determined solely by how things compare along value dimensions. These are first steps towards a more systematic value pluralism. (shrink)

Boredom has dominated discussions about longevity thanks to Bernard Williams’s influential “The Makropulos Case.” I reveal the presence in that paper of a neglected, additional problem for the long-lived person, namely alienation in the face of unwanted change. Williams gestures towards this problem but does not pursue it. I flesh it out on his behalf, connecting it to what I call the ‘curmudgeonly attitude to change.’ This attitude manifests itself in the tendency, amongst those getting on in years, to observe (...) that things are getting worse. Curmudgeonliness is typically met with dismissal because it often concerns changes that don’t radically inhibit the curmudgeon’s well-being or autonomy. I believe that taking the curmudgeonly attitude more seriously will provide insight into the longer-lived self and its relation to the future. Using Williams’s approach to longevity as the framework, I contend that—as with boredom—a sense of alienation born of curmudgeonliness can become terminal for the subject, rendering her unable to envision the future as a site of worthwhile activity. However, I also uncover ways in which this agential stasis is significantly distinct from boredom and constitutes a different worry and a different risk for the long-lived individual. (shrink)

Holly Smith has done more than anyone to explore and defend the importance of usability for moral theories. In Making Morality Work, she develops a moral theory that is almost universally usable. But not quite. In this article, I argue that no moral theory is universally usable, in the sense that is most immediately relevant to action, even by agents who know all the normative facts. There is no moral theory knowledge of which suffices to settle deliberation about what to (...) do. However, this is unsurprising if the question of what to do is not a question of fact. One upshot of the discussion is that the search for a universally usable moral theory is misconceived. Another is that, contra Smith (341), agents who are radically uncertain need not lack autonomy. (shrink)

This paper aims to draw attention to an important but underappreciated aspect of the instrumental value of freedom: its diagnostic value. This is the value freedom has insofar as it makes it possible for us to discover ourselves and improve ourselves in our capacity to make value judgements. Diagnostic value, I argue, has an important role to play in explaining the value we attach to freedom. Accordingly, this paper is aimed at elucidating this concept, examining its relevance to our lives, (...) and defending an account of how to measure the diagnostic value of opportunities and sets of opportunities. (shrink)

For Kant and Hill, self-respect is a morally central and morally powerful concern. Both have also had some things to say in moral praise of humility and in condemnation of arrogance, a trait widely regarded as the vice to which the virtue of humility is the prevention and cure. Arrogance can easily be seen as a failure to respect both other people and oneself. It might be thought, however, that humility and self-respect are in tension, if not at odds with (...) one another, for the one is widely thought to involve a low opinion of one’s worth and the other a high regard for it. My essay focuses on understanding, with the help of Kant and Hill, relations among various kinds of humility, arrogance, and self-respect. I argue that humility is not the virtue opposing arrogance, but rather, self-respect is, and that humility is at best an ancillary, instrumental, contextual virtue and the servant of self-respect; but at worst, it is as serious a vice as arrogance, indeed, an aspect of it. (shrink)

Critics have argued that Rawls's account of self-respect is equivocal. I show, first, that Rawls in fact relies upon an unambiguous notion of self-respect, though he sometimes is unclear as to whether this notion has merely instrumental or also intrinsic value. I show second that Rawls’s main objective in arguing that justice as fairness supports citizens’ self-respect is not, as many have thought, to show that his principles support citizens’ self-respect generally, but to show that his principles counter the effects (...) of the market on lower class citizens’ sense of worth. This discussion establishes that Rawls, in the end, sees self-respect primarily as an intrinsic good. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin argues on the basis of a theory of well-being that critical paternalism is self-defeating. People must endorse their lives if they are to benefit. This is the endorsement constraint and this paper rejects it. For certain kinds of important mistakes that people can make in their lives, the endorsement constraint is either incredible or too narrow to rule out as much paternalism as Dworkin wants. The endorsement constraint cannot be interpreted to give sensible judgements when people change their (...) minds about the value of their lives. And the main argument for the endorsement constraint, which is based on the value of integrity, does not support Dworkin's anti-paternalism. (shrink)

The notion that some things have intrinsic value, independently of whether they are valued or would be valued under certain conditions, is puzzling not only to noncognitivists and skeptics, but to theorists who understand value in terms of what would be accepted by rational preference, in a social contract, or under conditions of vivid imagination. Written in the tradition of Roderick Chisholm’s Brentano and Intrinsic Value, Noah Lemos’s Intrinsic Value: Concept and Warrant is unlikely to diminish the puzzlement, though it (...) will be beneficial to those who accept intrinsic value and our knowledge of it. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a new theory of normative reasons called reasons as good bases, according to which a normative reason to φ is something that is a good basis for φing. The idea is that the grounds on which we do things—bases—can be better or worse as things of their kind, and a normative reason—a good reason—is something that is just a good instance of such a ground. After introducing RGB, I clarify what it is to be a (...) good basis, and argue that RGB has various attractive features: it has intuitive implications, makes good sense of the weights of reasons, and attractively explains the relationship between normative reasons and motivating reasons. I then briefly defend the view from objections and compare it to rivals. Finally, I sketch two possible implications of RGB: some kind of constitutivism, according to which the norms that govern us are explained by the nature of agency, and second, the claim that agents who do things for reasons generally do them for good reasons. (shrink)

Originally published during the early part of the twentieth century, the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature were designed to provide concise introductions to a broad range of topics. They were written by experts for the general reader and combined a comprehensive approach to knowledge with an emphasis on accessibility. The Moral Life by W. R. Sorley was first published in 1911 and reissued as this third edition in 1920. The volume presents an account of the nature of goodness in (...) humanity, taking the perspective that morality is a spirit manifested in life rather than a body of rules. (shrink)

T.L.S. Sprigge; VIII*—Intrinsic Connectedness, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 129–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/.

The paper argues that the final value of an object, i.e., its value for its own sake, need not be intrinsic. It need not supervene on the object’s internal properties. Extrinsic final value, which accrues to things in virtue of their relational features, cannot be traced back to the intrinsic value of states that involve these things together with their relations. On the opposite, such states, insofar as they are valuable at all, derive their value from the things involved. The (...) endeavour to reduce thing-values to state-values is largely motivated by a mistaken belief that appropriate responses to value must consist in preferring and/or promoting. A pluralist approach to value analysis obviates the need for reduction: the final value of a thing or a person can be given an independent interpretation in terms of the appropriate thing- or person-oriented responses: admiration, love, respect, protection, cherishing, etc. (shrink)

Even if you were the last person on Earth, you should not cut down all the trees—or so goes the Last Man thought experiment, which has been taken to show that nature has intrinsic value. But ‘Last Man’ is caught on a dilemma. If Last Man is too far inside the anthropocentric circle, so to speak, his actions cannot be indicative of intrinsic value. If Last Man is cast too far outside the anthropocentric circle, though, then value terms lose their (...) cogency. The experiment must satisfy conditions in a seemingly impossible ‘goldilocks’ zone. To this end I propose a new version, the Ultramodal Last Man, which appeals to Routley's work in metaphysics and non-classical logic. With this ‘Last Last Man’, I argue that the Local/Global dilemma is resolved: impossible equations balance in ultramodal space. For defenders and critics alike, this helps to clarify the demands of intrinsic value, and renews a role for non-standard logics in value theory. (shrink)

Dignity, according to some recent arguments, is a useless concept, giving vague expression to moral intuitions that are better captured by other, better defined concepts. In this paper, I defend the concept of dignity against such skeptical arguments. I begin with a description of the defining features of the Kantian conception of dignity. I then examine one of the strongest arguments against that conception, advanced by Arthur Schopenhauer in On the Basis of Morality. After considering some standard accounts of dignity, (...) showing how they fail adequately to address Schopenhauer’s concern, I propose and defend a new account of dignity, drawing on the ontology of Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

Dem phänomenologischen Philosophieren liegt ein spezifisches Verständnis von Freiheit zugrunde, an dem sich eine negative und eine positive Seite unterscheiden lassen. Negativ ist die phänomenologische Freiheit die Freiheit von philosophischen Vorurteilen, positiv eine Freiheit zum philosophischen Neuanfang. Sie benennt die Fähigkeit, sich in einer Erfahrungssituation auf das für diese Situation Wesentliche einzulassen, dieses philosophisch zu erfassen und entsprechend zu handeln. Aufgrund dieser Kontinuität im Phänomen der Freiheit selbst lässt sich die phänomenologische Freiheit weder allein als negative, noch allein als positive (...) Freiheit verstehen, noch lässt sie sich Theorie oder Praxis zuordnen. Ihr Gebrauch ist zwar ein Tun, das mit der Kritik gegenüber bestehenden Theoriebildungen anhebt. Aber dieses Tun verfolgt kein vorgegebenes Ziel, sondern besteht darin, eine theoretische Tätigkeit zu beginnen, die durch den Anspruch der Phänomenologie auf deskriptives Wissen lediglich umrissen ist. Phänomenologische Freiheit ist demnach Freiheit auch und gerade gegenüber den epistemischen und praktischen Voraussetzungen des eigenen Handelns und so erst jene radikale Zuwendung zu den Sachen, wie sich in der Phänomenologie realisieren soll. Mit dieser Bestimmung soll nicht geleugnet werden, dass Freiheit primär ein Gegenstand der praktischen Philosophie ist. Aber in einer phänomenologischen Bestimmung von Freiheit muss auch dies sich aus dem Phänomen selbst ergeben. ... (shrink)

Our lives are flooded with value claims. We evaluate our breakfast and the weather. We evaluate the actions of our politicians and our spouse. We talk of good routes to work and good routes through life. Many of our evaluative claims are a matter of much dispute, and some of these disputes are the most important in our lives, particularly disputes about what is right and wrong, and what makes our lives good. To settle these disputes one must know what (...) is good. ;This dissertation is an attempt to answer that question. I argue that there is only one property of value and it is the property of being rich, of being a unified variety. Examples of richness are living creatures, artworks, ecosystems, societies and human relationships. I begin by developing a definition of richness. Richness turns out to be variety that suggests a unified nomic explanation. Then I argue that our desires are our basic evidence of value and that any good value theory must explain why we desire and value what we do. Given the variety of things we desire and value, one might think that there are a variety of valuable properties; so I give arguments for the claim that the final value theory should be a monistic one. ;Next, I look at several of the things widely held to be valuable and show that we find them valuable in virtue of their richness. I look at beauty, life, knowledge, consciousness, desire-satisfaction, persons and some values from environmental ethics. In addition, I argue that there is a tight connection between love and the good. The proper object of love is the good. But it turns out the proper object of love is also richness. This suggests that richness and the good are one and the same. Finally, I give a refutation of the most common theory of value: hedonism. I argue that proper understandings of pleasure, enjoyment, pain and suffering show that none of these states are intrinsically valuable or disvaluable. (shrink)

Environmentalists have argued that contemporary ethical theories have overly strict rules about what kinds of things can be intrinsically valuable. These rules make it impossible for many of the things that environmentalists care deeply about---things which are not rational, sentient, or in some cases, even alive---to be considered bearers of intrinsic value. In this dissertation I consider possible responses to this environmentalist criticism from within mainstream ethical theories. Using the value of ecosystems as a test case, I analyze what features (...) a thing must have, and why, in order to be a possessor of intrinsic value on each of three ethical theories: wellbeing-based theories, Moorean theories, and rational attitude theories. ;I begin, in Chapter 1, by describing the different meanings that get attached to the term "intrinsic value" by both environmentalists and ethical theorists. In Chapter 2, I argue that on wellbeing-based ethical theories, many of the most popular accounts of wellbeing will allow ecosystems to be bearers of wellbeing and thus intrinsic value. I further argue that a "rational care" account of wellbeing is the most successful in this regard. In Chapter 3, I consider what the wellbeing of ecosystems would consist in within the framework of a rational care account of wellbeing. I argue that health is the sole constituent of ecosystemic wellbeing and offer an account of what ecosystem health consists in. In Chapter 4, I argue that Moorean theories can easily account for the intrinsic value of ecosystems without relying on the claim that ecosystems have a wellbeing. On behalf of Moorean accounts, I also respond to the objection that properties cannot be both intrinsic and normative. In Chapter 5, I argue that rational attitude theories can account for the intrinsic value of ecosystems without relying on claims about wellbeing or an implausible metaphysical picture. I sketch a general picture of the type of rational attitude theory that will be responsive to environmentalist theoretical requirements, and then discuss the problems and issues that would need to be resolved in order to have a completely satisfying account. ;Ultimately, I argue that while a place can be made for the intrinsic value of ecosystems on all three theories, rational attitude accounts do the best job of accommodating environmentalist concerns without incurring other significant theoretical costs. (shrink)

The recent literature of Environmental Ethics has frequently centered on the issue of whether nonhuman life or the environment as a whole has intrinsic value in some sense. In chapter one, I review the debate over the intrinsic value of the non-human and also the environmental critics of pragmatism. Pragmatism has been criticized as unsuitable for an Environmental Ethics on the grounds that it undermines intrinsic value, subjectivizes value, and thus cannot provide a sufficient basis for the protection of the (...) environment. In the second chapter, I examine the issue of intrinsic value in the classical literature of ethics. The argument is that subjectivization of value is the cause of the devaluation of the environment and that this is based on the metaphysics of the subject initiated by Descartes. The root of the problem of the intrinsic value of nature is metaphysical. A third chapter discusses the value theory of John Dewey. Dewey's Instrumentalism it is argued, modifies but does not abandon the notion of intrinsic value. By criticizing subjective value, however, Dewey transforms the issues. Intrinsic value is not treated as foundational to ethics, as it is for many subjective theories. Dewey retains it in a larger holistic system, as one element of justification. The fourth chapter argues against the charge that Dewey's philosophy is anthropocentric or based on the subject through a discussion of Dewey's Naturalism. Dewey's philosophy is an attempt to overcome subjectively based theories by showing how humans require a natural environment in which they live and of which they are a part. Intrinsic value is brought back into nature as a trait of nature: nature is revalued. I argue that this may be superior as a basis for Environmental Ethics to alternative approaches. Norms are derived from Dewey's moral writings which could be used for specific environmental issues. In the Conclusion, I briefly describe how the other pragmatists can be defended against the charges of subjectivity, anthropocentrism and undermining intrinsic value. I also suggest certain approaches to environmental issues for which pragmatism could be used as a basis. (shrink)

I identify two fundamental ways in which one can value oneself: conditionally--believing that one is worthy of a best friend's love because one has certain qualities that are special or outstanding; and unconditionally--believing that one is worthy of a best friend's love on the basis of no special or outstanding qualities. I argue that a conditional sense of self-worth--what I call 'self-esteem'--is important to have because without it we could not pursue our deepest goals and commitments; and an unconditional sense (...) of self-worth is important to have because having a conditional sense of self-worth requires it. ;There are two natural views about an unconditional sense of self-worth that I challenge. First, I show that there is a way of conceiving, and justifying, an unconditional sense of self-worth that doesn't rest on some idea of a universal, shared self--like Kant's noumenal self. On my view, an unconditional sense of self-worth is tied to an agent's particularity. Second, I criticize the view that a conditional sense of self-worth is important while an unconditional one isn't by showing how the former depends upon the latter. For I show that an unconditional sense of self-worth, at least on one conception of it, is justified in light of an agent's particular commitments. (shrink)