Abstract
Personal value, i.e., what is valuable for us (rather than value simpliciter), has recently been analysed in terms of so-called for-someone’s-sake attitudes. This paper is an attempt to add flesh to the bone of these attitudes that have not yet been properly analysed in the philosophical literature. By employing a distinction between justifiers and identifiers, which corresponds to two roles a property may play in the intentional content of an attitude, two different kinds of for-someone’s-sake attitudes can be identified. Moreover, it is argued that one of these kinds is particularly difficult to include in an analysis of value simpliciter but not in an analysis of value for.
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Notes
FAP gives rise to many questions and issues which there is no space to pursue here. However, to avoid some more obvious misunderstandings, the following should be kept in mind: (i) FAP analyses an evaluative (or normative) sense of value for (good for or bad for): in other words, it is not concerned with non-normative (non-evaluative) ways of understanding value for (good/bad for). (ii) The ‘reason’ element in the analysans is here not further specified. For instance, it might refer to pro tanto reasons or to complete reasons, agent-neutral or agent-relative reasons.
This is a major drawback with FAP. Christian Piller (personal communication) has suggested another, more substantial objection: Suppose your headache is good for your opponent in a game of chess (because it increases his chances of winning). But surely you do not have a reason to favour your headache for his sake, as FAP requires? But since it does seem intuitively plausible to think that your headache is good for your opponent, there seems to be something wrong with FAP. Of course, what happens in a case like this is that we might not be agreeing on what is good for the person. However, suppose you did think that your headache was in fact genuinely good for your opponent, and that you did not take this to be what sometimes is called a “natural normative fact”. The interesting thing to ask then is if FAP might catch what we mean by good for in such a case. Taking into consideration first that favouring your headache for his sake might refer to a number of very different kinds of attitude (say, liking or preferring the headache for his sake), and, second, that this reason may well be outweighed by other reasons (say, reasons having to do with the fact that you dislike the headache for your own sake), such cases will appear less problematic for FAP. For a detailed reply to this sort of objection see Rønnow-Rasmussen (2007).
I owe Christian Piller for these expressions.
So what is carrying the personal value in this particular case? The play? Perhaps, but it would be somewhat strained to say the play gives me a reason to want to accompany her to the theatre. More reasonably, what is valuable for her is rather seeing a good play together with someone whose company she enjoys. This, then, would more likely give me a reason to accompany her.
En passant, it might be thought that what I am in effect driving at by proposing an analysis of personal values in terms of reasons is that we should understand these values in terms of agent-relative reasons for attitudes and impersonal values in terms of agent-neutral reasons. This would be handy, of course, but it is actually not what I am suggesting. There is no place here to explain why things are not as straightforward as they might seem, and why I prefer my own approach (according to which both kinds of values are reducible to the same kind of reasons; the distinguishing feature being rather that only personal values should be understood to normatively require the FSS attitudes). In Rønnow-Rasmussen (2007), I argued that the reasons referred to in the analysis are all agent-neutral reasons. I am now inclined to regard them as agent-relative because I now find the notion of an agent-neutral reason hard to understand given that we regard reasons as facts. I develop this (admittedly somewhat counter-intuitive) idea in “Normative Reasons and the Agent-neutral/relative Dichotomy” (Rønnow-Rasmussen 2009): There, I consider a challenge to advocates of agent-neutral reasons that sets off from the two following ideas: First, claims such as “X is a reason” or “The reason is…” are, at least in the case of practical normative reasons, elliptical—they are all shorthand for “This is a practical reason for person x to Φ” or “The practical reason for x to Φ is…”. Second, facts that are reasons must somehow reflect or explain this personalizability (“for x”) feature. If they do not, it remains inexplicable why those facts constitute reasons for the agent. Advocates of agent-neutral reasons must find a fact that does this without involving the person for whom it is a reason. This, I argue, is easier said than done, and hence, defending the notion of agent-neutral reasons qua facts is something of a challenge.
A number of value theorists are value bearer monists, i.e., they believe that fundamentally value supervenes only on one kind of metaphysical entity (e.g., states of affairs). My approach to personal and impersonal value rests heavily on value bearer pluralism. However, in this paper I will not argue for this position here, but simply take it for granted.
The second problem (the detail of which would require quite some unraveling), has to do with the fact that it only seems to admit (first order) attitudes as bearers of personal values.
This is to simplify matters, though. For instance, I might favour something for its part or contribution in a whole (organic unity). In what follows I will set these attitudes aside.
There is further complication here. As has been argued in recent years sometimes we may value objects for their own sake in virtue of their instrumental properties. See for instance and Korsgaard (1983), Brännmark (2001) and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2002). The attitudes involved in such cases would have to be distinguished from the two attitudes I am discussing here. I am not sure about the details, but I suppose the intentional content of an attitude might include an object’s instrumental properties but not do so only for the sake of their instrumentality or causal effectiveness. If this is possible remains to be argued, but in case it is we should be able to differentiate such attitudes from the two ones I discuss above.
Love is a highly complex notion. I will describe only one feature of this complex attitude. I set out from a view that I outlined in Rønnow-Rasmussen (2008), which is similar to Harry Frankfurt’s understanding of love—notably what he calls “active love”. See Harry J. Frankfurt (1999). See also his description of love in “On Caring”, in the same work, p. 165. People are inclined to ascribe value to persons they love. However, the relation between love and value is far from straightforward. This is particularly evident if love is depicted, as I think it should be, as an attitude that takes non-replaceable, i.e., non-fungible persons as intentional objects. Moreover, to what extent people de facto display love as depicted here is a matter I leave open. The romantic literature is full of references to this sort of love, though. See e.g. W. B. Yeats’s poem “For Anne Gregory” which he ends with: “But I can get a hair-dye/And set such colour there,/Brown or black, or carrot,/That young men in despair/May love me for myself alone/And not my yellow hair.”
In Section 3 I outline some of the central claims made in Rønnow-Rasmussen (2008), and so there will be some unavoidable overlapping.
Blaise Pascal (1995, pp. 130–1) argues this in his Pensées.
W. Newton-Smith (1973), in his discussion of the problem of love’s “constancy”, says much that I am in agreement with. However, what I miss in this otherwise insightful work is an awareness of the distinction between what causes us to love someone and what is in the intentional content of love (see e.g., p. 122 where he uses the expression “on account of” without specifying what he has in mind here).
This conception of love raises different philosophically interesting issues that I have had to set aside here. However, see Rønnow-Rasmussen (2008) in which I discuss some of these in more detail.
The example is simplified, though. In fact, there may be two personal values in play here; it might be the case that you ascribe personal value to the satisfaction of b’s desire to make me pass the salt to a, or it might be a’s getting the salt that is carrying a’s personal value.
The example is complicated. At least some of us will also think that fundamentally the worshiper does not have any reason to favour the Madonna, which suggests that we might after all not consider the Madonna as carrying someone’s genuine personal value; our value judgement expresses rather a kind of inverted commas use of ‘value for’.
See here my “Subjectivism and Objectivism” in Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen (2003) Patterns of Value, vol. 1, Lund: Lund Philosophy Reports, 2003b.
This reply is not available to so-called Mooreans who reject the idea of a relativized notion of value, like “value for”, that can be defined independently of value (period). For two defences of this Moorean idea, see Donald H. Regan (2004) and Thomas Hurka (1987). I discuss these views, Moore’s classic attack on good for as well as Connie Rosati’s recent defence of good for in (2007), in Personal Value (circulating manuscript). See also Michael J. Zimmerman’s “Understanding What’s Good for Us” in this issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
This “whose” is not intended to imply that value (in this case a value for) can be in someone’s possession. Values are not owned. G. E. Moore was right about this. If O carries a value for, this will be a kind of value for anyone who has a reason to favour O for some person’s sake. However, we might also have a different sense in mind. In short, in this other sense to say that something is a’s personal value it so say that there exists a reason to favour the object for a’s sake which is constituted by the fact that the supervenience basis of the value for contains a (relational) property accruing to a. (Not all relational properties call for FSS attitudes, though. Which ones that call for this particular kind of attitudes is a matter to which I have no determinate answer. I strongly suspect that basically this difference concerns a major evaluative issue).
I develop this further in Rønnow-Rasmussen (2008)
There is no place in this work to discuss the complex nature of this distinction. Its fruitfulness in application will, I hope, be displayed, though.
Should we allow these relational properties to indirectly be part of the attitude? Perhaps this makes sense. However, it does not change the point made here, that certain properties cannot be said to be discerned.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited much from the comments I received from the people who attended the workshop Kinds of Value and Kinds of Value Bearers at ECAP6 (Krakow). I would like to thank in particular Christian Piller and Wlodek Rabinowicz who gave me valuable remarks on the manuscript. I also owe Johan Brännmark, Kevin Mulligan, Jonas Olson, Andrew Reisner, and Michael J. Zimmerman a special thanks for useful and stimulating discussions.
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Rønnow-Rasmussen, T. On For Someone’s Sake Attitudes. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 12, 397–411 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9178-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9178-2