Abstract
I shall argue, however, that there can be genuine ambivalence
between a judgment that A is v and a judgment that A is not v. Such ambivalence
may, moreover, be precisely of the kind that appears to be either impossible or
destructive for ethics. Objectivist ambivalence, as we shall call it, is neither an
accidental nor peripheral feature of our value discourse. At the same time it is not
destructive to ethics or to value judgments in general, but only to certain received
philosophical conceptions of ethics and value. Once the phenomenon of objectivist
ambivalence of value judgment is identified, it can be analyzed, and in conducting
that analysis I shall set out three aspects that are involved in it. The analysis of the
mental attitude of ambivalence will have consequences for the logic of values. We
shall see that this logic allows and invites tensions in a non-mysterious way.