The Case against Evaluative Realism

International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2013

Value realism, roughly speaking, is the thesis that value claims (such as friendship is good and burning baby's feet for fun is bad) can be literally true or false; that some such claims are indeed true; that their truth is not simply a matter of any individual's subjective attitudes or even of the attitudes of some larger collective; and that facts about value enjoy a certain metaphysical independence from other matters of fact. As this first rough characterization might suggest, realism about value is a matter of degree. While the robust value antirealist will reject all four claims, there are a variety of realist positions from weak objective idealist views, to mind-independent naturalist views, and finally robustly non-naturalist views of value. It is possible to combine different degrees of realism with respect to different domains. For example, a robust realism about the physical can be, and often is, combined with a reductive realism about the mental, or with antirealism about the moral. The purpose of this essay is to characterize value or axiological realism, rather than either deontic realism or moral realism (see realism, moral) with which it is sometimes conflated. The axiological domain embraces the thin evaluative concepts -such as good, bad, better, worse -along with their thick entourage including such concepts as courageous, kind, beautiful, sublime, intelligent, elegant, clumsy, petty, craven, callous, cruel, outrageous, salacious, mean, sarcastic, and ugly (see thick and thin concepts). The deontic domain embraces the concepts of permissibility, impermissibility, obligation, and so on, along with their thick entourage (e.g., just, fair, appropriate, desert, rights, duties, and so on). That these two domains are conceptually distinct is evidenced, for example, by the ongoing debate about whether the right is reducible to the good, or the good to the right, or neither. We can thus distinguish between deontic realism and axiological realism, facilitating possibly differential treatments of the two. The moral domain is identified narrowly with the deontic domain alone, or broadly, with the union of the deontic and the axiological. These yield a narrow and a broad notion of moral realism, neither of which is identical to value realism. The putative bearers of value are ontologically varied -states of affairs, people, properties, culinary dishes, works of art, sporting achievements, proofs, scientific discoveries, to name a few. One might nevertheless hold that certain kinds of putative value bearers are primary, while the values of the remaining kinds of entities derive from the values of primary bearers. Thus some value theorists take states of affairs or propositions to be the primary value bearers, while others take properties or people for example. We can leave this open here.

Phenomenology and Mind n.5 - 2013 84-97

What is the place of values in a world of facts? This paper presents three versions of an argument in defence of a form of value-realism. The argument is based on a principle of non-reducibility of integral wholes to sums, as informally developed by Gestalt theorists, systematically worked out by Husserl in his III Logical Investigation on wholes and parts, and exploited by Max Scheler’s theory of material and axiological apriori. Keywords: values, norms, realism, Gestalt Theory, Phenomenology

I discuss Benacerraf's epistemological challenge for realism about an area, F, like mathematics, metalogic, modality, or morality. I argue that it should be understood as the challenge to show that our beliefs are safe, realistically construed -- i.e., as the challenge to show that we could not have easily had systematically false ones. I explain how F-pluralism -- the view that there are a plurality of F-like concepts, all independently satisfied -- can be understood as a response to Benacerraf's challenge. And I explain why moral, and more generally, normative pluralism is peculiarly problematic. One upshot of the discussion is a radicalization of Moore's Open Question Argument. Another is that the concepts of realism and objectivity, which are widely identified, are actually in tension.

Appraisal, 2020

This article presents a phenomenological critique of attitude-dependent accounts of value in contemporary axiology and argues that the notion of objective value is unproblematical if understood correctly. Through a phenomenological critique of ideal-typical versions of dispositionalist and fitting attitude accounts of value, the article argues that a careful phenomenology of evaluation can clarify some fundamental issues about the nature and existence of objective value. The critique draws inspiration from classic phenomenological analyses of evaluation found in Max Scheler' s Formalismus in der Ethik und Materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values). Through a phenomenological critique of ideal-typical versions of dispositionalist and fitting attitude accounts of value, the article argues that a careful phenomenology of evaluation can clarify some fundamental issues about the nature and existence of objective value. The critique draws inspiration from classic phenomenological analyses of evaluation found in Max Scheler' s Formalism and Edmund Husserl' s genetic phenomenology. Considering how values phenomenally present themselves in lived-experience, the article investigates the relation between evaluative attitudes, such as propositional judgments, beliefs, preferences, and intentional emotions, and the objects of such attitudes. The article argues that any attitude-dependent account of value faces the problem that at least some experienced value properties are objective in the sense of being precisely independent of evaluative attitudes. Keywords Phenomenology of value; Max Scheler; objective value; fitting attitude accounts of value 1. Introduction One of the most critical issues for a theory of value that analyses values in terms of their necessary relation to subjective attitudes is to account for the objective feature of experienced value. Both dispositionalist and fitting attitude accounts are promising attempts to solve this problem. They aim to reconcile some notion of objective value with the conception that values are necessarily dependent on human attitudes. Through a phenomenological critique of this argumentative strategy, I argue that such compatibilism has fundamental problems. This is due to the feature of at least some values: their experienced objectivity is characterised precisely by attitude-independence. I argue that nothing mystical is implied by this feature, as is often assumed in the debate. We are motivated to see this if we are careful in our reconstructive analysis of evaluative experience, and thoughts in Max Scheler can help clarify this point. I sketch the contours of ideal-typical versions of a dispositionalist account and a fitting attitude theory of value in the context of the phenomenology of value (2). The two accounts presented are meant to exemplify typical positions that account for value in terms of their necessary relation to evaluative attitudes. They function in the article as means for highlighting systematic points about the broader issue as such, i.e. the relation between evaluative attitudes and values, considering the phenomenology of evaluation, including not least the experienced objectivity of values. The following phenomenological critique (3), inspired by Max Scheler and Edmund Husserl, addresses the relation between evaluative attitudes and intentional objects of value as such and serves as a general criticism of any account that depicts all value as essentially dependent on attitudes. Based on the points established in the phenomenological critique, I then suggest a possible phenomenologically consistent answer to the ontological worries about the notion of objective value (4) and end the article with some brief, concluding remarks (5).

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2007

While objective values need not be intrinsically motivating, need not actually motivate us, they would determine what we ought to pursue and protect. They would provide reasons for actions. Objective values would come in degrees, and more objective value would provide stronger reasons. It follows that, if objective value exists, we ought to maximize it in the world. But virtually no one acts with that goal in mind. Furthermore, objective value would exist independently of our subjective valuings. But we have no way of measuring amounts of such values independently of the ways we value objects. While a subjectivist can account for mistaken values, a fully impersonal viewpoint, from which objective values would appear, seems instead to cause all values to disappear. Nor does the moral point of view, which requires more impartiality than agents usually exhibit, reveal fully objective values. The paper closes with an examination of the most widely endorsed candidates for states having positive and negative objective values: pleasures and pains. It concludes again that, once we adjust for worthiness of the object and desert of the subject for such states, there is no way to measure their supposed objective value.

This paper aims at providing a perspective against the dominating idea within traditional moral philosophy and moral psychology, according to which there is a tight and direct bond between evaluative and motivational states, such that holding a belief that something is good implies having a desire for pursuing it. This idea, founded in Socratic moral intellectualism, and frequently regarded as the sub specie boni scheme of explanation of agency, states that any action can be explained with reference to an ultimate ‘believed good’, for the sake of which all relative means and ends are desired, even if these appear to be, at first glance, desires for something that the agent does not conceive as being good. In this sense, what is valuated as good, and only this, can be motivationally efficient. Such an explanation scheme renders phenomena as incontinence, self-harm, choosing the less beneficial of two alternatives, or in general ‘desiring the bad’, as misconstruals of explanations, or mere false appearances, hence denying the possibility of what seem to be common cases of human wickedness or moral deficiency. Against this idea, the paper explores the sufficiency and adequacy of the supposed straightforward bond between evaluative and motivational states, by introducing some considerations, stemming from Michael Stocker’s work, that moods, emotional states, energy, interest, preoccupation and similar psychological factors are what serve as bridges between mentioned states in the production of actions. The idea is that by making the relation between evaluation and motivation more complex by way of this introduction, it will be possible not only to give satisfactory explanations of those cases that the sub specie boni scheme adequately accounted for, but also to make way for explanations of common phenomena that under such scheme resulted in the contradiction of many of our intuitions regarding agency. What this serves, in the end, is the purpose of making way for a better moral psychology.

In this paper I demolish three influential arguments - moral, metaphysical and epistemological - against moral realism. We have good reasons to believe, and no good reasons not to believe, that value-features, value-facts, really do exist in the world.

In Prospects For Meaning, ed. Richard Schantz (De Gruyter), 2012

In meta-ethics, philosophers have often attempted to use a thesis of motivational internalism in order to establish a case for non-cognitivism about moral judgement. In this paper, I investigate the prospects for using a form of motivational internalism about semantic judgement to defend a form of non-cognitivism about meaning. I argue that even if the motivational internalist argument is assumed to be completely successful in the moral case, in the case of semantic judgement the argument fails.

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2021

I argue that relativists about evaluative language face some of the same objections as non-naturalists in ethics. If these objections are powerful, there is reason to doubt the existence of relative evaluative states of affairs. In they do not exist, then relativism leads to an error theory. This is unattractive, as the position was specifically designed to preserve the truth of many evaluative claims.

The Harvard Review of Philosophy, 1996

The popular stereotypical view of facts as absolute entities and values as relative entities needs to be rejected, for it stifles understanding of both fact and value. The two are inextricably intertwined: the demarcation of facts rests squarely on considerations of values; evaluations are infus'd with considerations of fact. A category scheme provides the resources for stating various truths and falsehoods and for demarcating conceptual boundaries. But the values that the schemes realize are not always, or only, the ones people intend to produce. In building a system of thought, people begin with a provisional scaffolding made of the relevant beliefs already held, the aims of the projects already embarked on, and the values they seek to uphold. System building is dialectical. Specific judgments are molded to accepted generalizations, and generalizations to specific judgments. Justification is holistic. Support for a conclusion comes not from a single line of argument, but from a host of considerations of varying,gegrcz ci relevance and strength. That which is right relativ.2 to one acceptable system may be wrong relative to another. (PPB)