Table Of ContentPersonal Value
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Personal Value
Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen
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3
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To Elly,
Anna, and Sofia
Preface
Values accrue to objects. They are not free-floating entities that exist independently of
other things: necessarily, they are ‘carried’ by objects in a wide sense of this term.
Clearly, not all objects carry the same kind of value; and some (perhaps most) have
more than one kind of value. Some objects have only minor value, while others seem
worth fighting hard for. Moral values such as justice or equality belong to this latter
category. Some valuable objects—whether material in nature, such as the concert
ticket we have kept all these years because something extraordinary happened that
evening, or something less tangible, like having a certain memory whenever you hear a
particular song on the radio—are distinctly connected with one person. They carry
special value for that person. Valuable objects like these are often historical in character,
tying us to some particular event in our past, but they need not do so. What is valuable
might rather be a future state of affairs. It may be something you strive hard to realize
(say, fame or clearing your name in a scandal); or again, it may be neither a material
thing nor an abstract entity (such as a state of affairs) but rather involve some person—
your children, parents, spouse, or friends. Some of these persons and objects are
obviously very important to you; others carry only minor value for you. The discovery
that your dog has eaten the concert ticket will probably have no real, or at least no
enduring, impact on your life. Of course, people tend to react differently, and it is
probably true of many objects that most of us consider to have trifling value that their
loss or damage would make a major difference in a person’s life. Here we differ, and
there is obviously room for disagreement about how much we should value such
objects. In fact, we might even think that something can be of great value to a person
even if it plays no actual role at all in that person’s life. I am inclined to believe that it is
at least an open question what to think about a case like the following: unknown to
you, you have a living child (either because you never realized you were a parent, or
because a child you thought had died is in fact alive). I imagine that, in many people’s
eyes, an unknown child would nevertheless be of value to its oblivious parent. There
are certain patterns of behaviour, and certain attitudes, that we would expect the parent
to display as a matter of what is ‘fitting’, or of what one has reason to do, when one
learns of the existence of a child of one’s own. So the impact of an object, or person, in
one’s life is not necessarily (or so we may suspect) a measure of the value the object
actually has for someone. The role of values is different: they function, generally
speaking, as reason-grounded incentives or disincentives to action and the formation
of attitudes. Objects like those mentioned set more or less negotiable boundaries
dictating what we must, should, may, or have reason to, do or not do with them. In
some cases we ought perhaps to help another person to achieve fame, or see to it that
PREFACE vii
someone’s name is cleared, or simply respect a person’s wish to live life as she thinks fit.
It may be that we should have overcome our fear, stuck fingers into the dog’s mouth,
and saved the ticket. Of course, we should not do so for the sake of the ticket but rather
for the sake of the person (and perhaps for the sake of the dog, too) whose value we
think is at stake here. It may be that the thing to do for the sake of your friend is to buy
her record, or to stop people talking behind her back. Personal values, as I will refer to
these sorts of value, are what this book is about.
Any attempt to analyse personal value will at some point have to face the following two
questions: In what sense is personal value a kind of value? And (if it is a value) in what
sense is this value personal? I will suggest that personal value is in fact a kind of value.
One way to elaborate this suggestion is to say that in ascribing personal value to
something we are, as I will claim, actually evaluating. That is, we are employing a
particular notion of value, and one that we standardly express with the help of the
following bona fide locutions: value-for, good-for. Now, I might be mistaken about
this in more ways than I care to think. For instance, I may be making an evaluative
blunder in saying that the examples I will invoke are in fact examples of value-for.
Since I will not be getting involved in substantive value theory, I will have to choose
my examples carefully so that they do at least appear to be plausible bearers of personal
value—that is, bearers of something that most of us would be ready to say is good for or
valuable for themselves or someone else. Here I will have to trust my intuitions.
(Needless to say, this will also be the case when it comes to impersonal values.)
Equally, I might make another kind of mistake. I want to work with the assumption
that there is a kind of evaluation that is conducted in terms of notions such as good-for,
but it might be objected that there is no such notion as good-for, and that therefore
genuine evaluation cannot make use of that notion. Whenever we speak about what is
good for person a we are merely reporting on what is good according to a, or from a’s
perspective. We are not committing ourselves evaluatively, in the sense of agreeing or
disagreeing with what we take to be the view of a.
Sometimes, certainly, good-for judgements are indeed like this; and when they are
they should perhaps be enclosed in scare quotes. But I am convinced that there are
other times when we are genuinely evaluating, genuinely attributing value-for. And
the two kinds of case must not be confused. The occasions on which we genuinely
evaluate what is good-for someone are not rare. The best way to show this, as far as I
know, is to present a plausible analysis of the more questionable notion.
A caveat is now required regarding the verb ‘to value’ and my use of it. What
precisely we are doing when we value something will in this book be left open. This is,
of course, in some ways regrettable, but it would be even less satisfactory to set out
1
from something that is not yet settled.
1
This work is a contribution to mainly formal value theory. Traditionally such theory admits of two
relatively independent approaches. On the one hand, we have a number of semantic theories about the
viii PREFACE
What I will be proposing in this work, then, is that we should employ a certain
pattern of value analysis, one which has recently attracted much attention and which
has roots in the writings of the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano. If we fine-tune
this kind of value analysis it will come to cover personal values, too. I believe these
goals can be achieved. A fortiori such an achievement supports the idea that we are
dealing with a genuine value (because, in important ways, the finely tuned analysis
structurally resembles the way in which values have been analysed according to a
plausible pattern). Moreover, I think this approach has many advantages. Since my
proposal is novel, my concern is less with evaluating rival proposals and more with
articulating and defending my own positive view.
In trying to understand value-for it will be helpful, as I mentioned, to have a better
grasp of value, period. But anyone who has followed value theory in recent years will
know only too well that there are a number of more or less interrelated value concepts.
Therefore, it will be necessary at the outset to outline the more important and
fundamental ones. So before elaborating my views on the particular pattern of value
analysis I endorse, I will introduce, and distinguish between, various kinds of value.
The presentation of a value taxonomy often leads to discussion of the nature of
things that bear value. That there must be an object of some sort that value accrues to is
something over which value theorists, with very few exceptions, agree. Most philo-
sophers would also say that many different things can be ascribed value. Thus, in
everyday talk we speak of physical objects such as paintings bearing value (e.g. beauty),
but we also refer to events, facts (e.g. that it is more valuable that two persons feel well
than that one person feels well), places, times, and so on, as having value. The
consensus that exists today on this matter—i.e. the wide agreement that there is a
relation between value and something that bears this value—does not, however,
dissipate when we ask questions about the nature of these value bearers. While some
philosophers argue that just about everything can be a bearer of value, others have
taken a much more restrictive view, and, in effect, allowed only one kind of thing to
bear value.
Investigation of the metaphysical nature of value bearers may at first glance seem
rather inconsequential. However, I do think there is reason to more carefully look at
this issue, and not only to satisfy a philosopher’s curiosity. In fact, one of the things I
will argue in Chapter 10 is that, by excluding certain types of value bearer, we limit the
substantive views available. Equally, by endorsing certain types of substantive theory of
meaning of our value terms (e.g. versions of cognitivism, non-cognitivism, expressivism). But not every
formal value theory makes it a priority to improve our understanding of the ‘semantic meaning’ of value
terms. What I will be doing in this work falls, for instance, beyond the scope of these semantic theories.
Rather, the general aim of work of the kind undertaken here is to reach an understanding of value (in
particular, final personal value). A good way of doing this is to exhibit structural connections that exist in the
field of value, and in particular those holding between our central evaluative concepts. In other words, the
focus is the logic of value: the relevant conceptual distinctions, the relations between different types of value,
and the relations between value concepts and deontic (normative) notions such as ‘ought’, ‘reasons’, and
‘fittingness’.
PREFACE ix
value, we will quite naturally be led to certain positions regarding the nature of value
bearers. I suspect both of these claims will be looked at with some scepticism.
This work easily divides into three parts. First, there is the scene setting of Chapter 1.
This is followed by a much longer part, Chapter 2 to Chapter 8, which contains the
analysis, together with discussions more directly concerned with my proposal. The
third part, consisting of Chapter 9 and Chapter 10, discusses some rather different ideas
which have had a significant influence on my analysis. The notion of personal value
plays only a minor, indirect role in these last two chapters. Since I believe this book to
be somewhat dense, I shall now brief the reader on the main structure.
In Chapter 1, I introduce some contrasting notions of value. G. E. Moore’s
influential views on intrinsic value, as well as his much employed, so-called isolation
test, are discussed in some detail. This test, as I shall explain, might have done more bad
than good to value theory in general. At least, it may well have blinded value theorists
to a value notion that is central to both the chapter and the book—namely, the notion
of final value, or what is valuable for its own sake. This kind of value plays an important
role throughout the book. Chapter 1 also discusses the common claim that values are
supervenient features: the notion that, whatever values are, they are dependent on
something else, some subjacent set of properties (which set is generally taken to contain
natural properties). In particular, I disentangle two intuitions involved in the idea that
value is a supervenient feature which, regrettably, are often lumped together. These are
what I call the ‘consistency intuition’ and the ‘dependence intuition’. Although closely
related, these intuitions seem to be different in nature. My discussion leads me, among
other things, to identify what is missing in Jaegwon Kim’s formulation of super-
venience. In this work, supervenience plays a special role, in that it is one of the key
elements I employ in order to get clear about the often misconstrued distinction
between subjectivism and objectivism about values. Since I take it to be an advantage
of my analysis of personal value that it is essentially neutral on this vexed issue, I want to
make clear at the outset just how I conceive of the distinction between subjectivism
and objectivism. So much has been written on this topic that it would require a very
substantial work or two to do it justice. I have decided, therefore, to set out, in as much
detail as is possible in the present discussion, just how I conceive of the debate, and to
leave the writing of the substantial books to someone else. This is not a very nice thing
to do to my forerunners, and I can only hope that they will bear with me. The two
core ideas at play in this discussion are those of supervenience and value constitution.
The notion of value constitution is a particularly tricky one, and I am painfully aware
that much work remains to be done here. The ‘Invariance Thesis’, the claim that what
is valuable for its own sake is invariant over possible worlds, is often thought to serve as
a line of demarcation between subjectivists and objectivists. However, I argue that the
Invariance Thesis, which often divides value theorist into two camps, is only reasonable
given certain assumptions about the nature of the bearer of value. Once we take into
consideration the fact that the supervenience base might contain non-essential proper-
ties it becomes clear that the thesis should be rejected.
