Types of Value

Dao https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-024-09955-6 Types of Value Michael Slote1 Accepted: 2 September 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract Our values possess a previously unrecognized distinctive kind of underlying unity. Discussion here begins with moral values, and it is argued that recent approaches like Scanlon’s and Parfit’s run together moral and rational values in an unintuitive way. A defense is then briefly given of a more intuitively plausible moral approach that focuses on empathy, and it is argued further that empathy itself can be theoretically grounded in updated versions of yin 陰 and yang 陽, with yin understood as receptivity and yang as directed purpose. The discussion then takes up notions like practical rationality, well-being, the (impersonally) Good, moral approval/disapproval, and nonethical value concepts like “good knife” and “beautiful face.” It is argued that in every one of these spheres of evaluation positive value judgments imply attraction and negative value judgments repulsion but that in all cases these implications can be canceled in a Gricean way. And it also turns out that we can use yin/yang to better understand not only the positive and negative implications of value judgments but also the ways those implications can be contextually canceled. Keywords Cancellation · Implication/Implicature · Morality · Values · Yang 陽 · Yin 陰 1  The present essay is just about as ambitious as its title makes it sound. I am convinced that our values or value judgments have an underlying unity that goes far beyond anything having to do with morality. Morality and moral judgment may well constitute the most important parts of ethics and of value judgment more generally, but too much attention to morality may actually make it more difficult to see what is common to all the different kinds of value judgments philosophers write about. (Perhaps there are others we don’t write about or even recognize, but let’s put that theoretical possibility aside for present purposes.) What I propose to do here is consider one after another the main types * Michael Slote 1 University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida 33124, USA Vol.:(0123456789) Michael Slote of value judgments philosophers write about, starting, as befits their importance, with moral value judgments and proceeding onward to ethical (but nonmoral) judgments about practical rationality, well-being, and the Good. Then finally, we will discuss extraethical claims involving concepts like “good knife,” “good Christian,” and “beautiful face.” So I want to begin by talking about morality and moral judgment, but as you will see the connection or possible connection between issues of morality and issues of practical rationality/reason will concern us from the start. 2  Recent moral philosophy in the English-speaking world has been greatly influenced by the 19th-century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and his main book The Methods of Ethics, more influenced than those under that influence seem to be or to have been aware of. Sidgwick claimed that there is only one main normative concept in ethics, a concept that he interchangeably identified with the rationally required and the morally required or obligatory (see Sidgwick 1907: 5–14, 23, 32, 77, 344). But this is a deep, deep mistake, and one all the more surprising because of the deft and careful attention to detail and plausible generalities that Sidgwick brought otherwise to bear on his description and discussion of commonsense or ordinary moral thinking. Moreover, and as you are about to see, the mistake is easily pointed out, which makes Sidgwick’s failure to recognize and avoid it all the more surprising. There are many things we do that are irrational or show some degree of irrationality but that are morally speaking beyond criticism. If one negligently harms another person, one can be morally criticized for having done so; but if we negligently harm ourselves, no one thinks that calls for moral criticism of the person who does this (either on their own part or on the part of others). If someone unthinkingly and negligently harms themselves, we and they can criticize them for having acted foolishly or in a rationally deficient manner, but no one outside philosophy would want to say they have acted immorally. (There is an exception, of course, when the harm they do themselves foreseeably prevents them from fulfilling their moral obligations.) Harming or hurting is thus self-other asymmetric from the standpoint of our ordinary moral thinking and moral reactions, but Sidgwick doesn’t leave any room for this basic feature of ordinary thinking and never mentions it explicitly. Rather, he relies without further ado on the assumption that there is only one major normative concept in ethics, thereby denying that the (morally) right can be conceptually or normatively prized apart from the (practically) rational. What is worse, though, is that he seems to have planted this seed so deeply and powerfully that those presentday major moral philosophers who in some measure implicitly follow Sidgwick here don’t seem to be aware that they are doing so. Influential recent moral philosophers like T. M. Scanlon and Derek Parfit do conceptually distinguish moral questions from questions of rationality; so unlike Sidgwick they do not hold that there is only one main concept in ethics. But the theories they come up with—unbeknownst to them—run together the (morally) right and the (practically) rational. Those theories confuse ethical questions about rationality or reasonableness with ethical questions about right and wrong. So Sidgwick planted Types of Value an intellectual seed, and those influenced by him (and typically, as with Parfit, acknowledging such a central influence) end up with what I can only call a misbegotten view of what morality and, as a result, ethics as a whole are all about. Time now to substantiate these pointed allegations. Let me start with consequentialism, first with act-consequentialism and then with rule-consequentialism (what we say about the latter can also be said mutatis mutandis about motive-consequentialism). These moral philosophies are less complex than what came later with Scanlon and Parfit, and they allow us more easily or readily to see how certain moral philosophies theoretically (if not conceptually) run together the moral and the rational. Moreover, since questions about moral rightness and goodness and questions about practical rationality are both traditionally part of normative ethics, these moral philosophies misjudge and mischaracterize ethics as a whole and not just the specific ethical realm of moral right and wrong. Act-consequentialism tells us that it is morally incumbent on us always to perform actions that bring about better consequences than any alternative action would. (Let’s ignore cases where alternative actions have better consequences than anything else an agent can do, but those consequences are equally good, and le (...truncated)