Value Theory (Bloomsbury Ethics)

Value Theory (Bloomsbury Ethics)

Francesco Orsi

Language: English

Pages: 184

ISBN: B00OMVLYBC

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


What is it for a car, a piece of art or a person to be good, bad or better than another? In this first book-length introduction to value theory, Francesco Orsi explores the nature of evaluative concepts used in everyday thinking and speech and in contemporary philosophical discourse. The various dimensions, structures and connections that value concepts express are interrogated with clarity and incision.

Orsi provides a systematic survey of both classic texts including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Moore and Ross and an array of contemporary theorists. The reader is guided through the moral maze of value theory with everyday examples and thought experiments. Rare stamps, Napoleon's hat, evil demons, and Kant's good will are all considered in order to probe our intuitions, question our own and philosophers' assumptions about value, and, ultimately, understand better what we want to say when we talk about value.

The Virtue of Selfishness

Unexpected Consequences: Why The Things We Trust Fail

Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phenomenon. So I will treat the practice of evaluation or ‘people’s values’ as a window which reveals, or at least purports to reveal, putative truths about value. Therefore evaluations which are verbally expressed or at least expressible in value terms are the starting point. In this chapter I introduce the conceptual background of the book. First, I draw a distinction between different evaluations, in order to focus on the value concepts that will be discussed. Then I define and explain the.

It is good absolutely. The good of it can in no possible sense be “private” or belong to me; any more than a thing can exist privately or for one person only’ (1993: 150). In the terms introduced by Geach (see previous chapter), Moore seems to treat ‘good for A’ as a logically predicative adjectival phrase, because it can be logically split up: if x is good for A, then x is good (therefore, good absolutely) and x is somehow related to A.1 Given this premise about the meaning of ‘good for me’, it.

Repaying a debt might not be good for him – it will make him poorer, for instance. However, the idea that a normative demand attaches especially to an agent (and not to another), while unable to capture the concept of good for A, has been thought to configure a different category of value: x as being good relative to A. Agent-relative value, unlike personal value, appears to be a technical concept, created for specific reasons having to do with the credentials of consequentialism. In its.

Fail to maximize the relevant value (human life, peace, history), and not because they express some other unfitting attitude towards those values (say, disregard or disrespect). The choice then is not between respecting human life (peace, history) and maximizing human life (peace, history), but rather between two potentially maximizing strategies: maximizing a certain value by respecting it or maximizing it by not respecting it. And once the conflict is seen from this angle, it becomes obvious.

Edn). http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2008/entries/value–incommensurable/ Hurka, T. (1987). ‘“Good” and “good for”’. Mind, 96: 71–3. —(1998). ‘Two kinds of organic unity’. Journal of Ethics, 2(4): 299–320. —(2001). Virtue, Vice and Value. New York: Oxford University Press. —(2003). ‘Moore in the middle’. Ethics, 113: 599–628. Jackson, F. (1998). From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobson, D. (2011). ‘Fitting Attitude Theories of Value’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The.

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