The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Goodness, Values, Reasons

På svenska

Author

Summary, in English

Contemporary value theory has been characterized by a renewed interest in the analysis of concepts like "good" or "valuable", the most prominent pattern of analysis in recent years being the socalled buck-passing or fitting-attitude analysis which reduces goodness to a matter of having properties that provide reasons for pro-attitudes. Here I argue that such analyses are best understood as metaphysical rather than linguistic and that while the buck-passing analysis has some virtues, it still fails to provide a suitably wide-ranging pattern of analysis for conceptualizing evaluative properties. Instead, a better alternative can be found in a metaphysical version of the Geachean view that goodness is always attributive and never predicative, namely that goodness is always a matter of relative placement in certain kinds of comparison classes. It is then suggested that the good and the valuable need to be separated from each other and that the latter is a species of the former.

Publishing year

2009

Language

English

Pages

329-343

Publication/Series

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

Volume

12

Issue

4

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Philosophy

Keywords

  • Buck-passing
  • Analysis
  • Goodness
  • Value
  • Attributive

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1386-2820