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Explaining Value*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2009

Gilbert Harman
Gilbert Harman
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Princeton University
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Extract

I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do?

A moral theory like (one or another version of) utilitarianism (or social-contract theory, natural-law theory, Kantianism, or whatever) may be put forward as offering the correct normative account of justice, or of the good, or of what people ought morally to do. The answers such a theory offers may be surprising in suggesting that what people ought to do is quite different from what they think they ought to do. I am not concerned with normative moral theories of this revisionary sort. Indeed, I am interested in less revisionary normative theories only to the extent that they can be reinterpreted as offering potential explanations of people's actual moral reactions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Winter 1994 , pp. 229 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1994

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References

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5 A good sample of this discussion is collected in Fischer, John Martin and Ravizza, Mark, eds. Ethics Problems and Principles (Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1992).Google Scholar

6 There can be significant relations between these two kinds of explanation, including these: (1) Explaining why something is of value might help to explain why people value it. (2) Given an impartial-spectator theory of morality, to explain why people value something may be to explain why it is of value. (3) Certain explanations of why people value what they value may undermine the conviction that the things valued are of value.

7 Hume, David, Treatise of Human NatureGoogle Scholar, Book 3, part 2, section 12, “Of Chastity and Modesty.”

8 Expected utility is measured by the sum of the utility of each potential consequence of an option multiplied by the probability that the option will lead to that consequence. I will suppress further mention of expected utility.

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26 I heard a discussion about this on the radio one day, but do not have a more specific reference.

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29 A type of implication is “nonmonotonic” if something implied by a proposition P is not necessarily implied by the conjunction of P with something else Q. See Ginsberg, Matthew L., Readings in Nonmonotonic Reasoning (San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1987).Google Scholar

30 Nozick, , “Moral Complications.”Google Scholar