## 1. Basic Questions



The theory of value begins with a subject matter. It is hard to
specify in some general way exactly what counts, but it certainly
includes what we are talking about when we say any of the following
sorts of things (compare Ziff [1960]):



> 
> "pleasure is good/bad"; "it would be good/bad if you
> did that"; "it is good/bad for him to talk to her";
> "too much cholesterol is good/bad for your health";
> "that is a good/bad knife"; "Jack is a good/bad
> thief"; "he's a good/bad man";
> "it's good/bad that you came"; "it would be
> better/worse if you didn't"; "lettuce is
> better/worse for you than Oreos"; "my new can opener is
> better/worse than my old one"; "Mack is a better/worse
> thief than Jack"; "it's better/worse for it to end
> now, than for us to get caught later"; "best/worst of all,
> would be if they won the World Series *and* kept all of their
> players for next year"; "celery is the best/worst thing
> for your health"; "Mack is the best/worst thief
> around"
> 



The word "value" doesn't appear anywhere on this
list; it is full, however, of "good",
"better", and "best", and correspondingly of
"bad", "worse", and "worst". And
these words are used in a number of different kinds of constructions,
of which we may take these four to be the main exemplars:


1. Pleasure is good.
2. It is good that you came.
3. It is good for him to talk to her.
4. That is a good knife.



Sentences like 1, in which "good" is predicated of a mass
term, constitute a central part of traditional axiology, in which
philosophers have wanted to know what things (of which there can be
more or less) are good. I'll stipulatively call them value
claims, and use the word "stuff" for the kind of thing of
which they predicate value (like pleasure, knowledge, and money).
Sentences like 2 make claims about what I'll (again
stipulatively) call goodness *simpliciter*; this is the kind of
goodness appealed to by traditional utilitarianism. Sentences like 3
are *good for* sentences, and when the subject following
"for" is a person, we usually take them to be claims about
welfare or well-being. And sentences like 4 are what, following Geach
[1956], I'll call *attributive* uses of "good",
because "good" functions as a predicate modifier, rather
than as a predicate in its own right.



Many of the basic issues in the theory of value begin with questions
or assumptions about how these various kinds of claim are related to
one another. Some of these are introduced in the next two sections,
focusing in 1.1 on the relationship between our four kinds of
sentences, and focusing in 1.2 on the relationship between
"good" and "better", and between
"good" and "bad".


### 1.1 Varieties of Goodness



Claims about good *simpliciter* are those which have garnered the
most attention in moral philosophy. This is partly because as it is
usually understood, these are the "good" claims that
consequentialists hold to have a bearing on what we ought to do.
Consequentialism, so understood, is the view that you ought to do
whatever action is such that it would be best if you did it. This
leaves, however, a wide variety of possible theories about how such
claims are related to other kinds of "good" claim.


#### 1.1.1 Good *Simpliciter* and *Good For*



For example, consider a simple *point of view* theory, according
to which what is good *simpliciter* differs from what is good for
Jack, in that being good for Jack is being good from a certain point
of view -- Jack's -- whereas being good
*simpliciter* is being good from a more general point of view
-- the point of view of the universe (compare Nagel [1985]). The
point of view theory reduces both *good for* and good
*simpliciter* to *good from the point of view of*, and
understands good *simpliciter* claims as about the point of view
of the universe. One problem for this view is to make sense of what
sort of thing points of view could be, such that Jack and the universe
are both the kinds of thing to have one.



According to a different sort of theory, the *agglomerative
theory*, goodness *simpliciter* is just what you get by
"adding up" what is good for all of the various people
that there are. Rawls [1971] attributes this view to utilitarians, and
it fits with utilitarian discussions such as that of Smart's
contribution to Smart and Williams [1973], but much more work would
have to be done in order to make it precise. We sometimes say things
like, "wearing that outfit in the sun all day is not going to be
good for your tan line", but your tan line is not one of the
things whose good it seems plausible to "add up" in order
to get what is good *simpliciter*. Certainly it is not one of the
things whose good classical utilitarians would want to add up. So the
fact that sapient and even sentient beings are not the only kinds of
thing that things can be good or bad for sets an important constraint
both on accounts of the *good for* relation, and on theories
about how it is related to good *simpliciter*.



Rather than accounting for either of goodness *simpliciter* or
goodness-*for* in terms of the other, some philosophers have
taken one of these seriously at the expense of the other. For example,
Philippa Foot [1985] gives an important but compressed argument that
apparent talk about what is good *simpliciter* can be made
sense of as elliptical talk about what is good for some unmentioned
person, and Foot's view can be strengthened (compare Shanklin
[2011], Finlay [2014]) by allowing that apparent good
*simpliciter* claims are often *generically quantified*
statements about what is, in general, good for a person. Thomson
[2008] famously defends a similar view.



G.E. Moore [1903], in contrast, struggled to make sense of good-for
claims. In his refutation of egoism, Moore attributed to ethical
egoists the theory that what is good for Jack (or "in
Jack's good") is just what is good and in Jack's
possession, or alternatively, what it is good that Jack possesses.
Moore didn't argue against these theses directly, but he did
show that they cannot be combined with universalizable egoism. It is
now generally recognized that to avoid Moore's arguments,
egoists need only to reject these analyses of *good for*, which
are in any case unpromising (Smith [2003]).


#### 1.1.2 Attributive Good



Other kinds of views understand good *simpliciter* in terms of
attributive good. What, after all, are the kinds of things to which we
attribute goodness *simpliciter*? According to many philosophers,
it is to propositions, or states of affairs. This is supported by a
cursory study of the examples we have considered, in which what is
being said to be good appears to be picked out by complementizers like
"if", "that", and "for": "it
would be good if you did that"; "it's good that you
came"; "it's better for it to end now". If
complementizer phrases denote propositions or possible states of
affairs, then it is reasonable to conjecture, along with Foot [1985]
that being good *simpliciter* is being a good state of affairs,
and hence that it is a special case of attributive good (if it makes
sense at all -- Geach and Foot both argue that it does not, on
the ground that states of affairs are too thin of a kind to support
attributive good claims).



See the



> 
> Supplement on Four Complications about Attributive Good
> 



for further complications that arise when we consider the attributive
sense of "good".



Some philosophers have used the examples of attributive good and
*good for* in order to advance arguments against noncognitivist
metaethical theories (See the entry
 cognitivism and non-cognitivism).
 The basic outlines of such an argument go like this: noncognitivist
theories are designed to deal with good *simpliciter*, but have
some kind of difficulties accounting for attributive good or for
*good for*. Hence, there is a general problem with noncognitivist
theories, or at least a significant lacuna they leave. It has
similarly been worried that noncognitivist theories will have problems
accounting for so-called "agent-relative" value [see
section 4], again, apparently, because of its relational nature. There
is no place to consider this claim here, but note that it would be
surprising if relational uses of "good" like these were in
fact a deep or special problem for noncognitivism; Hare's
account in *The Language of Morals* (Hare [1952]) was
specifically about attributive uses of "good", and it is
not clear why relational noncognitive attitudes should be harder to
make sense of than relational beliefs.


#### 1.1.3 Relational Strategies



In an extension of the strategies just discussed, some theorists have
proposed views of "good" which aspire to treat all of good
*simpliciter*, *good for*, and attributive good as special
cases. A paradigm of this approach is the "end-relational"
theory of Paul Ziff [1960] and Stephen Finlay [2004], [2014].
According to Ziff, all claims about goodness are relative to ends or
purposes, and "good for" and attributive
"good" sentences are simply different ways of making these
purposes (more or less) explicit. Talk about what is good for Jack,
for example, makes the purpose of Jack's being happy (say)
explicit, while talk about what is a good knife makes our usual
purposes for knives (cutting things, say) explicit. The claim about
goodness is then relativized accordingly.



Views adopting this strategy need to develop in detail answers to just
what, exactly, the further, relational, parameter on
"good" is. Some hold that it is *ends*, while others
say things like "aims". A filled-out version of this view
must also be able to tell us the *mechanics* of how these ends
can be made explicit in "good for" and attributive
"good" claims, and needs to really make sense of both of
those kinds of claim as of one very general kind. And, of course, this
sort of view yields the prediction that non-explicitly relativized
"good" sentences -- including those used throughout
moral philosophy -- are really only true or false once the end
parameter is specified, perhaps by context.



This means that this view is open to the objection that it fails to
account for a central class of uses of "good" in ethics,
which by all evidence are *non*-relative, and for which the
linguistic data do not support the hypothesis that they are
context-sensitive. J.L. Mackie held a view like this one and embraced
this result -- Mackie's [1977] error theory about
"good" extended only to such putative non-relational
senses of "good". Though he grants that there are such
uses of "good", Mackie concludes that they are mistaken.
Finlay [2014], in contrast, argues that he can use ordinary pragmatic
effects in order to explain the appearances. The apparently
non-relational senses of "good", Finlay argues, really are
relational, and his theory aspires to explain why they seem
otherwise.


#### 1.1.4 What's Special About Value Claims



The sentences I have called "value claims" present special
complications. Unlike the other sorts of "good" sentences,
they do not appear to admit, in a natural way, of comparisons.
Suppose, for example, with G.E. Moore, that pleasure is good and
knowledge is good. Which, we might ask, is better? This question does
not appear to make very much sense, until we fix on some *amount*
of pleasure and some *amount* of knowledge. But if Sue is a good
dancer and Huw is a good dancer, then it makes perfect sense to ask
who is the better dancer, and without needing to fix on any particular
*amount* of dancing -- much less on any amount of Sue or
Huw. In general, just as the kinds of thing that can be tall are the
same kinds of thing as can be taller than each other, the kinds of
thing that can be good are the same kinds of thing as can be better
than one another. But the sentences that we are calling "value
claims", which predicate "good" of some stuff,
appear not to be like this.



One possible response to this observation, if it is taken seriously,
is to conclude that so-called "value claims" have a
different kind of logical form or structure. One way of implementing
this idea, the *good-first* theory, is to suppose that
"pleasure is good" means something roughly like,
"(other things equal) it is better for there to be more
pleasure", rather than, "pleasure is better than most
things (in some relevant comparison class)", on a model with
"Sue is a good dancer", which means roughly, "Sue is
a better dancer than most (in some relevant comparison class)".
According to a very different kind of theory, the *value-first*
theory, when we say that pleasure is good, we are saying that pleasure
is a value, and things are better just in case there is more of the
things which are values. These two theories offer competing orders of
explanation for the same phenomenon. The good-first theory analyzes
value claims in terms of "good" simpliciter, while the
value-first theory analyzes "good" *simpliciter* in
terms of value claims. The good-first theory corresponds to the thesis
that states of affairs are the "primary bearers" of value;
the value-first theory corresponds to the alternative thesis that it
is things like pleasure or goodness (or perhaps their instances) that
are the "primary bearers" of value.



According to a more skeptical view, sentences like "pleasure is
good" do not express a distinctive kind of claim at all, but are
merely what you get when you take a sentence like "pleasure is
good for Jill to experience", generically quantify out Jill, and
ellipse "to experience". Following an idea also developed
by Finlay [2014], Robert Shanklin [2011] argues that in general,
good-for sentences pattern with *experiencer* adjectives like
"fun", which admit of these very syntactic
transformations: witness "Jack is fun for Jill to talk
to", "Jack is fun to talk to", "Jack is
fun". This view debunks the issue over which the views discussed
in the last paragraph disagree, for it denies that there is any such
distinct topic for value claims to be about. (It may also explain the
failures of comparative forms, above, on the basis of differences in
the elided material.)


### 1.2 Good, Better, Bad


#### 1.2.1 *Good* and *Better*



On a natural view, the relationship between "good",
"better", and "best" would seem to be the same
as that between "tall", "taller", and
"tallest". "Tall" is a gradable adjective, and
"taller" is its comparative form. On standard views,
gradable adjectives are analyzed in terms of their comparative form.
At bottom is the relation of being *taller than*, and someone is
the tallest woman just in case she is taller than every woman.
Similarly, someone is tall, just in case she is taller than a
contextually appropriate standard (Kennedy [2005]), or taller than
sufficiently many (this many be vague) in some contextually
appropriate comparison class.



Much moral philosophy appears to assume that things are very different
for "good", "better", and "best".
Instead of treating "better than" as basic, and something
as being good just in case it is better than sufficiently many in some
comparison class, philosophers very often assume, or write as if they
assume, that "good" is basic. For example, many theorists
have proposed analyses of *what it is* to be good which are
incompatible with the claim that "good" is to be
understood in terms of "better". In the absence of some
reason to think that "good" is very different from
"tall", however, this may be a very peculiar kind of claim
to make, and it may distort some other issues in the theory of
value.


#### 1.2.2 Value



Moreover, it is difficult to see how one could do things the other way
around, and understand "better" in terms of
"good". Jon is a better sprinter than Jan not because it
is more the case that Jon is a good sprinter than that Jan is a good
sprinter -- they are both excellent sprinters, so neither one of
these is more the case than the other. It is, however, possible to see
how to understand both "good" and "better" in
terms of value. If good is to better as tall is to taller, then the
analogue of value should intuitively be height. One person is taller
than another just in case her height is greater; similarly, one state
of affairs is better than another just in case its value is greater.
If we postulate something called "value" to play this
role, then it is natural (though not obligatory) to identify value
with amounts of *values* -- amounts of things like pleasure
or knowledge, which "value" claims claim to be good.



But this move appears to be implausible or unnecessary when applied to
attributive "good". It is not particularly plausible that
there is such a thing as can-opener value, such that one can-opener is
better than another just in case it has more can-opener value. In
general, not all comparatives need be analyzable in terms of something
like height, of which there can be literally more or less. Take, for
example, the case of "scary". The analogy with height
would yield the prediction that if one horror film is scarier than
another, it is because it has more of something -- scariness
-- than the other. This may be right, but it is not obviously so.
If it is not, then the analogy need not hold for "good"
and its cognates, either. In this case, it may be that being better
than does not merely amount to having more value than.


#### 1.2.3 *Good* and *Bad*



These questions, moreover, are related to others. For example,
"better" would appear to be the inverse relation of
"worse". A is better than B just in case B is worse than
A. So if "good" is just "better than sufficiently
many" and "bad" is just "worse than
sufficiently many", all of the interesting facts in the
neighborhood would seem to be captured by an assessment of what stands
in the *better than* relation to what. The same point goes if to
be good is just to be better than a contextually set standard. But it
has been held by many moral philosophers that an inventory of what is
better than what would still leave something interesting and important
out: what is *good*.



If this is right, then it is one important motivation for denying that
"good" can be understood in terms of "better".
But it is important to be careful about this kind of argument.
Suppose, for example, that, as is commonly held about
"tall", the relevant comparison class or standard for
"good" is somehow supplied by the context of utterance.
Then to know whether "that is good" is true, you *do*
need to know more than all of the facts about what is better than what
-- you also need to know something about the comparison class or
standard that is supplied by the context of utterance. The assumption
that "good" is context-dependent in this way may therefore
itself be just the kind of thing to explain the intuition which drives
the preceding argument.


## 2. Traditional Questions



Traditional axiology seeks to investigate what things are good, how
good they are, and how their goodness is related to one another.
Whatever we take the "primary bearers" of value to be, one
of the central questions of traditional axiology is that of what
stuffs are good: what is of value.


### 2.1 Intrinsic Value


#### 2.1.1 What is Intrinsic Value?



Of course, the central question philosophers have been interested in,
is that of what is of *intrinsic* value, which is taken to
contrast with *instrumental* value. Paradigmatically, money is
supposed to be good, but not intrinsically good: it is supposed to be
good because it leads to other good things: HD TV's and houses
in desirable school districts and vanilla lattes, for example. These
things, in turn, may only be good for what they lead to: exciting NFL
Sundays and adequate educations and caffeine highs, for example. And
those things, in turn, may be good only for what they lead to, but
eventually, it is argued, something must be good, and not just for
what it leads to. Such things are said to be *intrinsically
good*.



Philosophers' adoption of the term "intrinsic" for
this distinction reflects a common theory, according to which whatever
is non-instrumentally good must be good in virtue of its intrinsic
properties. This idea is supported by a natural argument: if something
is good only because it is related to something else, the argument
goes, then it must be its relation to the other thing that is
non-instrumentally good, and the thing itself is good only because it
is needed in order to obtain this relation. The premise in this
argument is highly controversial (Schroeder [2005]), and in fact many
philosophers believe that something can be non-instrumentally good in
virtue of its relation to something else. Consequently, sometimes the
term "intrinsic" is reserved for what is good in virtue of
its intrinsic properties, or for the view that *goodness* itself
is an intrinsic property, and non-instrumental value is instead called
"telic" or "final" (Korsgaard [1983]).
I'll stick to "intrinsic", but keep in mind that
intrinsic goodness may not be an intrinsic property, and that what is
intrinsically good may turn out not to be so in virtue of its
intrinsic properties.



See the



> 
> Supplement on Atomism/Holism about Value
> 



for further discussion of the implications of the assumption that
intrinsic value supervenes on intrinsic properties.



Instrumental value is also sometimes contrasted with
"constitutive" value. The idea behind this distinction is
that instrumental values lead *causally* to intrinsic values,
while constitutive values *amount* to intrinsic values. For
example, my giving you money, or a latte, may causally result in your
experiencing pleasure, whereas your experiencing pleasure may
*constitute*, without causing, your being happy. For many
purposes this distinction is not very important and often not noted,
and constitutive values can be thought, along with instrumental
values, as things that are ways of getting something of intrinsic
value. I'll use "instrumental" in a broad sense, to
include such values.


#### 2.1.2 What is the Intrinsic/Instrumental Distinction Among?



I have assumed, here, that the intrinsic/instrumental distinction is
among what I have been calling "value claims", such as
"pleasure is good", rather than among one of the other
kinds of uses of "good" from part 1. It does not make
sense, for example, to say that something is a good can opener, but
only instrumentally, or that Sue is a good dancer, but only
instrumentally. Perhaps it does make sense to say that vitamins are
good for Jack, but only instrumentally; if that is right, then the
instrumental/intrinsic distinction will be more general, and it may
tell us something about the structure of and relationship between the
different senses of "good", to look at which uses of
"good" allow an intrinsic/instrumental distinction.



It is sometimes said that consequentialists, since they appeal to
claims about what is good *simpliciter* in their explanatory
theories, are committed to holding that states of affairs are the
"primary" bearers of value, and hence are the only things
of intrinsic value. This is not right. First, consequentialists can
appeal in their explanatory moral theory to facts about what state of
affairs would be best, without holding that states of affairs are the
"primary" bearers of value; instead of having a
"good-first" theory, they may have a
"value-first" theory (see section 1.1.4), according to
which states of affairs are good or bad *in virtue* of there
being more things of value in them. Moreover, even those who take a
"good-first" theory are not really committed to holding
that it is states of affairs that are intrinsically valuable; states
of affairs are not, after all, something that you can collect more or
less of. So they are not really in parallel to pleasure or
knowledge.



For more discussion of intrinsic value, see the entry on
 intrinsic vs. extrinsic value.


### 2.2 Monism/Pluralism



One of the oldest questions in the theory of value is that of whether
there is more than one fundamental (intrinsic) value. Monists say
"no", and pluralists say "yes". This question
only makes sense as a question about intrinsic values; clearly there
is more than one instrumental value, and monists and pluralists will
disagree, in many cases, not over whether something is of value, but
over whether its value is *intrinsic*. For example, as important
as he held the value of knowledge to be, Mill was committed to holding
that its value is instrumental, not intrinsic. G.E. Moore disagreed,
holding that knowledge is indeed a value, but an intrinsic one, and
this expanded Moore's list of basic values. Mill's theory
famously has a pluralistic element as well, in contrast with
Bentham's, but whether Mill properly counts as a pluralist about
value depends on whether his view was that there is only one value
-- happiness -- but two different kinds of pleasure which
contribute to it, one more effectively than the other, or whether his
view was that each kind of pleasure is a distinctive value. This point
will be important in what follows.


#### 2.2.1 Ontology and Explanation



At least three quite different sorts of issues are at stake in this
debate. First is an ontological/explanatory issue. Some monists have
held that a plural list of values would be explanatorily
unsatisfactory. If pleasure and knowledge are both values, they have
held, there remains a further question to be asked: why? If this
question has an answer, some have thought, it must be because there is
a further, more basic, value under which the explanation subsumes both
pleasure and knowledge. Hence, pluralist theories are either
explanatorily inadequate, or have not really located the basic
intrinsic values.



This argument relies on a highly controversial principle about how an
explanation of why something is a value must work -- a very
similar principle to that which was appealed to in the argument that
intrinsic value must be an intrinsic property [section 2.1.1]. If this
principle is false, then an explanatory theory of *why* both
pleasure and knowledge are values can be offered which does not work
by subsuming them under a further, more fundamental value. Reductive
theories of *what it is* to be a value satisfy this description,
and other kinds of theory may do so, as well (Schroeder [2005]). If
one of these kinds of theory is correct, then even pluralists can
offer an explanation of why the basic values that they appeal to are
values.


#### 2.2.2 Revisionary Commitments?



Moreover, against the monist, the pluralist can argue that the basic
posits to which her theory appeals are not *different in kind*
from those to which the monist appeals; they are only different in
*number*. This leads to the second major issue that is at stake
in the debate between monists and pluralists. Monistic theories carry
strong implications about what is of value. Given any monistic theory,
everything that is of value must be either the one intrinsic value, or
else must lead to the one intrinsic value. This means that if some
things that are intuitively of value, such as knowledge, do not, in
fact, always lead to what a theory holds to be the one intrinsic value
(for example, pleasure), then the theory is committed to denying that
these things are really always of value after all.



Confronted with these kinds of difficulties in subsuming everything
that is pre-theoretically of value under one master value, pluralists
don't fret: they simply add to their list of basic intrinsic
values, and hence can be more confident in preserving the
pre-theoretical phenomena. Monists, in contrast, have a choice. They
can change their mind about the basic intrinsic value and try all over
again, they can work on developing resourceful arguments that
knowledge really does lead to pleasure, or they can bite the bullet
and conclude that knowledge is really not, after all, always good, but
only under certain specific conditions. If the explanatory commitments
of the pluralist are not *different in kind* from those of the
monist, but only different in *number*, then it is natural for
the pluralist to think that this kind of slavish adherence to the
number one is a kind of fetish it is better to do without, if we want
to develop a theory that gets things *right*. This is a
perspective that many historical pluralists have shared.


#### 2.2.3 Incommensurability



The third important issue in the debate between monists and
pluralists, and the most central over recent decades, is that over the
relationship between pluralism and incommensurability. If one state of
affairs is better than another just in case it contains more value
than the other, and there are two or more basic intrinsic values, then
it is not clear how two states of affairs can be compared, if one
contains more of the first value, but the other contains more of the
second. Which state of affairs is better, under such a circumstance?
In contrast, if there is only one intrinsic value, then this
can't happen: the state of affairs that is better is the one
that has more of the basic intrinsic value, whatever that is.



Reasoning like this has led some philosophers to believe that
pluralism is the key to explaining the complexity of real moral
situations and the genuine tradeoffs that they involve. If some things
really *are* incomparable or incommensurable, they reason, then
pluralism about value could explain *why*. Very similar reasoning
has led other philosophers, however, to the view that monism
*has* to be right: practical wisdom requires being able to make
choices, even in complicated situations, they argue. But that would be
impossible, if the options available in some choice were incomparable
in this way. So if pluralism leads to this kind of incomparability,
then pluralism must be false.



In the next section, we'll consider the debate over the
comparability of values on which this question hinges. But even if we
grant all of the assumptions on both sides so far, monists have the
better of these two arguments. Value pluralism may be *one* way
to obtain incomparable options, but there could be other ways, even
consistently with value monism. For example, take the interpretation
of Mill on which he believes that there is only one intrinsic value
-- happiness -- but that happiness is a complicated sort of
thing, which can happen in each of two different ways -- either
through higher pleasures, or through lower pleasures. If Mill has this
view, and holds, further, that it is in some cases indeterminate
whether someone who has slightly more higher pleasures is happier than
someone who has quite a few more lower pleasures, then he can explain
why it is indeterminate whether it is better to be the first way or
the second way, without having to appeal to pluralism in his theory of
*value*. The pluralism would be within his theory of
*happiness* alone.



See a more detailed discussion in the entry on
 value pluralism.


### 2.3 Incommensurability/Incomparability



We have just seen that one of the issues at stake in the debate
between monists and pluralists about value turns on the question
(vaguely put) of whether values can be incomparable or
incommensurable. This is consequently an area of active dispute in its
own right. There are, in fact, many distinct issues in this debate,
and sometimes several of them are run together.


#### 2.3.1 Is there Weak Incomparability?



One of the most important questions at stake is whether it must always
be true, for two states of affairs, that things would be better if the
first obtained than if the second did, that things would be better if
the second obtained than if the first did, or that things would be
equally good if either obtained. The claim that it can sometimes
happen that none of these is true is sometimes referred to as the
claim of *incomparability*, in this case as applied to good
*simpliciter*. Ruth Chang [2002] has argued that in addition to
"better than", "worse than", and
"equally good", there is a fourth "positive value
relation", which she calls *parity*. Chang reserves the use
of "incomparable" to apply more narrowly, to the
possibility that in addition to none of the other three relations
holding between them, it is possible that two states of affairs may
fail even to be "on a par". However, we can distinguish
between *weak* incomparability, defined as above, and
*strong* incomparability, further requiring the lack of parity,
whatever that turns out to be. Since the notion of *parity* is
itself a theoretical idea about how to account for what happens when
the other three relations fail to obtain, a question which I
won't pursue here, it will be weak incomparability that will
interest us here.



It is important to distinguish the question of whether good
*simpliciter* admits of incomparability from the question of
whether *good for* and attributive good admit of incomparability.
Many discussions of the incomparability of values proceed at a very
abstract level, and interchange examples of each of these kinds of
value claims. For example, a typical example of a purported
incomparability might compare, say, Mozart to Rodin. Is Mozart a
better artist than Rodin? Is Rodin a better artist than Mozart? Are
they equally good? If none of these is the case, then we have an
example of incomparability in attributive good, but not an example of
incomparability in good *simpliciter*. These questions may be
parallel or closely related, and investigation of each may be
instructive in consideration of the other, but they still need to be
kept separate.



For example, one important argument against the incomparability of
value was mentioned in the previous section. It is that
incomparability would rule out the possibility of practical wisdom,
because practical wisdom requires the ability to make correct choices
even in complicated choice situations. Choices are presumably between
actions, or between possible consequences of those actions. So it
could be that attributive good is sometimes incomparable, because
neither Mozart nor Rodin is a better artist than the other and they
are not equally good, but that good *simpliciter* is always
comparable, so that there is always an answer as to which of two
actions would lead to an outcome that is better.


#### 2.3.2 What Happens when there is Weak Incomparability?



Even once it is agreed that good *simpliciter* is incomparable in
this sense, many theories have been offered as to what that
incomparability involves and why it exists. One important constraint
on such theories is that they not predict more incomparabilities than
we really observe. For example, though Rodin may not be a better or
worse artist than Mozart, nor equally good, he is certainly a better
artist than Salieri -- even though Salieri, like Mozart, is a
better composer than Rodin. This is a problem for the idea that
incomparability can be explained by value pluralism. The argument from
value pluralism to incomparability suggested that it would be
impossible to compare any two states of affairs where one contained
more of one basic value and the other contained more of another. But
cases like that of Rodin and Salieri show that the explanation of what
is incomparable between Rodin and Mozart can't simply be that
since Rodin is a better sculptor and Mozart is a better composer,
there is no way of settling who is the better artist. If that were the
correct explanation, then Rodin and Salieri would also be
incomparable, but intuitively, they are not. Constraints like these
can narrow down the viable theories about what is going on in cases of
incomparability, and are evidence that incomparability is probably not
going to be straightforwardly explained by value pluralism.



There are many other kinds of theses that go under the title of the
incomparability or incommensurability of values. For example, some
theories which posit lexical orderings are said to commit to
"incomparabilities". Kant's thesis that rational
agents have a dignity and not a price is often taken to be a thesis
about a kind of incommensurability, as well. Some have interpreted
Kant to be holding simply that respect for rational agents is of
infinite value, or that it is to be lexically ordered over the value
of anything else. Another thesis in the neighborhood, however, would
be somewhat weaker. It might be that a human life is "above
price" in the sense that killing one to save one is not an
acceptable exchange, but that for some positive value of \(n\),
killing one to save \(n\) would be an acceptable exchange. On this
view, there is no single "exchange value" for a life,
because the value of a human life depends on whether you are
"buying" or "selling" -- it is higher
when you are going to take it away, but lower when you are going to
preserve it. Such a view would intelligibly count as a kind of
"incommensurability", because it sets no single value on
human lives.



A more detailed discussion of the commensurability of values can be
found in the entry on
 incommensurable values.


## 3. Relation to the Deontic



One of the biggest and most important questions about value is the
matter of its relation to the deontic -- to categories like
*right*, *reason*, *rational*, *just*, and
*ought*. According to *teleological* views, of which
classical consequentialism and universalizable egoism are classic
examples, deontic categories are posterior to and to be explained in
terms of evaluative categories like *good* and *good for*.
The contrasting view, according to which deontic categories are prior
to, and explain, the evaluative categories, is one which, as Aristotle
says, has no name. But its most important genus is that of
"fitting attitude" accounts, and Scanlon's [1998]
"buck-passing" theory is another closely related
contemporary example.


### 3.1 Teleology



Teleological theories are not, strictly speaking, theories about
value. They are theories about right action, or about what one ought
to do. But they are committed to *claims* about value, because
they appeal to evaluative facts, in order to explain what is right and
wrong, and what we ought to do -- *deontic* facts. The most
obvious consequence of these theories, is therefore that evaluative
facts must not then be explained in terms of deontic facts. The
evaluative, on such views, is prior to the deontic.


#### 3.1.1 Classical Consequentialism



The most familiar sort of view falling under this umbrella is
*classical consequentialism*, sometimes called (for reasons
we'll see in section 3.3) "agent-neutral
consequentialism". According to classical consequentialism,
every agent ought always to do whatever action, out of all of the
actions available to her at that time, is the one such that if she did
it, things would be best. Not all defenders of consequentialism
interpret it in such classical terms; other prominent forms of
consequentialism focus on rules or motives, and evaluate actions only
derivatively.



Classical consequentialism is sometimes supported by appeal to the
intuition that one should always do the best action, and then the
assumption that actions are only instrumentally good or bad --
for the sake of what they lead to (compare especially Moore [1903]).
The problem with this reasoning is that non-consequentialists can
agree that agents ought always to do the best action. The important
feature of this claim to recognize is that it is a claim not about
intrinsic or instrumental value, but about attributive good. And as
noted in section 2.1, "instrumental" and
"intrinsic" don't really apply to attributive good.
Just as how good of a can opener something is or how good of a
torturer someone is does not depend on how good the world is, as a
result of the fact that they exist, how good of an action something is
need not depend on how good the world is, as a result that it happens.
Indeed, if it did, then the evaluative standards governing actions
would be quite different from those governing nearly everything
else.


#### 3.1.2 Problems in Principle vs. Problems of Implementation



Classical consequentialism, and its instantiation in the form of
utilitarianism, has been well-explored, and its advantages and costs
cannot be surveyed here. Many of the issues for classical
consequentialism, however, are issues for details of its exact
formulation or implementation, and not problems *in principle*
with its appeal to the evaluative in order to explain the deontic. For
example, the worry that consequentialism is too demanding has been
addressed within the consequentialist framework, by replacing
"best" with "good enough" -- substituting
a "satisficing" conception for a "maximizing"
one (Slote [1989]). For another example, problems faced by certain
consequentialist theories, like traditional utilitarianism, about
accounting for things like justice can be solved by other
consequentialist theories, simply by adopting a more generous picture
about what sort of things contribute to how good things are (Sen
[1982]).



In section 3.3 we'll address one of the most central issues
about classical consequentialism: its inability to allow for
*agent-centered constraints*. This issue *does* pose an
in-principle general problem for the aspiration of consequentialism to
explain deontic categories in terms of the evaluative. For more, see
the entry on
 consequentialism and utilitarianism.


#### 3.1.3 Other Teleological Theories



Universalizable egoism is another familiar teleological theory.
According to universalizable egoism, each agent ought always to do
whatever action has the feature that, of all available alternatives,
it is the one such that, were she to do it, things would be best
*for her*. Rather than asking agents to maximize the good, egoism
asks agents to maximize what is good *for them*. Universalizable
egoism shares many features with classical consequentialism, and
Sidgwick found both deeply attractive. Many others have joined
Sidgwick in holding that there is something deeply attractive about
what consequentialism and egoism have in common -- which
involves, at minimum, the teleological idea that the deontic is to be
explained in terms of the evaluative (Portmore [2005]).



Of course, not all teleological theories share the broad features of
consequentialism and egoism. Classical Natural Law theories (Finnis
[1980], Murphy [2001]) are teleological, in the sense that they seek
to explain what we ought to do in terms of what is good, but they do
so in a very different way from consequentialism and egoism. According
to an example of such a Natural Law theory, there are a variety of
natural values, each of which calls for a certain kind of distinctive
response or respect, and agents ought always to act in ways that
respond to the values with that kind of respect. For more on natural
law theories, see the entry on
 the natural law tradition in ethics. 
 And Barbara Hermann has prominently argued for interpreting
Kant's ethical theory in teleological terms.  For more on
Herman's interpretation of Kant, see the entry on
 Kant's Moral Philosophy,
 especially section 13. Philip Pettit [1997] prominently
distinguishes between values that we are called to
"promote" and those which call for other responses. 
As Pettit notes, classical consequentialists hold that all values are
to be promoted, and one way of thinking of some of these other kinds
of teleological theories is that like consequentialism they explain
what we ought to do in terms of what is good, but unlike
consequentialism they hold that some kinds of good call for responses
other than promotion.


### 3.2 Fitting Attitudes



In contrast to teleological theories, which seek to account for
deontic categories in terms of evaluative ones, Fitting Attitudes
accounts aspire to account for evaluative categories -- like good
*simpliciter*, *good for*, and attributive good -- in
terms of the deontic. Whereas teleology has *implications* about
value but is not itself a theory primarily *about* value, but
rather about what is right, Fitting Attitudes accounts *are*
primarily theses about value -- in accounting for it in terms of
the deontic, they tell us what it is for something to be good. Hence,
they are theories about the nature of value.



The basic idea behind all kinds of Fitting Attitudes account is that
"good" is closely linked to "desirable".
"Desireable", of course, in contrast to
"visible" and "audible", which mean
"able to be seen" and "able to be heard", does
not mean "able to be desired". It means, rather, something
like "correctly desired" or "appropriately
desired". If being good just is being desirable, and being
desirable just is being correctly or appropriately desired, it follows
that being good just is being correctly or appropriately desired. But
*correct* and *appropriate* are deontic concepts, so if
being good is just being desirable, then *goodness* can itself be
accounted for in terms of the deontic. And that is the basic idea
behind Fitting Attitudes accounts (Ewing [1947], Rabinowicz and
Ronnow-Rasmussen [2004]).


#### 3.2.1 Two Fitting Attitudes Accounts



Different Fitting Attitudes accounts, however, work by appealing to
different deontic concepts. Some of the problems facing Fitting
Attitudes views can be exhibited by considering a couple exemplars.
According to a formula from Sidgwick, for example, the good is what
ought to be desired. But this slogan is not by itself very helpful
until we know more: desired by whom? By everyone? By at least someone?
By someone in particular? And for which of our senses of
"good" does this seek to provide an account? Is it an
account of good *simpliciter*, saying that it would be good if
\(p\) just in case \_\_\_\_ ought to desire that \(p\), where
"\_\_\_\_" is filled in by whoever it is, who is supposed to
have the desire? Or is it an account of "value" claims,
saying that pleasure is good just in case pleasure ought to be desired
by \_\_\_\_?



The former of these two accounts would fit in with the
"good-first" theory from section 1.1.4; the latter would
fit in with the "value-first" theory. We observed in
section 1.1.4 that "value" claims don't admit of
comparatives in the same way that other uses of "good" do;
this is important here because if "better" simpliciter is
prior to "good" simpliciter, then strictly speaking a
"good-first" theorist needs to offer a Fitting Attitudes
account of "better", rather than of "good".
Such a modification of the Sidgwickian slogan might say that it would
be better if \(p\) than if \(q\) just in case \_\_\_\_ ought to desire
that \(p\) more than that \(q\) (or alternatively, to prefer \(p\) to
\(q\)).



In *What We Owe to Each Other*, T.M. Scanlon offered an
influential contemporary view with much in common with Fitting
Attitudes accounts, which he called the *Buck-Passing* theory of
value. According to Scanlon's slogan, "to call something
valuable is to say that it has other properties that provide reasons
for behaving in certain ways with respect to it." One important
difference from Sidgwick's view is that it appeals to a
different deontic concept: *reasons* instead of *ought*. But
it also aspires to be more neutral than Sidgwick's slogan on the
specific response that is called for. Sidgwick's slogan required
that it is *desire* that is always relevant, whereas
Scanlon's slogan leaves open that there may be different
"certain ways" of responding to different kinds of
values.



But despite these differences, the Scanlonian slogan shares with the
Sidgwickian slogan the feature of being massively underspecified. For
*which* sense of "good" does it aspire to provide an
account? Is it really supposed to be directly an account of
"good", or, if we respect the priority of
"better" to "good", should we really try to
understand it as, at bottom, an account of "better than"?
And crucially, which are the "certain ways" that are
involved? It can't just be that the speaker has to have some
certain ways in mind, because there are some ways of responding such
that reasons to respond in that way are evidence that the thing in
question is *bad* rather than that it is good -- for
example, the attitude of *dread*. So does the theory require that
there is some particular set of certain ways, such that a thing is
good just in case there are reasons to respond to it in any of
*those* ways? Scanlon's initial remarks suggest rather that
for each sort of thing, there are different "certain ways"
such that when we say that *that* thing is good, we are saying
that there are reasons to respond to it in those ways. This is a
matter that would need to be sorted out by any worked out view.



A further complication with the Scanlonian formula, is that appealing
in the analysis to the bare existential claim that there *are*
reasons to respond to something in one of these "certain
ways" faces large difficulties. Suppose, for example, that there
is some reason to respond in one of the "certain ways",
but there are competing, and weightier, reasons not to, so that all
things considered, responding in any of the "certain ways"
would be a mistake. Plausibly, the thing under consideration should
not turn out to be good in such a case. So even a view like
Scanlon's, which appeals to reasons, may need, once it is more
fully developed, to appeal to specific claims about the *weight*
of those reasons.


#### 3.2.2 The Wrong Kind of Reason



Even once these kinds of questions are sorted out, however, other
significant questions remain. For example, one of the famous problems
facing such views is the *Wrong Kind of Reasons* problem (Crisp
[2000], Rabinowicz and Ronnow-Rasmussen [2004]). The problem
arises from the observation that intuitively, some factors can affect
what you ought to desire without affecting what is good. It may be
true that if we make something better, then other things being equal,
you ought to desire it more. But we can also create *incentives*
for you to desire it, without making it any better. For example, you
might be offered a substantial financial reward for desiring something
bad, or an evil demon might (credibly) threaten to kill your family
unless you do so. If these kinds of circumstances can affect what you
ought to desire, as is at least intuitively plausible, then they will
be counterexamples to views based on the Sidgwickian formula.
Similarly, if these kinds of circumstances can give you *reasons*
to desire the thing which is bad, then they will be counterexamples to
views based on the Scanlonian formula. It is in the context of the
Scanlonian formula that this issue has been called the "Wrong
Kind of Reasons" problem, because if these circumstances do give
you reasons to desire the thing that is bad, they are reasons of the
wrong kind to figure in a Scanlon-style account of what it is to be
good.



This issue has recently been the topic of much fruitful investigation,
and investigators have drawn parallels between the kinds of reason to
desire that are provided by these kinds of "external"
incentives and familiar issues about pragmatic reasons for belief and
the kind of reason to intend that exists in Gregory Kavka's
Toxin Puzzle (Hieronymi [2005]). Focusing on the cases of desire,
belief, and intention, which are all kinds of mental state, some have
claimed that the distinction between the "right kind" and
"wrong kind" of reason can be drawn on the basis of the
distinction between "object-given" reasons, which refer to
the object of the attitude, and "state-given" reasons,
which refer to the mental state itself, rather than to its object
(Parfit [2001], Piller [2006]). But questions have also been raised
about whether the "object-given"/"state-given"
distinction is general enough to really explain the distinction
between reasons of the right kind and reasons of the wrong kind, and
it has even been disputed whether the distinction tracks anything at
all.



One reason to think that the distinction may not be general enough, is
that situations very much like Wrong Kind of Reasons situations can
arise even where no mental states are in play. For example, games are
subject to norms of correctness. External incentives to cheat --
for example, a credible threat from an evil demon that she will kill
your family unless you do so -- can plausibly not only provide
you with reasons to cheat, but make it the case that you ought to. But
just as such external incentives don't make it appropriate or
correct to desire something bad, they don't make it a correct
move of the game to cheat (Schroeder [2010]). If this is right, and
the right kind/wrong kind distinction among reasons really does arise
in a broad spectrum of cases, including ones like this one, it is not
likely that a distinction that only applies to reasons for mental
states is going to lie at the bottom of it.



Further discussion of fitting attitudes accounts of
value and the wrong kind of reasons problem can be found in the entry
on
 fitting attitude theories of value.


#### 3.2.4 Application to the Varieties of Goodness



One significant attraction to Fitting Attitudes-style accounts, is
that they offer prospects of being successfully applied to attributive
good and *good for*, as well as to good *simpliciter*
(Darwall [2002], Ronnow-Rasmussen [2009], Suikkanen [2009]). Just
as reasons to prefer one state of affairs to another can underwrite
one state of affairs being better than another, reasons to choose one
can-opener over another can underwrite its being a better can opener
than the other, and reasons to prefer some state of affairs *for
someone's sake* can underwrite its being better for that
person than another. For example, here is a quick sketch of what an
account might look like, which accepts the good-first theory from
section 1.1.4, holds as in section 1.1.2 that good *simpliciter*
is a special case of attributive good, and understands attributive
"good" in terms of attributive "better" and
"good for" in terms of "better for":



> 
> 
> **Attributive better:** For all kinds *K*, and things
> *A* and *B*, for *A* to be a better *K*
> than *B* is for the set of all of the right kind of reasons to
> choose *A* over *B* when selecting a *K* to be
> weightier than the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose
> *B* over *A* when selecting a *K*.
> 
> 
> 
> **Better for:** For all things *A*, *B*, and
> *C*, *A* is better for *C* than *B* is
> just in case the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose
> *A* over *B* on *C*'s behalf is weightier
> than the set of all of the right kind of reasons to choose *B*
> over *A* on *C*'s behalf.
> 
> 
> 



If being a good K is just being a better K than most (in some
comparison class), and "it would be good if \(p\)" just
means that \(p\)'s obtaining is a good state of affairs, and
value claims like "pleasure is good" just mean that other
things being equal, it is better for there to be more pleasure, then
this pair of accounts has the right structure to account for the full
range of "good" claims that we have encountered. But it
also shows how the various senses of "good" are related,
and allows that even attributive good and *good for* have, at
bottom, a common shared structure. So the prospect of being able to
offer such a unified story about what the various senses of
"good" have in common, though not the exclusive property
of the Fitting Attitudes approach, is nevertheless one of its
attractions.


### 3.3 Agent-Relative Value?


#### 3.3.1 Agent-Centered Constraints



The most central, in-principle problem for classical consequentialism
is the possibility of what are called *agent-centered
constraints* (Scheffler [1983]). It has long been a traditional
objection to utilitarian theories that because they place no intrinsic
disvalue on wrong actions like murder, they yield the prediction that
if you have a choice between murdering and allowing two people to die,
it is clear that you should murder. After all, other things being
equal, the situation is stacked 2-to-1 -- there are two deaths on
one side, but only one death on the other, and each death is equally
bad.



Consequentialists who hold that killings of innocents are
intrinsically bad can avoid this prediction. As long as a murder is at
least twice as bad as an ordinary death not by murder,
consequentialists can explain why you ought not to murder, even in
order to prevent two deaths. So there is no in-principle problem for
consequentialism posed by this sort of example; whether it is an issue
for a given consequentialist depends on her axiology: on what she
thinks is intrinsically bad, and how bad she thinks it is.



But the problem is very closely related to a genuine problem for
consequentialism. What if you could prevent two murders by murdering?
Postulating an intrinsic disvalue to murders does nothing to account
for the intuition that you still ought not to murder, even in this
case. But most people find it pre-theoretically natural to assume that
even if you should murder in order to prevent thousands of murders,
you shouldn't do it in order to prevent just two. The constraint
against murdering, on this natural intuition, goes beyond the idea
that murders are bad. It requires that the badness of your own murders
affects what you should do more than it affects what others should do
in order to prevent you from murdering. That is why it is called
"agent-centered".


#### 3.3.2 Agent-Relative Value



The problem with agent-centered constraints is that there seems to be
no single natural way of evaluating outcomes that yields all of the
right predictions. For each agent, there is some way of evaluating
outcomes that yields the right predictions about what she ought to do,
but these rankings treat that agent's murders as contributing
more to the badness of outcomes than other agents' murders. So
as a result, an *incompatible* ranking of outcomes appears to be
required in order to yield the right predictions about what some other
agent ought to do -- namely, one which rates *his* murders
as contributing more to the badness of outcomes than the first
agent's murders. (The situation is slightly more complicated
-- Oddie and Milne [1991] prove that under pretty minimal
assumptions there is always *some* agent-neutral ranking that
yields the right consequentialist predictions, but their proof does
not show that this ranking has any independent plausibility, and Nair
[2014] argues that it cannot be an independently plausible account of
what is a better outcome.)



As a result of this observation, philosophers have postulated a thing
called *agent-relative value*. The idea of agent-relative value
is that if the *better than* relation is relativized to
*agents*, then outcomes in which Franz murders can be
worse-*relative-to* Franz than outcomes in which Jens murders,
even though outcomes in which Jens murders are worse-relative-to Jens
than outcomes in which Franz murders. These contrasting rankings of
these two kinds of outcomes are not incompatible, because each is
relativized to a different agent -- the former to Franz, and the
latter to Jens.



The idea of agent-relative value is attractive to teleologists,
because it allows a view that is very similar in structure to
classical consequentialism to account for constraints. According to
this view, sometimes called *Agent-Relative Teleology* or
*Agent-Centered Consequentialism*, each agent ought always to do
what will bring about the results that are best-relative-to her. Such
a view can easily accommodate an agent-centered constraint not to
murder, on the assumption that each agent's murders are
sufficiently worse-relative-to her than other agent's murders
are (Sen [1983], Portmore [2007]).



Some philosophers have claimed that Agent-Relative Teleology is not
even a distinct theory from classical consequentialism, holding that
the word "good" in English picks out agent-relative value
in a context-dependent way, so that when consequentialists say,
"everyone ought to do what will have the best results",
what they are really saying is that "everyone ought to do what
will have the best-relative-to-her results" (Smith [2003]). And
other philosophers have suggested that Agent-Relative Teleology is
such an attractive theory that everyone is really committed to it
(Dreier [1996]). These theses are bold claims in the theory of value,
because they tell us strong and surprising things about the nature of
what we are talking about, when we use the word,
"good".


#### 3.3.3 Problems and Prospects



In fact, it is highly controversial whether there is even such a thing
as agent-relative value in the first place. Agent-Relative
Teleologists typically appeal to a distinction between agent-relative
and agent-neutral value, but others have contested that no one has
ever successfully made such a distinction in a theory-neutral way
(Schroeder [2007]). Moreover, even if there is such a distinction,
relativizing "good" to agents is not sufficient to deal
with all intuitive cases of constraints, because common sense allows
that you ought not to murder, even in order to prevent *yourself*
from murdering twice in the future. In order to deal with such cases,
"good" will need to be relativized not just to agents, but
to *times* (Brook [1991]). Yet a further source of difficulties
arises for views according to which "good" in English is
used to make claims about agent-relative value in a context-dependent
way; such views fail ordinary tests for context-dependence, and
don't always generate the readings of sentences which their
proponents require.



One of the motivations for thinking that there must be such a thing as
agent-relative value comes from proponents of Fitting Attitudes
accounts of value, and goes like this: if the good is what ought to be
desired, then there will be *two kinds* of good. What ought to be
desired by everyone will be the "agent-neutral" good, and
what ought to be desired by some particular person will be the good
relative-to that person. Ancestors of this idea can be found in
Sidgwick and Ewing, and it has found a number of contemporary
proponents. Whether it is right will turn not only on whether Fitting
Attitudes accounts turn out to be correct, but on what role the answer
to the questions, "who ought?" or "whose
reasons?" plays in the shape of an adequate Fitting Attitudes
account. All of these issues remain unresolved.



The questions of whether there is such a thing as agent-relative
value, and if so, what role it might play in an agent-centered variant
on classical consequentialism, are at the heart of the debate between
consequentialists and deontologists, and over the fundamental question
of the relative priority of the evaluative versus the deontic. These
are large and open questions, but as I hope I've illustrated
here, they are intimately interconnected with a very wide range of
both traditional and non-traditional questions in the theory of value,
broadly construed.