Abstract
This paper examines the debate as to whether something can have final value in virtue of its relational (i.e., non-intrinsic) properties, or, more briefly put, whether final value must be intrinsic. The paper adopts the perspective of the fitting-attitude analysis (FA analysis) of value, and argues that from this perspective, there is no ground for the requirement that things may have final value only in virtue of their intrinsic properties, but that there might be some grounds for the alternate requirement that final value be grounded only in the essential properties of their bearers. First, the paper introduces the key elements of the FA analysis, and sets aside an obvious but unimportant way in which this analysis makes all final values relational. Second, it discusses some classical counterexamples to the view that final value must be intrinsic. Third, it discusses the relation between final, contributive, and signatory value. Fourth, it examines Zimmerman’s defense of the requirement that final value must be intrinsic on the grounds that final value cannot be derivative. And finally, it explores the alternative requirement that something may have final value in virtue of its essential properties.
Highlights
This paper examines the resources that fitting-attitude analyses of value offer for dealing with a key issue in formal axiology: whether something may have final value in virtue of its relational or extrinsic properties1
Moore’s rationale seems to be that since the relations that a thing entertains with other things would be absent under the isolation test, the value that a thing possesses for its own sake must be one that it has in virtue of its intrinsic properties
The paper introduced Korsgaard, Kagan, O’Neill, and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen’s paradigm examples of objects which intuitively have relational final value, and argued that FA analysts should be responsive to the phenomenological evidence that these cases are genuine
Summary
FA analyses of value propose that to be valuable is to be a fitting object of an approving attitude (a pro-attitude, for short). Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen argue on these grounds that it would be implausible to interpret such examples as cases of instrumental evaluations in disguise: Diana’s dress is perhaps valuable merely as a means: merely because it allows us to establish an indirect connection to a person we admire or find important in one way or another Having such a connection may be something that we set a final value on. What has been shown by cases of contributive and signatory values applies in exactly the same way to instrumental values in the relational sense: our evaluative attitudes are not dictated univocally by the kind of relations characterizing the properties in virtue of which they are grounded. This opacity is, the only reason why the evaluator cannot explain her evaluation, and why her only option is to say that she values the thing “in virtue of its own nature.” On these grounds, I take it that the derivative/nonderivative distinction does not reflect any fundamental contrast about how evaluations relate to their supervenience bases
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