Objective Value and Subjective States

Abstract

There has been a revival of interest in moral realism, the thesis that there are ethical facts. Some, for instance Mackie, have argued that alleged ethical facts are too queer to take seriously.' But others, for instance Sturgeon, have touted their explanatory power and legitimacy.' Many recent discussions of moral realism have not focused on specifying plausible examples of ethical facts, and this may leave the abstract discussion of their possibility unsatisfying. I hope here to help remedy that situation. Ethical facts, if there are any, are a subspecies of a possibly larger class, the class of normative facts. These are facts involving the possession by things of normative properties like rightness or goodness, though perhaps not a specifically ethical rightness or goodness. I will argue that there are plausible examples of normative facts, of the robust sort that I will shortly characterize as objective normative facts.3 In particular, I will argue that there are phenomenal states, qualia, sense data, or raw feels that are an essential part of some pleasure and pain and that have, as a matter of objective fact, the normative properties of intrinsic value or disvalue. There is objective value in those subjective states. That such objective value is an ethical property, that the intrinsic value of certain phenomenal states is ethical value, I do not demonstrate. But by exhibiting such exam-