The Objectivity of Value

Abstract

is the value of the capacity to weigh reasons itself, which we find in ourselves, but also equally in every other member of the universal community of rational agents. This is the basis of moral reasoning. Its principle is to treat all rational agents as having an objective value that is fundamental, supreme and equal. It is solely through this moral value that happiness acquires its value, and the principle of prudence becomes binding on us; it is likewise solely through the value of happiness that more limited ends, and hence the means to them, acquire their value. Therefore, the three species of practical reasoning stand in a definite order of priority. Moral reasoning takes precedence over, and governs, prudential reasoning, and prudential reasoning takes precedence over, and governs, instrumental reasoning. The common dogma that all practical reason is instrumental is based on the false idea that all reason must begin with desire (for an end) and that the role of reason is merely to supply the means to the end. But apart from our conception of ourselves as capable of setting ends, and as having reasons to pursue the ends we set, there would be no reason for us to take the means to our ends apart from the momentary desire we might feel to perform the actions that count as those means. However, an agent who always felt that desire, apart from any reason to feel it, would not need instrumental reason. An agent needs instrumental reason at all only insofar as it must create in itself a desire to employ the means it realizes are necessary for its end. It creates this desire through its awareness of its value as a rational agent, and the consequent objective value of the ends it has set for good reasons. 25 David Hume, “The Standard of Taste,” in David Hume: Selected Essays, ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar (New York, 1993). 26 This is what Kant calls our “empirical interest” in the beautiful (Critique of the Power of Judgment, in Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, pp. 296–98).