Understanding Value as Knowing How to Value, and for What Reasons

Abstract

After sketching the intuitions that give rise to an account aimed at reducing evaluative talk to reason talk, I delineate this account (which is in the line of Scanlon’s ‘buck-passing’ account of value), by contrasting it with two other accounts, and point out its advantages. The focus of the paper is on two nagging problems that plague the reductive account so delineated, one about the attitudes (and the reasons for them) that imply and explicate the value of a person or an object, and one about the buck-passing move itself. I claim to present a solution to the first problem (how to avoid that favourable attitudes taken for wrong reasons imply valuableness?), and I point out a tentative solution to the second (how may an important function of value talk be preserved if we reduce it to reason talk?).