The term “value theory” is used in at least threedifferent ways in philosophy. In its broadest sense, “valuetheory” is a catch-all label used to encompass all branches ofmoral philosophy, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, andsometimes feminist philosophy and the philosophy of religion —whatever areas of philosophy are deemed to encompass some“evaluative” aspect. In its narrowest sense, “valuetheory” is used for a relatively narrow area of normativeethical theory particularly, but not exclusively, of concern toconsequentialists. In this narrow sense, “value theory” isroughly synonymous with “axiology”. Axiology can bethought of as primarily concerned with classifying what things aregood, and how good they are. For instance, a traditional question ofaxiology concerns whether the objects of value are subjectivepsychological states, or objective states of the world.

But in a more useful sense, “value theory” designates thearea of moral philosophy that is concerned with theoretical questionsabout value and goodness of all varieties — the theory of value.The theory of value, so construed, encompasses axiology, but alsoincludes many other questions about the nature of value and itsrelation to other moral categories. The division of moral theory intothe theory of value, as contrasting with other areas of investigation,cross-cuts the traditional classification of moral theory intonormative and metaethical inquiry, but is a worthy distinction in itsown right; theoretical questions about value constitute a core domainof interest in moral theory, often cross the boundaries between thenormative and the metaethical, and have a distinguished history ofinvestigation. This article surveys a range of the questions whichcome up in the theory of value, and attempts to impose some structureon the terrain by including some observations about how they arerelated to one another.

• 1. Basic Questions
  • 1.1 Varieties of Goodness
  • 1.2 Good, Better, Bad
• 2. Traditional Questions
  • 2.1 Intrinsic Value
  • 2.2 Monism/Pluralism
  • 2.3 Incommensurability/Incomparability
• 3. Relation to the Deontic
  • 3.1 Teleology
  • 3.2 Fitting Attitudes
  • 3.3 Agent-Relative Value?
• Bibliography
  • Works Cited
  • Other Important Works
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Basic Questions

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

“pleasure is good/bad”; “it would be good/bad if youdid 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/badthief”; “he’s a good/bad man”;“it’s good/bad that you came”; “it would bebetter/worse if you didn’t”; “lettuce isbetter/worse for you than Oreos”; “my new can opener isbetter/worse than my old one”; “Mack is a better/worsethief than Jack”; “it’s better/worse for it to endnow, than for us to get caught later”; “best/worst of all,would be if they won the World Seriesand kept all of theirplayers for next year”; “celery is the best/worst thingfor your health”; “Mack is the best/worst thiefaround”

The word “value” doesn’t appear anywhere on thislist; it is full, however, of “good”,“better”, and “best”, and correspondingly of“bad”, “worse”, and “worst”. Andthese 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 massterm, constitute a central part of traditional axiology, in whichphilosophers have wanted to know what things (of which there can bemore or less) are good. I’ll stipulatively call them valueclaims, and use the word “stuff” for the kind of thing ofwhich they predicate value (like pleasure, knowledge, and money).Sentences like 2 make claims about what I’ll (againstipulatively) call goodnesssimpliciter; this is the kind ofgoodness appealed to by traditional utilitarianism. Sentences like 3aregood for sentences, and when the subject following“for” is a person, we usually take them to be claims aboutwelfare or well-being. And sentences like 4 are what, following Geach[1956], I’ll callattributive uses of“good”, because “good” functions as apredicate modifier, rather than as a predicate in its own right.

Many of the basic issues in the theory of value begin with questionsor assumptions about how these various kinds of claim are related toone another. Some of these are introduced in the next two sections,focusing in 1.1 on the relationship between our four kinds ofsentences, and focusing in 1.2 on the relationship between“good” and “better”, and between“good” and “bad”.

1.1 Varieties of Goodness

Claims about goodsimpliciter are those which have garneredthe most attention in moral philosophy. This is partly because as itis usually understood, these are the “good” claims thatconsequentialists hold to have a bearing on what we ought to do.Consequentialism, so understood, is the view that you ought to dowhatever action is such that it would be best if you did it. Thisleaves, however, a wide variety of possible theories about how suchclaims are related to other kinds of “good” claim.

1.1.1 GoodSimpliciter andGood For

For example, consider a simplepoint of view theory,according to which what is goodsimpliciter differs from whatis good for Jack, in that being good for Jack is being good from acertain point of view — Jack’s — whereas being goodsimpliciter is being good from a more general point of view— the point of view of the universe (compare Nagel [1985]). Thepoint of view theory reduces bothgood for and goodsimpliciter togood from the point of view of, andunderstands goodsimpliciter claims as about the point ofview of the universe. One problem for this view is to make sense ofwhat sort of thing points of view could be, such that Jack and theuniverse are both the kinds of thing to have one.

According to a different sort of theory, theagglomerativetheory, goodnesssimpliciter is just what you get by“adding up” what is good for all of the various peoplethat there are. Rawls [1971] attributes this view to utilitarians, andit fits with utilitarian discussions such as that of Smart’scontribution to Smart and Williams [1973], but much more work wouldhave to be done in order to make it precise. We sometimes say thingslike, “wearing that outfit in the sun all day is not going to begood for your tan line”, but your tan line is not one of thethings whose good it seems plausible to “add up” in orderto get what is goodsimpliciter. Certainly it is not one ofthe things whose good classical utilitarians would want to add up. Sothe fact that sapient and even sentient beings are not the only kindsof thing that things can be good or bad for sets an importantconstraint both on accounts of thegood for relation, and ontheories about how it is related to goodsimpliciter.

Rather than accounting for either of goodnesssimpliciter orgoodness-for in terms of the other, some philosophers havetaken one of these seriously at the expense of the other. For example,Philippa Foot [1985] gives an important but compressed argument thatapparent talk about what is goodsimpliciter can be madesense of as elliptical talk about what is good for some unmentionedperson, and Foot’s view can be strengthened (compare Shanklin[2011], Finlay [2014]) by allowing that apparent goodsimpliciter claims are oftengenerically quantifiedstatements about what is, in general, good for a person. Similarly,Kraut [2007] and Korsgaard [2018] each claim that nothing can be goodwithout being good for someone. Thomson [2008] famously defends asimilar but more general view on which all goodness is goodness in away, but being good for someone is just one way amongst others.

G.E. Moore [1903], in contrast, struggled to make sense of good-forclaims. In his refutation of egoism, Moore attributed to ethicalegoists the theory that what is good for Jack (or “inJack’s good”) is just what is good and in Jack’spossession, or alternatively, what it is good that Jack possesses.Moore didn’t argue against these theses directly, but he didshow that they cannot be combined with universalizable egoism. It isnow generally recognized that to avoid Moore’s arguments,egoists need only to reject these analyses ofgood for, whichare in any case unpromising (Smith [2003]).

1.1.2 Attributive Good

Other kinds of views understand goodsimpliciter in terms ofattributive good. What, after all, are the kinds of things to which weattribute goodnesssimpliciter? According to manyphilosophers, it is to propositions, or states of affairs. This issupported by a cursory study of the examples we have considered, inwhich what is being said to be good appears to be picked out bycomplementizers like “if”, “that”, and“for”: “it would be good if you did that”;“it’s good that you came”; “it’s betterfor it to end now”. If complementizer phrases denotepropositions or possible states of affairs, then it is reasonable toconjecture, along with Foot [1985] that being goodsimpliciter is being a good state of affairs, and hence thatit 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 thatstates of affairs are too thin of a kind to support attributive goodclaims).

See the

Supplement on Four Complications about Attributive Good

for further complications that arise when we consider the attributivesense of “good”.

Some philosophers have used the examples of attributive good andgood for in order to advance arguments against noncognitivistmetaethical theories (See the entrycognitivism and non-cognitivism). The basic outlines of such an argument go like this: noncognitivisttheories are designed to deal with goodsimpliciter, but havesome kind of difficulties accounting for attributive good or forgood for. Hence, there is a general problem withnoncognitivist theories, or at least a significant lacuna they leave.It has similarly been worried that noncognitivist theories will haveproblems 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 wouldbe surprising if relational uses of “good” like these werein fact a deep or special problem for noncognitivism; Hare’saccount inThe Language of Morals (Hare [1952]) wasspecifically about attributive uses of “good”, and it isnot clear why relational noncognitive attitudes should be harder tomake sense of than relational beliefs.

1.1.3 Relational Strategies

In an extension of the strategies just discussed, some theorists haveproposed views of “good” which aspire to treat all of goodsimpliciter,good for, and attributive good asspecial cases. A paradigm of this approach is the“end-relational” theory of Paul Ziff [1960] and StephenFinlay [2004], [2014]. According to Ziff, all claims about goodnessare relative to ends or purposes, and “good for” andattributive “good” sentences are simply different ways ofmaking these purposes (more or less) explicit. Talk about what is goodfor Jack, for example, makes the purpose of Jack’s being happy(say) explicit, while talk about what is a good knife makes our usualpurposes for knives (cutting things, say) explicit. The claim aboutgoodness is then relativized accordingly.

Views adopting this strategy need to develop in detail answers to justwhat, exactly, the further, relational, parameter on“good” is. Some hold that it isends, whileothers say things like “aims”. A filled-out version ofthis view must also be able to tell us themechanics of howthese ends can be made explicit in “good for” andattributive “good” claims, and needs to really make senseof both of those kinds of claim as of one very general kind. And, ofcourse, this sort of view yields the prediction that non-explicitlyrelativized “good” sentences — including those usedthroughout moral philosophy — are really only true or false oncethe end parameter is specified, perhaps by context.

This means that this view is open to the objection that it fails toaccount for a central class of uses of “good” in ethics,which by all evidence arenon-relative, and for which thelinguistic data do not support the hypothesis that they arecontext-sensitive. J.L. Mackie held a view like this one and embracedthis result — Mackie’s [1977] error theory about“good” extended only to such putative non-relationalsenses of “good”. Though he grants that there are suchuses of “good”, Mackie concludes that they are mistaken.Finlay [2014], in contrast, argues that he can use ordinary pragmaticeffects in order to explain the appearances. The apparentlynon-relational senses of “good”, Finlay argues, really arerelational, and his theory aspires to explain why they seemotherwise.

1.1.4 What’s Special About Value Claims

The sentences I have called “value claims” present specialcomplications. 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 andknowledge is good. Which, we might ask, is better? This question doesnot appear to make very much sense, until we fix on someamount of pleasure and someamount of knowledge. Butif Sue is a good dancer and Huw is a good dancer, then it makesperfect sense to ask who is the better dancer, and without needing tofix on any particularamount of dancing — much less onany amount of Sue or Huw. In general, just as the kinds of thing thatcan be tall are the same kinds of thing as can be taller than eachother, the kinds of thing that can be good are the same kinds of thingas can be better than one another. But the sentences that we arecalling “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 adifferent kind of logical form or structure. One way of implementingthis idea, thegood-first theory, is to suppose that“pleasure is good” means something roughly like,“(other things equal) it is better for there to be morepleasure”, rather than, “pleasure is better than mostthings (in some relevant comparison class)”, on a model with“Sue is a good dancer”, which means roughly, “Sue isa better dancer than most (in some relevant comparison class)”.According to a very different kind of theory, thevalue-firsttheory, when we say that pleasure is good, we are saying that pleasureis a value, and things are better just in case there is more of thethings which are values. These two theories offer competing orders ofexplanation for the same phenomenon. The good-first theory analyzesvalue claims in terms of “good” simpliciter, while thevalue-first theory analyzes “good”simpliciter interms of value claims. The good-first theory corresponds to the thesisthat states of affairs are the “primary bearers” of value;the value-first theory corresponds to the alternative thesis that itis things like pleasure or goodness (or perhaps their instances) thatare the “primary bearers” of value.

According to a more skeptical view, sentences like “pleasure isgood” do not express a distinctive kind of claim at all, but aremerely what you get when you take a sentence like “pleasure isgood for Jill to experience”, generically quantify out Jill, andellipse “to experience”. Following an idea also developedby Finlay [2014], Robert Shanklin [2011] argues that in general,good-for sentences pattern withexperiencer adjectives like“fun”, which admit of these very syntactictransformations: witness “Jack is fun for Jill to talkto”, “Jack is fun to talk to”, “Jack isfun”. This view debunks the issue over which the views discussedin the last paragraph disagree, for it denies that there is any suchdistinct topic for value claims to be about. (It may also explain thefailures of comparative forms, above, on the basis of differences inthe elided material.)

1.2 Good, Better, Bad

1.2.1Good andBetter

On a natural view, the relationship between “good”,“better”, and “best” would seem to be the sameas 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 beingtaller than, and someoneis the tallest woman just in case she is taller than every woman.Similarly, someone is tall, just in case she is taller than acontextually appropriate standard (Kennedy [2005]), or taller thansufficiently many (this many be vague) in some contextuallyappropriate comparison class.

Much moral philosophy appears to assume that things are very differentfor “good”, “better”, and “best”.Instead of treating “better than” as basic, and somethingas being good just in case it is better than sufficiently many in somecomparison class, philosophers very often assume, or write as if theyassume, that “good” is basic. For example, many theoristshave proposed analyses ofwhat it is to be good whichare incompatible with the claim that “good” is to beunderstood in terms of “better”. In the absence of somereason to think that “good” is very different from“tall”, however, this may be a very peculiar kind of claimto make, and it may distort some other issues in the theory ofvalue.

1.2.2 Value

Moreover, it is difficult to see how one could do things the other wayaround, and understand “better” in terms of“good”. Jon is a better sprinter than Jan not because itis more the case that Jon is a good sprinter than that Jan is a goodsprinter — they are both excellent sprinters, so neither one ofthese is more the case than the other. It is, however, possible to seehow to understand both “good” and “better” interms of value. If good is to better as tall is to taller, then theanalogue of value should intuitively be height. One person is tallerthan another just in case her height is greater; similarly, one stateof affairs is better than another just in case its value is greater.If we postulate something called “value” to play thisrole, then it is natural (though not obligatory) to identify valuewith amounts ofvalues — amounts of things likepleasure or knowledge, which “value” claims claim to begood.

But this move appears to be implausible or unnecessary when applied toattributive “good”. It is not particularly plausible thatthere is such a thing as can-opener value, such that one can-opener isbetter than another just in case it has more can-opener value. Ingeneral, not all comparatives need be analyzable in terms of somethinglike height, of which there can be literally more or less. Take, forexample, the case of “scary”. The analogy with heightwould yield the prediction that if one horror film is scarier thananother, 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 betterthan does not merely amount to having more value than.

1.2.3Good andBad

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 thanA. So if “good” is just “better than sufficientlymany” and “bad” is just “worse thansufficiently many”, all of the interesting facts in theneighborhood would seem to be captured by an assessment of what standsin thebetter than relation to what. The same point goes ifto be good is just to be better than a contextually set standard. Butit has been held by many moral philosophers that an inventory of whatis better than what would still leave something interesting andimportant out: what isgood.

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, youdo need to know more than all of the facts about what isbetter than what — you also need to know something about thecomparison class or standard that is supplied by the context ofutterance. The assumption that “good” is context-dependentin this way may therefore itself be just the kind of thing to explainthe intuition which drives the preceding argument.

2. Traditional Questions

Traditional axiology seeks to investigate what things are good, howgood they are, and how their goodness is related to one another.Whatever we take the “primary bearers” of value to be, oneof the central questions of traditional axiology is that of whatstuffs 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 ofintrinsic value, which is taken tocontrast withinstrumental value. Paradigmatically, money issupposed to be good, but not intrinsically good: it is supposed to begood because it leads to other good things: HD TV’s and housesin desirable school districts and vanilla lattes, for example. Thesethings, in turn, may only be good for what they lead to: exciting NFLSundays and adequate educations and caffeine highs, for example. Andthose things, in turn, may be good only for what they lead to, buteventually, it is argued, something must be good, and not just forwhat it leads to. Such things are said to beintrinsicallygood.

Philosophers’ adoption of the term “intrinsic” forthis distinction reflects a common theory, according to which whateveris non-instrumentally good must be good in virtue of its intrinsicproperties. This idea is supported by a natural argument: if somethingis good only because it is related to something else, the argumentgoes, then it must be its relation to the other thing that isnon-instrumentally good, and the thing itself is good only because itis needed in order to obtain this relation. The premise in thisargument is highly controversial (Schroeder [2005]), and in fact manyphilosophers believe that something can be non-instrumentally good invirtue of its relation to something else. Consequently, sometimes theterm “intrinsic” is reserved for what is good in virtue ofits intrinsic properties, or for the view thatgoodnessitself is an intrinsic property, and non-instrumental value is insteadcalled “telic” or “final” (Korsgaard [1983]).I’ll stick to “intrinsic”, but keep in mind thatintrinsic goodness may not be an intrinsic property, and that what isintrinsically good may turn out not to be so in virtue of itsintrinsic properties.

See the

Supplement on Atomism/Holism about Value

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

Instrumental value is also sometimes contrasted with“constitutive” value. The idea behind this distinction isthat instrumental values leadcausally to intrinsic values,while constitutive valuesamount to intrinsic values. Forexample, my giving you money, or a latte, may causally result in yourexperiencing pleasure, whereas your experiencing pleasure mayconstitute, without causing, your being happy. For manypurposes this distinction is not very important and often not noted,and constitutive values can be thought, along with instrumentalvalues, as things that are ways of getting something of intrinsicvalue. I’ll use “instrumental” in a broad sense, toinclude such values.

2.1.2 What is the Intrinsic/Instrumental Distinction Among?

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

It is sometimes said that consequentialists, since they appeal toclaims about what is goodsimpliciter in their explanatorytheories, are committed to holding that states of affairs are the“primary” bearers of value, and hence are the only thingsof intrinsic value. This is not right. First, consequentialists canappeal in their explanatory moral theory to facts about what state ofaffairs 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 towhich states of affairs are good or badin virtue of therebeing more things of value in them. Moreover, even those who take a“good-first” theory are not really committed to holdingthat it is states of affairs that are intrinsically valuable; statesof affairs are not, after all, something that you can collect more orless of. So they are not really in parallel to pleasure orknowledge.

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

2.2 Monism/Pluralism

One of the oldest questions in the theory of value is that of whetherthere is more than one fundamental (intrinsic) value. Monists say“no”, and pluralists say “yes”. This questiononly makes sense as a question about intrinsic values; clearly thereis more than one instrumental value, and monists and pluralists willdisagree, in many cases, not over whether something is of value, butover whether its value isintrinsic. For example, asimportant as he held the value of knowledge to be, Mill was committedto holding that its value is instrumental, not intrinsic. G.E. Mooredisagreed, holding that knowledge is indeed a value, but an intrinsicone, and this expanded Moore’s list of basic values.Mill’s theory famously has a pluralistic element as well, incontrast with Bentham’s, but whether Mill properly counts as apluralist about value depends on whether his view was that there isonly one value — happiness — but two different kinds ofpleasure which contribute to it, one more effectively than the other,or whether his view was that each kind of pleasure is a distinctivevalue. 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 thisdebate. First is an ontological/explanatory issue. Some monists haveheld that a plural list of values would be explanatorilyunsatisfactory. If pleasure and knowledge are both values, they haveheld, there remains a further question to be asked: why? If thisquestion has an answer, some have thought, it must be because there isa further, more basic, value under which the explanation subsumes bothpleasure and knowledge. Hence, pluralist theories are eitherexplanatorily inadequate, or have not really located the basicintrinsic values.

This argument relies on a highly controversial principle about how anexplanation of why something is a value must work — a verysimilar principle to that which was appealed to in the argument thatintrinsic value must be an intrinsic property [section 2.1.1]. If thisprinciple is false, then an explanatory theory ofwhy bothpleasure and knowledge are values can be offered which does not workby subsuming them under a further, more fundamental value. Reductivetheories ofwhat it is to be a value satisfy thisdescription, and other kinds of theory may do so, as well (Schroeder[2005]). If one of these kinds of theory is correct, then evenpluralists can offer an explanation of why the basic values that theyappeal to are values.

2.2.2 Revisionary Commitments?

Moreover, against the monist, the pluralist can argue that the basicposits to which her theory appeals are notdifferent in kindfrom those to which the monist appeals; they are only different innumber. This leads to the second major issue that is at stakein the debate between monists and pluralists. Monistic theories carrystrong implications about what is of value. Given any monistic theory,everything that is of value must be either the one intrinsic value, orelse must lead to the one intrinsic value. This means that if somethings that are intuitively of value, such as knowledge, do not, infact, always lead to what a theory holds to be the one intrinsic value(for example, pleasure), then the theory is committed to denying thatthese things are really always of value after all.

Confronted with these kinds of difficulties in subsuming everythingthat is pre-theoretically of value under one master value, pluralistsdon’t fret: they simply add to their list of basic intrinsicvalues, and hence can be more confident in preserving thepre-theoretical phenomena. Monists, in contrast, have a choice. Theycan change their mind about the basic intrinsic value and try all overagain, they can work on developing resourceful arguments thatknowledge really does lead to pleasure, or they can bite the bulletand conclude that knowledge is really not, after all, always good, butonly under certain specific conditions. If the explanatory commitmentsof the pluralist are notdifferent in kind from those of themonist, but only different innumber, then it is natural forthe pluralist to think that this kind of slavish adherence to thenumber one is a kind of fetish it is better to do without, if we wantto develop a theory that gets thingsright. This is aperspective that many historical pluralists have shared.

2.2.3 Incommensurability

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

Reasoning like this has led some philosophers to believe thatpluralism is the key to explaining the complexity of real moralsituations and the genuine tradeoffs that they involve. If some thingsreallyare incomparable or incommensurable, they reason, thenpluralism about value could explainwhy. Very similarreasoning has led other philosophers, however, to the view that monismhas to be right: practical wisdom requires being able to makechoices, even in complicated situations, they argue. But that would beimpossible, if the options available in some choice were incomparablein 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 thecomparability of values on which this question hinges. But even if wegrant all of the assumptions on both sides so far, monists have thebetter of these two arguments. Value pluralism may beone wayto obtain incomparable options, but there could be other ways, evenconsistently with value monism. For example, take the interpretationof Mill on which he believes that there is only one intrinsic value— happiness — but that happiness is a complicated sort ofthing, which can happen in each of two different ways — eitherthrough higher pleasures, or through lower pleasures. If Mill has thisview, and holds, further, that it is in some cases indeterminatewhether someone who has slightly more higher pleasures is happier thansomeone who has quite a few more lower pleasures, then he can explainwhy it is indeterminate whether it is better to be the first way orthe second way, without having to appeal to pluralism in his theory ofvalue. The pluralism would be within his theory ofhappiness alone.

See a more detailed discussion in the entry onvalue pluralism.

2.3 Incommensurability/Incomparability

We have just seen that one of the issues at stake in the debatebetween monists and pluralists about value turns on the question(vaguely put) of whether values can be incomparable orincommensurable. This is consequently an area of active dispute in itsown 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 alwaysbe true, for two states of affairs, that things would be better if thefirst obtained than if the second did, that things would be better ifthe second obtained than if the first did, or that things would beequally good if either obtained. The claim that it can sometimeshappen that none of these is true is sometimes referred to as theclaim ofincomparability, in this case as applied to goodsimpliciter. Ruth Chang [2002] has argued that in addition to“better than”, “worse than”, and“equally good”, there is a fourth “positive valuerelation”, which she callsparity. Chang reserves theuse of “incomparable” to apply more narrowly, to thepossibility that in addition to none of the other three relationsholding between them, it is possible that two states of affairs mayfail even to be “on a par”. However, we can distinguishbetweenweak incomparability, defined as above, andstrong incomparability, further requiring the lack of parity,whatever that turns out to be. Since the notion ofparity isitself a theoretical idea about how to account for what happens whenthe other three relations fail to obtain, a question which Iwon’t pursue here, it will be weak incomparability that willinterest us here.

It is important to distinguish the question of whether goodsimpliciter admits of incomparability from the question ofwhethergood for and attributive good admit ofincomparability. Many discussions of the incomparability of valuesproceed at a very abstract level, and interchange examples of each ofthese kinds of value claims. For example, a typical example of apurported incomparability might compare, say, Mozart to Rodin. IsMozart a better artist than Rodin? Is Rodin a better artist thanMozart? Are they equally good? If none of these is the case, then wehave an example of incomparability in attributive good, but not anexample of incomparability in goodsimpliciter. Thesequestions may be parallel or closely related, and investigation ofeach may be instructive in consideration of the other, but they stillneed to be kept separate.

For example, one important argument against the incomparability ofvalue was mentioned in the previous section. It is thatincomparability would rule out the possibility of practical wisdom,because practical wisdom requires the ability to make correct choiceseven in complicated choice situations. Choices are presumably betweenactions, or between possible consequences of those actions. So itcould be that attributive good is sometimes incomparable, becauseneither Mozart nor Rodin is a better artist than the other and theyare not equally good, but that goodsimpliciter is alwayscomparable, so that there is always an answer as to which of twoactions would lead to an outcome that is better.

2.3.2 What Happens when there is Weak Incomparability?

Even once it is agreed that goodsimpliciter is incomparablein this sense, many theories have been offered as to what thatincomparability involves and why it exists. One important constrainton such theories is that they not predict more incomparabilities thanwe really observe. For example, though Rodin may not be a better orworse artist than Mozart, nor equally good, he is certainly a betterartist than Salieri — even though Salieri, like Mozart, is abetter composer than Rodin. This is a problem for the idea thatincomparability can be explained by value pluralism. The argument fromvalue pluralism to incomparability suggested that it would beimpossible to compare any two states of affairs where one containedmore of one basic value and the other contained more of another. Butcases like that of Rodin and Salieri show that the explanation of whatis incomparable between Rodin and Mozart can’t simply be thatsince 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 thecorrect explanation, then Rodin and Salieri would also beincomparable, but intuitively, they are not. Constraints like thesecan narrow down the viable theories about what is going on in cases ofincomparability, and are evidence that incomparability is probably notgoing to be straightforwardly explained by value pluralism.

There are many other kinds of theses that go under the title of theincomparability or incommensurability of values. For example, sometheories which posit lexical orderings are said to commit to“incomparabilities”. Kant’s thesis that rationalagents have a dignity and not a price is often taken to be a thesisabout a kind of incommensurability, as well. Some have interpretedKant to be holding simply that respect for rational agents is ofinfinite value, or that it is to be lexically ordered over the valueof anything else. Another thesis in the neighborhood, however, wouldbe somewhat weaker. It might be that a human life is “aboveprice” in the sense that killing one to save one is not anacceptable exchange, but that for some positive value ofn,killing one to saven would be an acceptable exchange. Onthis 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 higherwhen you are going to take it away, but lower when you are going topreserve it. Such a view would intelligibly count as a kind of“incommensurability”, because it sets no single value onhuman lives.

A more detailed discussion of the commensurability of values can befound in the entry onincommensurable values.

3. Relation to the Deontic

One of the biggest and most important questions about value is thematter of its relation to the deontic — to categories likeright,reason,rational,just, andought. According toteleological views, of whichclassical consequentialism and universalizable egoism are classicexamples, deontic categories are posterior to and to be explained interms of evaluative categories likegood andgoodfor. The contrasting view, according to which deontic categoriesare prior to, and explain, the evaluative categories, is one which, asAristotle 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 relatedcontemporary example.

3.1 Teleology

Teleological theories are not, strictly speaking, theories aboutvalue. They are theories about right action, or about what one oughtto do. But they are committed toclaims about value, becausethey appeal to evaluative facts, in order to explain what is right andwrong, and what we ought to do —deontic facts. Themost obvious consequence of these theories, is therefore thatevaluative 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 isclassical consequentialism, sometimes called (for reasonswe’ll see in section 3.3) “agent-neutralconsequentialism”. According to classical consequentialism,every agent ought always to do whatever action, out of all of theactions available to her at that time, is the one such that if she didit, things would be best. Not all defenders of consequentialisminterpret it in such classical terms; other prominent forms ofconsequentialism focus on rules or motives, and evaluate actions onlyderivatively.

Classical consequentialism is sometimes supported by appeal to theintuition that one should always do the best action, and then theassumption 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 canagree that agents ought always to do the best action. The importantfeature of this claim to recognize is that it is a claim not aboutintrinsic or instrumental value, but about attributive good. And asnoted 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 atorturer someone is does not depend on how good the world is, as aresult of the fact that they exist, how good of an action something isneed not depend on how good the world is, as a result that it happens.Indeed, if it did, then the evaluative standards governing actionswould be quite different from those governing nearly everythingelse.

It is also worth mentioning that much of the literature on what is ofvalue focuses on a theory of well-being or welfare, and involvesdebates about the values that play a role in hedonistic,desire-fulfillment, and objective-list theories of well-being. See theentry onwell-being.

3.1.2 Problems in Principle vs. Problems of Implementation

Classical consequentialism, and its instantiation in the form ofutilitarianism, has been well-explored, and its advantages and costscannot be surveyed here. Many of the issues for classicalconsequentialism, however, are issues for details of its exactformulation or implementation, and not problemsin principlewith its appeal to the evaluative in order to explain the deontic. Forexample, the worry that consequentialism is too demanding has beenaddressed within the consequentialist framework, by replacing“best” with “good enough” — substitutinga “satisficing” conception for a “maximizing”one (Slote [1989]). For another example, problems faced by certainconsequentialist theories, like traditional utilitarianism, aboutaccounting for things like justice can be solved by otherconsequentialist theories, simply by adopting a more generous pictureabout what sort of things contribute to how good things are (Sen[1982]).

In section 3.3 we’ll address one of the most central issuesabout classical consequentialism: its inability to allow foragent-centered constraints. This issuedoes pose anin-principle general problem for the aspiration of consequentialism toexplain deontic categories in terms of the evaluative. For more, seethe entry onconsequentialism and utilitarianism.

3.1.3 Other Teleological Theories

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

Of course, not all teleological theories share the broad features ofconsequentialism and egoism. Classical Natural Law theories (Finnis[1980], Murphy [2001]) are teleological, in the sense that they seekto explain what we ought to do in terms of what is good, but they doso in a very different way from consequentialism and egoism. Accordingto an example of such a Natural Law theory, there are a variety ofnatural values, each of which calls for a certain kind of distinctiveresponse or respect, and agents ought always to act in ways thatrespond to the values with that kind of respect. For more on naturallaw theories, see the entry onthe natural law tradition in ethics. And Barbara Hermann has prominently argued for interpretingKant’s ethical theory in teleological terms. For more onHerman’s interpretation of Kant, see the entry onKant’s Moral Philosophy, especially section 13. Philip Pettit [1997] prominentlydistinguishes between values that we are called to“promote” and those which call for other responses. As Pettit notes, classical consequentialists hold that all values areto be promoted, and one way of thinking of some of these other kindsof teleological theories is that like consequentialism they explainwhat we ought to do in terms of what is good, but unlikeconsequentialism they hold that some kinds of good call for responsesother than promotion. See Anderson [1993] for additional discussion.

3.2 Fitting Attitudes

In contrast to teleological theories, which seek to account fordeontic categories in terms of evaluative ones,FittingAttitudes accounts aspire to explain evaluative categories— like goodsimpliciter,good for, andattributive good — in terms of the deontic. Whereas teleologyhasimplications about value but is not itself a theoryprimarilyabout value, but rather about what is right,Fitting Attitudes accountsare primarily theses about value.In accounting for value in terms of the deontic, Fitting Attitudeaccounts tell us what it is for something to be good. Hence, they aretheories 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”, doesnot mean “able to be desired”. It means, rather, somethinglike “correctly desired” or “appropriatelydesired”. If being good just is being desirable, and beingdesirable just is being correctly or appropriately desired, it followsthat being good just is being correctly or appropriately desired. Butcorrect andappropriate are deontic concepts, so ifbeing good is just being desirable, thengoodness can itselfbe accounted for in terms of the deontic. And that is the basic ideabehind Fitting Attitudes accounts (Ewing [1947], Rabinowicz andRönnow-Rasmussen [2004]).

3.2.1 Two Fitting Attitudes Accounts

Different Fitting Attitudes accounts, however, work by appealing todifferent deontic concepts. Some of the problems facing FittingAttitudes views can be exhibited by considering a couple exemplars.According to a formula from Sidgwick, for example, the good is whatought to be desired. But this slogan is not by itself very helpfuluntil 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 anaccount of goodsimpliciter, saying that it would be good ifp just in case ____ ought to desire thatp, where“____” is filled in by whoever it is, who is supposed tohave the desire? Or is it an account of “value” claims,saying that pleasure is good just in case pleasure ought to be desiredby ____?

The former of these two accounts would fit in with the“good-first” theory from section 1.1.4; the latter wouldfit in with the “value-first” theory. We observed insection 1.1.4 that “value” claims don’t admit ofcomparatives in the same way that other uses of “good” do;this is important here because if “better” simpliciter isprior to “good” simpliciter, then strictly speaking a“good-first” theorist needs to offer a Fitting Attitudesaccount of “better”, rather than of “good”.Such a modification of the Sidgwickian slogan might say that it wouldbe better ifp than ifq just in case ____ ought todesire thatp more than thatq (or alternatively, topreferp toq).

InWhat We Owe to Each Other, T.M. Scanlon offered aninfluential contemporary view with much in common with FittingAttitudes accounts, which he called theBuck-Passing theoryof value. According to Scanlon’s slogan, “to callsomething valuable is to say that it has other properties that providereasons for behaving in certain ways with respect to it.” Oneimportant difference from Sidgwick’s view is that it appeals toa different deontic concept:reasons instead ofought. But it also aspires to be more neutral thanSidgwick’s slogan on the specific response that is called for.Sidgwick’s slogan required that it isdesire that isalways relevant, whereas Scanlon’s slogan leaves open that theremay be different “certain ways” of responding to differentkinds of values.

But despite these differences, the Scanlonian slogan shares with theSidgwickian slogan the feature of being massively underspecified. Forwhich sense of “good” does it aspire to providean 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 tounderstand it as, at bottom, an account of “better than”?And crucially, which are the “certain ways” that areinvolved? It can’t just be that the speaker has to have somecertain ways in mind, because there are some ways of responding suchthat reasons to respond in that way are evidence that the thing inquestion isbad rather than that it is good — forexample, the attitude ofdread. So does the theory requirethat there is some particular set of certain ways, such that a thingis good just in case there are reasons to respond to it in any ofthose ways? Scanlon’s initial remarks suggest ratherthat for each sort of thing, there are different “certainways” such that when we say thatthat thing is good, weare saying that there are reasons to respond to it in those ways. Thisis a matter that would need to be sorted out by any worked outview.

A further complication with the Scanlonian formula, is that appealingin the analysis to the bare existential claim that therearereasons to respond to something in one of these “certainways” faces large difficulties. Suppose, for example, that thereis some reason to respond in one of the “certain ways”,but there are competing, and weightier, reasons not to, so that allthings considered, responding in any of the “certain ways”would be a mistake. Plausibly, the thing under consideration shouldnot turn out to be good in such a case. So even a view likeScanlon’s, which appeals to reasons, may need, once it is morefully developed, to appeal to specific claims about theweight of those reasons.

3.2.2 The Wrong Kind of Reason

Even once these kinds of questions are sorted out, however, othersignificant questions remain. For example, one of the famous problemsfacing such views is theWrong Kind of Reasons problem (Crisp[2000], Rabinowicz and Rönnow-Rasmussen [2004]). The problemarises from the observation that intuitively, some factors can affectwhat you ought to desire without affecting what is good. It may betrue that if we make something better, then other things being equal,you ought to desire it more. But we can also createincentives for you to desire it, without making it anybetter. For example, you might be offered a substantial financialreward for desiring something bad, or an evil demon might (credibly)threaten to kill your family unless you do so. If these kinds ofcircumstances can affect what you ought to desire, as is at leastintuitively plausible, then they will be counterexamples to viewsbased on the Sidgwickian formula. Similarly, if these kinds ofcircumstances can give youreasons to desire the thing whichis bad, then they will be counterexamples to views based on theScanlonian formula. It is in the context of the Scanlonian formulathat this issue has been called the “Wrong Kind ofReasons” problem, because if these circumstances do give youreasons to desire the thing that is bad, they are reasons of the wrongkind to figure in a Scanlon-style account of what it is to begood.

This issue has recently been the topic of much fruitful investigation,and investigators have drawn parallels between the kinds of reason todesire that are provided by these kinds of “external”incentives and familiar issues about pragmatic reasons for belief andthe kind of reason to intend that exists in Gregory Kavka’sToxin Puzzle (Hieronymi [2005]). Focusing on the cases of desire,belief, and intention, which are all kinds of mental state, some haveclaimed that the distinction between the “right kind” and“wrong kind” of reason can be drawn on the basis of thedistinction between “object-given” reasons, which refer tothe 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 raisedabout whether the “object-given”/“state-given”distinction is general enough to really explain the distinctionbetween reasons of the right kind and reasons of the wrong kind, andit has even been disputed whether the distinction tracks anything atall.

One reason to think that the distinction may not be general enough, isthat situations very much like Wrong Kind of Reasons situations canarise even where no mental states are in play. For example, games aresubject to norms of correctness. External incentives to cheat —for example, a credible threat from an evil demon that she will killyour family unless you do so — can plausibly not only provideyou with reasons to cheat, but make it the case that you ought to. Butjust as such external incentives don’t make it appropriate orcorrect to desire something bad, they don’t make it a correctmove of the game to cheat (Schroeder [2010]). If this is right, andthe right kind/wrong kind distinction among reasons really does arisein a broad spectrum of cases, including ones like this one, it is notlikely that a distinction that only applies to reasons for mentalstates is going to lie at the bottom of it.

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

3.2.4 Application to the Varieties of Goodness

One significant attraction to Fitting Attitudes-style accounts, isthat they offer prospects of being successfully applied to attributivegood andgood for, as well as to goodsimpliciter(Darwall [2002], Rönnow-Rasmussen [2009], Suikkanen [2009]). Justas reasons to prefer one state of affairs to another can underwriteone state of affairs being better than another, reasons to choose onecan-opener over another can underwrite its being a better can openerthan the other, and reasons to prefer some state of affairsforsomeone’s sake can underwrite its being better for thatperson than another. For example, here is a quick sketch of what anaccount might look like, which accepts the good-first theory fromsection 1.1.4, holds as in section 1.1.2 that goodsimpliciter is a special case of attributive good, andunderstands attributive “good” in terms of attributive“better” and “good for” in terms of“better for”:

Attributive better: For all kindsK, andthingsA andB, forA to be a betterK thanB is for the set of all of the right kind ofreasons to chooseA overB when selecting aK to be weightier than the set of all of the right kind ofreasons to chooseB overA when selecting aK.

Better for: For all thingsA,B,andC,A is better forC thanB isjust in case the set of all of the right kind of reasons to chooseA overB onC’s behalf is weightierthan the set of all of the right kind of reasons to chooseBoverA onC’s behalf.

If being a goodK is just being a betterK than most(in some comparison class), and “it would be good ifp” just means thatp‘s obtaining is agood state of affairs, and value claims like “pleasure isgood” just mean that other things being equal, it is better forthere to be more pleasure, then this pair of accounts has the rightstructure to account for the full range of “good” claimsthat we have encountered. But it also shows how the various senses of“good” are related, and allows that even attributive goodandgood for have, at bottom, a common shared structure. Sothe prospect of being able to offer such a unified story about whatthe various senses of “good” have in common, though notthe exclusive property of the Fitting Attitudes approach, isnevertheless one of its attractions.

3.3 Agent-Relative Value?

3.3.1 Agent-Centered Constraints

The most central, in-principle problem for classical consequentialismis the possibility of what are calledagent-centeredconstraints (Scheffler [1983]). It has long been a traditionalobjection to utilitarian theories that because they place no intrinsicdisvalue on wrong actions like murder, they yield the prediction thatif you have a choice between murdering and allowing two people to die,it is clear that you should murder. After all, other things beingequal, the situation is stacked 2-to-1 — there are two deaths onone side, but only one death on the other, and each death is equallybad.

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

But the problem is very closely related to a genuine problem forconsequentialism. What if you could prevent two murders by murdering?Postulating an intrinsic disvalue to murders does nothing to accountfor the intuition that you still ought not to murder, even in thiscase. But most people find it pre-theoretically natural to assume thateven if you should murder in order to prevent thousands of murders,you shouldn’t do it in order to prevent just two. The constraintagainst murdering, on this natural intuition, goes beyond the ideathat murders are bad. It requires that the badness of your own murdersaffects what you should do more than it affects what others should doin 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 beno single natural way of evaluating outcomes that yields all of theright predictions. For each agent, there is some way of evaluatingoutcomes that yields the right predictions about what she ought to do,but these rankings treat that agent’s murders as contributingmore to the badness of outcomes than other agents’ murders. Soas a result, anincompatible ranking of outcomes appears tobe required in order to yield the right predictions about what someother agent ought to do — namely, one which rateshismurders as contributing more to the badness of outcomes than the firstagent’s murders. (The situation is slightly more complicated— Oddie and Milne [1991] prove that under pretty minimalassumptions there is alwayssome agent-neutral ranking thatyields the right consequentialist predictions, but their proof doesnot show that this ranking has any independent plausibility, and Nair[2014] argues that it cannot be an independently plausible account ofwhat is a better outcome.)

As a result of this observation, philosophers have postulated a thingcalledagent-relative value. The idea of agent-relative valueis that if thebetter than relation is relativized toagents, then outcomes in which Franz murders can beworse-relative-to Franz than outcomes in which Jens murders,even though outcomes in which Jens murders are worse-relative-to Jensthan outcomes in which Franz murders. These contrasting rankings ofthese two kinds of outcomes are not incompatible, because each isrelativized to a different agent — the former to Franz, and thelatter to Jens.

The idea of agent-relative value is attractive to teleologists,because it allows a view that is very similar in structure toclassical consequentialism to account for constraints. According tothis view, sometimes calledAgent-Relative Teleology orAgent-Centered Consequentialism, each agent ought always todo what will bring about the results that are best-relative-to her.Such a view can easily accommodate an agent-centered constraint not tomurder, on the assumption that each agent’s murders aresufficiently worse-relative-to her than other agent’s murdersare (Sen [1983], Portmore [2007]).

Some philosophers have claimed that Agent-Relative Teleology is noteven a distinct theory from classical consequentialism, holding thatthe word “good” in English picks out agent-relative valuein 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 whatwill have the best-relative-to-her results” (Smith [2003]). Andother philosophers have suggested that Agent-Relative Teleology issuch 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 ofwhat 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 thingas agent-relative value in the first place. Agent-RelativeTeleologists typically appeal to a distinction between agent-relativeand agent-neutral value, but others have contested that no one hasever 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 dealwith all intuitive cases of constraints, because common sense allowsthat you ought not to murder, even in order to preventyourself from murdering twice in the future. In order to dealwith such cases, “good” will need to be relativized notjust to agents, but totimes (Brook [1991]). Yet a furthersource of difficulties arises for views according to which“good” in English is used to make claims aboutagent-relative value in a context-dependent way; such views failordinary tests for context-dependence, and don’t always generatethe readings of sentences which their proponents require.

One of the motivations for thinking that there must be such a thing asagent-relative value comes from proponents of Fitting Attitudesaccounts of value, and goes like this: if the good is what ought to bedesired, then there will betwo kinds of good. What ought tobe desired by everyone will be the “agent-neutral” good,and what ought to be desired by some particular person will be thegood relative-to that person. Ancestors of this idea can be found inSidgwick and Ewing, and it has found a number of contemporaryproponents. Whether it is right will turn not only on whether FittingAttitudes accounts turn out to be correct, but on what role the answerto the questions, “who ought?” or “whosereasons?” plays in the shape of an adequate Fitting Attitudesaccount. All of these issues remain unresolved.

The questions of whether there is such a thing as agent-relativevalue, and if so, what role it might play in an agent-centered varianton classical consequentialism, are at the heart of the debate betweenconsequentialists and deontologists, and over the fundamental questionof the relative priority of the evaluative versus the deontic. Theseare large and open questions, but as I hope I’ve illustratedhere, they are intimately interconnected with a very wide range ofboth traditional and non-traditional questions in the theory of value,broadly construed.

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