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Absolute Goodness Defended

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper I will use these expressions interchangeably.

  2. Thomson’s term

  3. Thomson’s term

  4. Thomson talks about predicative and attributive adjectives but, as the anonymous reviewer of this paper rightly notes, it would be more accurate to talk about predicative and attributive uses or readings or occurrences of adjectives since as we will see shortly, there are adjectives that can be read both attributively and predicatively given the context of the sentences in which they occur. Accordingly, in the following parts of this paper I will try to talk about attributive or predicative uses or readings or occurrences of adjectives rather than attributive or predicative adjectives. I thank the anonymous reviewer for bringing this point to my attention.

  5. For an example of a philosopher who raises a variant of this objection see Sinnott-Armstrong (2003). Also see the references of A&H (2015).

  6. A&H's argument has another premise (P5) that jointly with (C1) entail the conclusion (C2) to the effect that standard consequentialism is false.

  7. For more on this theory see the references in Byrne (2016).

  8. For more on this subject see the references of Byrne (2016).

  9. Examples I gave here of the upper closed and lower closed scales are from Kennedy (2007). The examples Byrne himself provides are mistaken. The example he gives of an adjective with an upper closed scale is “straight” but as is asserted in Kennedy (2007), the scale associated with “straight” is a lower closed one; it measures bend and things can have no bend at all, and thus be straight, while there is no limit to how much bendy something can be. The example he gives of a lower closed scale is the scale measuring cost. Again, as Kennedy (2007) explicitly notes, the scale measuring cost, which is associated with the antonym pair adjectives “expensive”/”inexpensive”, is an open scale. There is no limit to how much low the cost of something is. We denote the property of having zero cost with the non-gradable adjective “free” and accordingly, the property of having zero cost has nothing to do with the scale measuring cost (Kennedy 2007, pp. 34-5).

  10. I thank the anonymous reviewer for helping me see this worry.

  11. I say “meagre” since one example hardly justifies a general statement like (I)-2

  12. Peace (2017) also makes this objection to A&H. see Peace (2017, p. 2995).

  13. Philosophical contemplation is an example I have borrowed from Wolf (2010)

  14. For example, see Rowland (2016).

  15. An anonymous referee suggests that maybe the attribution of goodness in this example is not the attribution of the first order property of absolute goodness. Rather, it is the attribution of a second order property that indicates the existence of good reasons for God’s act of annihilating the Nazis. I don’t think this possibility is threatening to my argument though. For my purposes in this paper, absolute goodness can be a buck passing, second order property that actions or objects come to possess in virtue of having certain other properties that give people or agents reasons for having certain attitudes towards them. Even if this is the case, we can still hold that the term “good” does have a predicative occurrence in sentences such as “that the Nazis perished was a good outcome of a war” and can be used to refer to this buck passing, second order property of goodness. Providing a comprehensive account of the nature of absolute goodness is beyond the scope of this paper.

  16. I thank the anonymous referee who made this point and pressed me to address it in more detail.

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Acknowledgement

I thank the Institute of Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) for supporting my PhD studies and my research. I also thank the professors, researchers, and students of the School of Analytic Philosophy in IPM for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The anonymous reviewers of The Journal of Value Inquiry made a lot of valuable comments on early drafts of this paper and I am grateful to them. Above all, I am grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Amir Saemi, for his guidance and very insightful comments on my work and on this paper.

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  1. University of Religions and Denominations, Qom, Iran

    Seyyed Abbas Kazemi

  2. School of Analytic philosophy, Institute of Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Niavaran Square, Tehran, Iran

    Seyyed Abbas Kazemi

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Kazemi, S.A. Absolute Goodness Defended. J Value Inquiry (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-023-09947-4

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