Abstract
Consider the utterances ‘our friendship is valuable’ and ‘I value our friendship’. On the face of it, these aren’t semantic equivalents: the former ascribes a property to our friendship, whereas the latter reports something about how I relate to our friendship. In this short paper, I first outline Samuel Scheffler’s account of valuing and of the difference between valuing and considering valuable. I then propose an amendment to his account of valuing, one which concerns how we interact with our value-related emotions. Subsequently, I argue against Scheffler’s view of the distribution of valuing and (merely) considering valuable in the world. While I don’t deny that considering valuable without valuing is conceptually possible and indeed instantiated, I disagree that it’s typical within our evaluative lives. Next, I consider an obvious response to my empirical claim and sketch a dilemma which accompanies that response. Finally, I highlight two limits of my empirical claim.
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Notes
Cognitivists, at least, are free to accept this appearance. Insofar as non-cognitivists deny a place for genuine assertions in our evaluative discourse, they’re under pressure to construe the former utterance in terms of the latter.
This is an example of an ostensible local conceptual limit on how much we can value, given the character of a particular kind of thing, namely a hobby. An outstanding question – to which I’m inclined to answer ‘no’ – is whether there’s a global conceptual limit on how much we can value, a limit inherent in the nature of valuing.
Note, the buck-passing account doesn’t imply that substantive, lower-order properties must be natural rather than non-natural. So even if beauty, say, is a non-natural property, it can be reason-giving on Scanlon’s proposal (Stratton-Lake and Hooker 2006: 152).
Indeed, this would seem to be an example which supports normative judgment or normative motivational externalism, roughly the thesis that one can judge something reason-giving without being at all motivated to act as those putative reasons specify (Svavarsdóttir 1999; Shafer-Landau 2000). Moreover, I think there are cases of considering valuable without pro-tanto motivation which don’t even involve (obviously) irrational conditions such as phobias. For instance, one might consider snakes or spiders valuable but merely dislike them enough that one would never defer to them in one’s practical deliberations.
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Stanhope, J. Samuel Scheffler on Valuing and Considering Valuable. Philosophia 48, 1609–1616 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00156-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-019-00156-7