Abstract
The idiom ‘for someone’s sake’ plays a central role in recent attempts to understand the distinction between impersonal values and personal values—e.g. between what is valuable or good, period, and what is valuable for or good for someone. In the first section, three historical approaches to this distinction are outlined. Sect. 4.2 presents a modified fitting-attitude (FA) analysis of final ‘value-for’ interpreting value-for in terms of there being a reason to favour something ‘for someone’s sake’. Sect. 4.3 outlines two arguments against this sort of modified analysis, and then indicates what the rejection of these arguments would involve. This section also identifies an ambiguity in the analysis deriving from the fact that ‘sake’ may be used either evaluatively or nonevaluatively (descriptively). In Sect. 4.4, the modified FA analysis is further clarified. Sect. 4.5 focuses on Kevin Mulligan’s recent suggestion that we are struck by personal value; finally, in Sect. 4.6, it is shown that an FA analysis admitting of two varieties of goodness may help us understand a certain kind of case that appears paradoxical as long as we assume that there is good, period, and no good-for.
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Notes
- 1.
For the rest of the chapter, I will refer to the ‘Jubilar’ in a more friendly way as Kevin.
- 2.
Following Scanlon (1998), one version of the FA analysis is called the ‘buck-passing’ account.
- 3.
- 4.
Recall Prichard’s (1928, pp. 21–49) point that Plato regarded even justice as a kind of good-for.
- 5.
The expression ‘person-relative value’ is ambiguous. It might mean that the value is constituted by a certain subject (as a subjectivist would say that is the case with all values), or that it is a value from a certain person’s perspective. However, this is not how it is intended to be understood here. Rather, if something is good for a person, this something carries a person-relative value, but this sort of value is not necessarily only analysable by subjectivists; nor is it goodness only from a certain perspective.
- 6.
Nor is this necessarily a distinction between an ‘objectivist’ and a ‘subjectivist’ approach to value.
- 7.
I would like to stress that there are a number of other reasonable and interesting objections to FAP, but that I will not consider them here.
- 8.
The objection rests on several notions and ideas that stand in need of clarification, and so it is quite likely that it can be criticized for other reasons. For the sake of advancing the discussion, I have set these criticisms aside.
- 9.
I do not have in mind, primarily at any rate, questions about the value-theoretical background of translators: But perhaps it would be an idea to introduce some meta-ethics and formal axiology in the translator curriculum?
- 10.
It should be borne in mind that ‘sake’ expressions are customarily translated into Latin by ‘causa’ or ‘gratia’.
- 11.
Etymologically ‘skull’ is related to ‘orsak’ (cause) as well as to ‘skuld’ (culpability). This is even clearer in Danish, which translates our phrase as follows: ‘For hans skyld’; ‘being guilty’ becomes in Swedish, as well as in Danish, being ‘skyldig’.
- 12.
The complex relationship between good-for and notions such as welfare and wellbeing is examined in Rønnow-Rasmussen (2011).
- 13.
Understanding final values in terms of ‘sake’ is not obviously right, though. Another possibility would perhaps be to have an analysis in terms of ‘favouring something as an end’. However, there are different disadvantages with this suggestion (Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen 2000, pp. 47–48).
- 14.
For example, what is desirable for or commendable for me should perhaps be understood in terms of what there is reason to desire or commend with an eye to what is good for me. Perhaps this is an example. It certainly needs to be further examined.
- 15.
The quote has here the following footnote: ‘On this idea in Scheler and Musil, cf. Mulligan “Selbstliebe, Sympathie, Egoismus”’.
- 16.
Besides the challenge to the FA analysis that I consider here, Bykvist’s article contains other serious challenges meriting full discussion rather than the brief examination I have been able to provide here.
- 17.
The distance problem was pointed out by Blanshard (1961, p. 287). I thank Noah Lemos (personal communication) for pointing this out to me.
- 18.
The Problem, as Bykvist also points out, is in effect a ‘wrong kind of reason’ problem for the analysis.
- 19.
In Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmusen (2004), ‘The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-Attitudes and Value’, we suggested that in the case of favouring something for the right reasons, reasons might in fact have a dual-role. We favour the object on account of some of its properties. They appear in the intentional content of the pro-attitude. At the same time, they are supposed to make the object valuable. Consequently, they also provide reasons for favouring the object. However, the example of the father apparently suggests that there are cases in which the right reasons should not in fact be part of (or, more cautiously, exhaust) the intentional content of the pro-attitude, even if they are value-making properties.
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Acknowledgment
I am indebted to, Roberta Colonna Dahlman, Noah Lemos, Anne Meylan, Hélène Pessah-Rasmussen, Carlo Proietti, Anne Reboul, Paul Robinson, and Wlodek Rabinowicz for beneficial discussions. Financial support from the Swedish Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.
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Rønnow-Rasmussen, T. (2014). For Kevin’s Sake. In: Reboul, A. (eds) Mind, Values, and Metaphysics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05146-8_4
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