Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: pluralism and uncertainty
- 2 Openness
- 3 The retreat
- 4 The moral sphere
- 5 Fact and value
- 6 Value experiments
- 7 Virtues, excellences and forms of life
- 8 The fourth dimension
- 9 Aspiration
- 10 Wisdom
- 11 Objective worth
- 12 The Bach crystals
- 13 Human flourishing
- 14 The Faust legend and the mosaic
- 15 The good and the right (I): intuitionism, Kantianism
- 16 The good and the right (II): utilitarianism, consequentialism
- 17 The good and the right (III): contractualism
- 18 Politics, public morality and law: justice, care and virtue
- References
- Index
5 - Fact and value
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: pluralism and uncertainty
- 2 Openness
- 3 The retreat
- 4 The moral sphere
- 5 Fact and value
- 6 Value experiments
- 7 Virtues, excellences and forms of life
- 8 The fourth dimension
- 9 Aspiration
- 10 Wisdom
- 11 Objective worth
- 12 The Bach crystals
- 13 Human flourishing
- 14 The Faust legend and the mosaic
- 15 The good and the right (I): intuitionism, Kantianism
- 16 The good and the right (II): utilitarianism, consequentialism
- 17 The good and the right (III): contractualism
- 18 Politics, public morality and law: justice, care and virtue
- References
- Index
Summary
DIMENSIONS OF VALUE
This chapter and the three following begin the task of situating the argument of Chapters 2–4 in a broader theory of value and eventually in a theory of philosophical inquiry. This task will involve, among other things, considering yet another of Hegel's “sunderings” of modernity cited in Chapter 1 – the sundering of fact from value.
Let us suppose the retreatants of Chapter 3 have gone through all the reasoning of the previous chapters, when skeptical members among them rise to make the following objection.
“We have been talking about being open to other ways of life in order to find the objective truth about values and have learned much in the process. We have arrived at some ethical principles that are shared by many of our respective traditions and have agreed on the conclusion that some ways of life are less worthy than others of our unqualified respect in the sense of openness. But these results cannot be the whole story of what we came here to learn. For suppose we strive to create a moral sphere in which all persons can be treated with openness and in which we are allowed to pursue our ways of life without interference from others. These measures alone would not tell us how we should go about living our lives in other respects. They will not tell us, except in a very general way, what sorts of lives we should live; and so they do not give us a complete answer to the question of what “the good life” is.[…]
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- Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom , pp. 60 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010