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51Reasons and Two Kinds of FactIn Sliwinski Rysiek & Svensson Frans (eds.), Neither/Nor - Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Erik Carlson on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday, Uppsala Philosophical Studies. 2011.Reasons are facts, i.e., they are constituted by facts. Given a popular view that conceives of facts as thin abstract rather than thick concrete entities, the dichotomy between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons is not particularly problematic. It is argued that it would be preferable if we could understand the dichotomy even if we had a thick noton of fact in mind. It would be preferable because it is better if our notion of a reason is consistent with a wider rather than narrower set of …Read more
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39Reasons and two kinds of factNeither/nor-Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Erik Carlson on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday 58. 2011.The much endorsed idea that reasons are facts, gives raise to several issues, not least when it is applied to the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons. The paper distinguish in broad terms between two important views on the nature of facts. Given in particular a view that conceives of facts as abstract entities, the dichotomy is not particularly problematic. We might run into problems when it comes to identifying which facts are reasons and which are not, but the very dic…Read more
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70Particularism and principlesTheoria 65 (2-3): 114-126. 1999.Jonathan Dancy argues in his book Moral Reasons that neither general nor specific moral principles are of any important use in moral decision making. I examine his reasons for denying any important role to such principles. With regard to general moral principles, I suggest that there are such principles that appear useful ‐ an idea that Dancy in some passages actually seems to endorse. When it comes to highly specific principles, Dancy's advice is less open to interpretation; since such principl…Read more
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136Hedonism, preferentialism, and value bearersJournal of Value Inquiry 36 (4): 463-472. 2002.While hedonism has been subjected to much criticism over the years, it is still a widely endorsed axiological view. One objection that appears to be generally recognised as especially troublesome to hedonists is that their central claim, that final value accrues only to experiences of pleasure gives us a narrow view of value. Much more than pleasure is valuable for its own sake. A competing theory, preferentialism, is another widespread theory about value. According to one version of preferentia…Read more
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122Analysing Personal ValueThe Journal of Ethics 11 (4): 405-435. 2007.It is argued that the so-called fitting attitude- or buck-passing pattern of analysis may be applied to personal values too if the analysans is fine-tuned in the following way: An object has personal value for a person a, if and only if there is reason to favour it for a’s sake. One benefit with it is its wide range: different kinds of values are analysable by the same general formula. Moreover, by situating the distinguishing quality in the attitude rather than the reason part, the analysis adm…Read more
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102Stephen Darwall, Welfare and Rational Care, Princeton Monographs in Philosophy, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. 135 pp (review)SATS 5 (1): 171-180. 2004.
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158Normative reasons and the agent-neutral/relative dichotomyPhilosophia 37 (2): 227-243. 2008.The distinction between the agent-relative and the agent-neutral plays a prominent role in recent attempts to taxonomize normative theories. Its importance extends to most areas in practical philosophy, though. Despite its popularity, the distinction remains difficult to get a good grip on. In part this has to do with the fact that there is no consensus concerning the sort of objects to which we should apply the distinction. Thomas Nagel distinguishes between agent-neutral and agent-relative val…Read more
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17Ett problem för Hares supervenienstesSATS 5 (2): 47-58. 2004.The supervenience thesis about value customarily expresses two intuitions: (i) that there is some kind of dependence between the value and the natural properties of the value bearer; (ii) that if you assert that x is valuable and if you agree that y is relevantly similar to x, with regard to natural properties, you must be prepared to assert that y too is valuable. R M Hare’s account of supervenience is problematic since it only expresses (ii) but not (i). A solution to this problem is outlined,…Read more
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340A distinction in value: Intrinsic and for its own sakeProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (1). 2000.The paper argues that the final value of an object-i.e., its value for its own sake-need not be intrinsic. Extrinsic final value, which accrues to things (or persons) in virtue of their relational rather than internal features, cannot be traced back to the intrinsic value of states that involve these things together with their relations. On the contrary, such states, insofar as they are valuable at all, derive their value from the things involved. The endeavour to reduce thing-values to state-v…Read more
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256Buck-passing and the right kind of reasonsPhilosophical Quarterly 56 (222). 2006.The ‘buck-passing’ account equates the value of an object with the existence of reasons to favour it. As we argued in an earlier paper, this analysis faces the ‘wrong kind of reasons’ problem: there may be reasons for pro-attitudes towards worthless objects, in particular if it is the pro-attitudes, rather than their objects, that are valuable. Jonas Olson has recently suggested how to resolve this difficulty: a reason to favour an object is of the right kind only if its formulation does not inv…Read more
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199Intrinsic and Extrinsic ValueIn Iwao Hirose & Jonas Olson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory, Oxford University Press Usa. 2015.Section 2.1 identifies three notions of intrinsic value: the finality sense understands it as value for its own sake, the supervenience sense identifies it with value that depends exclusively on the bearer’s internal properties, and the nonderivative sense describes intrinsic value as value that provides justification for other values and is not justified by any other value. A distinction between final intrinsic and final extrinsic value in terms of supervenience is subsequently introduced. Sect…Read more
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82Dislodging Butterflies from the SupervenientThe Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 9 103-112. 2006.Applied to evaluative properties the supervenience thesis is customarily understood as expressing two intuitions: (i) the idea that there is some kind of dependence between the (supervenient) value of an object and some (or all) of the natural properties of the object; (ii) the idea that if you assert that x is valuable and if you agree that y is relevantly similar to x, with regard to natural properties, you must be prepared to assert that y too is valuable. It is argued that the influential ac…Read more