The Subjectivity of Value

"This book is a sustained attack on the claim that values are objective, in the world independent of people's attitudes. It evaluates this claim in different value domains: moral, personal or prudential, aesthetic, general evaluative. The first section greatly expands on J. L. Mackie's appeal to moral disagreement and the queerness of moral properties. I argue via examples that fundamental moral disagreements are irresolvable, that the arguments on both sides are a standoff, and that an objectivist has no plausible explanation of why one side would be mistaken. The last chapter of this section argues that objective value properties would be very strange not in being intrinsically motivating (as Mackie claimed), but in giving rise to intransitive orderings and strange variations (from Temkin). In the second section I consider objective list accounts of personal well-being. I argue that instances of the usual items on such lists, such as knowledge, are not all good for all people, that properly narrowing their descriptions requires appeal to people's attitudes, and that other things that are intrinsically good for only some people, such as tennis, cannot fit such lists"-- Provided by publisher.