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 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.