Summary |
The general theme of this category is the idea of defining, analyzing or otherwise explaining one kind of evaluative or normative concept or property in terms of another kind of evaluative or normative concept or property. This broad idea is commonly referred to as the fitting attitude account of value, because its early proponents suggested defining value in terms of concepts such as fittingness or correctness of attitudes, e.g., 'x is good' as 'x is a fitting object of a favourable attitude' (Ewing), or 'it is correct to love x' (Brentano). Subsequent accounts used analogous concepts such as 'contemplation of x requires that one favor x' (Chisholm, Lemos). Thomas Scanlon revived this tradition by proposing that x's goodness be understood as the property of having other properties which provide reasons to value x in one or more different ways (admire, care for, protect, etc.). He named his account 'buck-passing' to signal that the property of goodness itself does not provide reasons to value what is good, but 'passes the normative buck' to the other properties which the good thing has and make it good. In this sense the buck-passing account is an intra-normative reductive account of value properties or concepts. The same structure can be applied to other normative notions, e.g. some propose to understand all normative concepts in terms of reasons (or fitting attitudes), including moral ones such as rightness and wrongness. The debate has centered around some difficulties for the fitting attitude/buck-passing account, such as the so called wrong kind of reasons problem (WKR). If a demon orders me to admire a saucer of mud (for its own sake), or else humankind will go extinct, it seems there are very good reasons for me to admire the saucer of mud, but this cannot mean that the saucer of mud is good or valuable (for its own sake). A vast number of papers have contributed by either proposing refinements to the analysis to avoid such counterexamples or by criticizing such refinements. |