Abstract

In Part One of this dissertation I imagine an agent who is omniscient in the domain of theoretical reason in order to explore whether such an agent could confront open questions about the value of his options, whether there exists a distinct form of rationality applicable to evaluative questions, and whether we can plausibly deny that evaluative reasoning ever arrives at true conclusions. I argue that our ability to engage in evaluative reasoning supports the moral realist claim that there exist truths about the intrinsic value of outcomes. I also describe how a moral realist can counter several of the epistemological and ontological objections that have traditionally bedeviled the realist position. ;Whereas Part One concludes that rationality is applicable to some evaluative questions, Part Two argues that rationality is applicable to all such questions, for the value of one option is never objectively incomparable to the value of another option. We often find it difficult to compare the value of two options but we cannot conclude from this that the value of one option is neither greater than nor less than nor equal to the value of another option. Objective incommensurability is ruled out by our ability to compare the value of an option that has a large amount of one sort of value to the value of an option that has a very small amount of a quite different sort of value. ;The dissertation covers a lot of ground, but there are three places where I stop skimming over the terrain and drill down into the recent literature. In three chapters I give close scrutiny to Michael Smith's work on moral motivation, John Broome's work on incommensurability, and Thomas Nagel's work on agent-relative values. A closing section briefly describes the role of evaluative reasoning in psychological development and examines philosophical counseling as a non-institutional context for evaluative inquiry