Abstract

These distinctions make it possible to comprehend within one coherent value-philosophy what otherwise seem incommensurate: the timeless, immutable facts about values known through eide and the often radically mutable, actual and quasi-real-values themselves. ;Far from necessitating the separation of values from beings, the distinctions made in this dissertation between the various value-phenomena, as well as the delineation of the characteristics of each and their interrelations, constitute strong and multifaceted evidence for the fundamental and unbreakable unity of actual and quasi-real-values with those beings whose values they are. ;However, these philosophers seem to have in mind not actual or quasi-real-values, but the eide of certain virtues and qualities, through which man can discover facts about actual or quasi-real-values that realizations of those eide necessarily must have. Because neither these eide nor the facts about value known through them are a kind of importance-in-itself, ontological conclusions about them do not apply to "value" understood as a kind of importance-in-itself. ;But man can turn completely away from actual or quasi-real-values of Goods and still discover values such as justice, courage, devotion, etc., which are not at all consequential predicates of beings, but are unchangeable, existing in an absolute hierarchy, unaffected by mutability of contingent beings. These values seem not merely distinct, but actually separate from real beings--a fact which has led some philosophers to hold that values are separate from beings. ;Fictional beings also have importance-in-itself, but it differs so essentially from actual value that it merits its own name: quasi-real-value. Although they are related to Goods in ways fundamentally different from actual values, quasi-real-values nonetheless are grounded in Goods and are inseparable from them. ;Actual values are values borne directly by real beings. They are distinct, sui generis consequential predicates, each of a specific kind and rank, not reducible to each other, to neutral qualities, or to the beings which have them. Still, actual values are inseparable from the beings which have them, arising necessarily from those beings because of what the beings are in themselves--a fact which justifies calling those beings "Goods." ;Building on certain insights of G. E. Moore into the irreducibility of values, as well as on Dietrich von Hildebrand's analysis of value as a kind of importance-in-itself, the dissertation then distinguishes various "modes of being" of the importance-in-itself of value. ;This dissertation considers the nature and implications of the distinction between values and the beings which have them. Because emotivism is commonly seen as the necessary consequence of this distinction, the dissertation first investigates value-language, showing that contrary to the emotivist claims, value-language not only is not simply a manifestation of feelings; it actually constitutes strong, although not conclusive evidence for the reality of values as qualities of beings