Abstract

The idiom ‘for someone’s sake’ plays a central role in recent attempts to understand the distinction between impersonal values and personal values—e.g. between what is valuable or good, period, and what is valuable for or good for someone. In the first section three historical approaches to this distinction are outlined. Section 2 presents a modified fitting-attitude analysis of final ‘value-for’ interpreting value-for in terms of there being a reason to favour something ‘for someone’s sake’. Section 3 outlines two arguments against this sort of modified analysis, and then indicates what the rejection of these arguments would involve. This section also identifies an ambiguity in the analysis deriving from the fact that ‘sake’ may be used either evaluatively or non-evaluatively. In Section 4, the modified FA analysis is further clarified. Section 5 focuses on Kevin Mulligan’s recent suggestion that we are struck by personal value; finally, in Section 6, it is shown that an FA analysis admitting of two varieties of goodness may help us understand a certain kind of case that appears paradoxical as long as we assume that there is good, period, and no good-for.