From Valuing to Value: A Defense of Subjectivism
David Sobel - Oxford University Press, 2016
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| Anteprima |
Subjective
accounts of well-being and reasons for action have a remarkable
pedigree. The idea that normativity flows from what an agent cares
about-that something is valuable because it is valued-has appealed to a
wide range of great thinkers. But at the same time this idea has seemed
to many of the best minds in ethics to be outrageous or worse, not least
because it seems to threaten the status of morality. Mutual
incomprehension looms over the discussion. From Valuing to Value,
written by an influential former critic of subjectivism, owns up to the
problematic features to which critics have pointed while arguing that
such criticisms can be blunted and the overall view rendered defensible.
In this collection of his essays David Sobel does not shrink from
acknowledging the real tension between subjective views of reasons and
morality, yet argues that such a tension does not undermine
subjectivism. In this volume the fundamental commitments of subjectivism
are clarified and revealed to be rather plausible and well-motivated,
while the most influential criticisms of subjectivism are
straightforwardly addressed and found wanting.
