‘Sake’
‘Sake’ tackles some problems to which the book’s analysis of Final Goodness and Final goodness-for gives rise. A core issue concerns how to understand the so-called sake-attitudes. The idiom ‘for someone’s sake’ plays a central role in the explanation of the distinction between impersonal and personal values—that is, between what is valuable (or good), period, and what is valuable (or good) for someone. There is a simple, in many ways naïve, objection to the involvement of ‘sake’ in the analysis. According to this, the ‘untranslatability objection’, the word ‘sake’ is, in many languages, untranslatable, and this ought to make us suspicious of its use in an analysis of ‘good for’. The objection is rejected, though. ‘Sake’ also identifies an ambiguity in fitting-attitude analysis (FA) deriving from the fact that ‘sake’ may be used either evaluatively or non-evaluatively (descriptively). This chapter culminates in a discussion of how ‘sake’ should be interpreted in FA analysis.