scholarly journals Internalism and Prudential Value

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Psychological Response ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Modal Distinction ◽  
Good For

Existence internalism claims that facts about human psychological responsiveness constrain the metaphysics of value in particular ways. Chapter 5 examines whether some form of existence internalism holds for prudential value (as opposed to moral or aesthetic value). It emphasizes the importance of a modal distinction that has been traditionally overlooked. Some facts about personal good are facts about realized good. For example, right now it may be true that X is good for me. Other facts about goodness are facts about what would be good for me in certain possible futures. These are facts about merely possible good. Philosophers should be internalists about realized good. The chapter defends a qualified version of the idea that a necessary constraint on something’s being good for a person at a time is that the thing in question elicits some kind of positive psychological response from the person at that time. However, philosophers should be motivational externalists about merely possible good. Facts about the superior future goodness of an option may ground reasons now to choose it. But we should not expect individuals to always recognize such facts, and so there is no reason to think such facts are always motivating.

Human Flourishing Versus Desire Satisfaction

1999 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Surprising Result ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Desire Satisfaction ◽  
Individual Good ◽  
Helping Others ◽  
Good For

What is the good for human persons? If I am trying to lead the best possible life I could lead, not the morally best life, but the life that is best for me, what exactly am I seeking?This phrasing of the question I will be pursuing may sound tendentious, so some explanation is needed. What is good for one person, we ordinarily suppose, can conflict with what is good for other persons and with what is required by morality. A prudent person seeks her own good efficiently; she selects the best available means to her good. If we call the value that a person seeks when she is being prudent “prudential value,” then an alternative rendering of the question to be addressed in this essay is “What is prudential value?” We can also say that an individual flourishes or has a life high in well-being when her life is high in prudential value. Of course, these common-sense appearances that the good for an individual, the good for other persons, and the requirements of morality often are in conflict might be deceiving. For all that I have said here, the correct theory of individual good might yield the result that sacrificing oneself for the sake of other people or for the sake of a morally worthy cause can never occur, because helping others and being moral always maximize one's own good. But this would be the surprising result of a theory, not something we should presuppose at the start of inquiry. When a friend has a baby and I express a conventional wish that the child have a good life, I mean a life that is good for the child, not a life that merely helps others or merely respects the constraints of morality. After all, a life that is altruistic and perfectly moral, we suppose, could be a life that is pure hell for the person who lives it—a succession of horrible headaches marked by no achievements or attainments of anything worthwhile and ending in agonizing death at a young age. So the question remains, what constitutes a life that is good for the person who is living it?

An Analysis of Prudential Value

Utilitas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEPHEN M. CAMPBELL
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Relationship

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.

Relativism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Craig
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Cultural Group ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Religious Truth ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Good For

Someone who holds that nothing is simply good, but only good for someone or from a certain point of view, holds a relativist view of goodness. Protagoras, with his dictum that ‘man is the measure of all things’, is often taken to be an early relativist. Quite common are relativism about aesthetic value, about truth in particular areas such as religious truth, and (arising from anthropological theory) about rationality. There are also a number of ways of answering the question ‘relative to what?’ Thus something might be said to be relative to the attitudes or faculties of each individual, or to a cultural group, or to a species. Relativism therefore has many varieties; some are very plausible, others verge on incoherence.

The Place of Subjectivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-373
Author(s):  
Christoph Halbig
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Prudential Value ◽  
Good For

Abstract The modern debate on the theory of prudential values is largely structured around the issue of how to accommodate the role of subjectivity: a prudentially good life (unlike, say, a morally good life) seems to be necessarily a life that is good for the person living it. The present article aims at clarifying this crucial role of subjectivity in the ontology of prudential values. It tries to show that this role, rightly understood, can be fully and satisfactorily accounted for by a strong realism in the theory of prudential value. Subjectivist intuitions that prove incompatible with such a realist framework, it is argued, can be convincingly rejected on independent grounds.

Seti Figure of Merit

1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 711-717 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Dreher ◽  
D. Kent Cullers
Keyword(s):  
Figure Of Merit ◽  
Qualitative Difference ◽  
Current Generation ◽  
Detection Range ◽  
Sky Surveys ◽  
Independent Observations ◽  
Good For

AbstractWe develop a figure of merit for SETI observations which is anexplicitfunction of the EIRP of the transmitters, which allows us to treat sky surveys and targeted searches on the same footing. For each EIRP, we calculate the product of terms measuring the number of stars within detection range, the range of frequencies searched, and the number of independent observations for each star. For a given set of SETI observations, the result is a graph of merit versus transmitter EIRP. We apply this technique to several completed and ongoing SETI programs. The results provide a quantitative confirmation of the expected qualitative difference between sky surveys and targeted searches: the Project Phoenix targeted search is good for finding transmitters in the 109to 1014W range, while the sky surveys do their best at higher powers. Current generation optical SETI is not yet competitive with microwave SETI.

Lactamide-MEA Looks Good for Cradle Cap

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (12) ◽  
pp. 53
Author(s):  
SHARON WORCESTER
Keyword(s):  
Good For

PDLs Equally Good for Scar Ablation

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Michele G. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
Good For
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