McDowell, Williams, and Intuitionism

This paper is concerned with a disagreement between Bernard Williams and John McDowell. It starts by asking what form a dispositional account of value should take. A no-priority view could hold that value is a disposition to elicit a certain response, and the response is to the object as disposed to elicit just that response. But a different no-priority view could talk of meriting a response and responding in the way merited. The response is explained as an instance of things being as they rationally ought to be. The paper debates the merits of such a view, and then turns to ask how much truth there is in the common claim that McDowell is an intuitionist.

Practical Concepts

This paper is a successor to the author’s ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’. It asks first whether all thick concepts have a default valence. It then considers how to account for the combination of the descriptive and the evaluative (which is sometimes called ‘interpenetration’) in a thick concept, and suggests that the so-called ‘no-priority’ view fails to do this. We might also wonder why the descriptive element is not always capable of separate instantiation. Various alternative moves are considered. The paper offers a considerably more varied list of supposedly thick concepts than is normal. It ends by suggesting that thick concepts are evaluative because competence with them involves grasp of their evaluative point.

Mathematical Knowledge and Sentential vs. Subsentential Priority

In this chapter, as in Chapter 7, an example is given that shows how Frege’s lessons can be put to work on contemporary issues. The focus here is on two papers, written by Paul Benacerraf in 1965 and 1973, that are still of concern to many philosophers today. In the first, Benacerraf argues that, although it seems obvious that numbers are objects, in fact numbers cannot be objects. In the second, Benacerraf presents an epistemological puzzle that seems to undermine our claims to have mathematical knowledge—even knowledge of elementary facts about numbers. These puzzles challenge our everyday understanding both of the nature of numbers and of our knowledge about them. In this chapter, it is argued that both puzzles depend on our presupposing the subsentential priority view. And both puzzles, it is argued, vanish once we accept Frege’s sentential priority view.

Reference, the Context Principle, and the Significance of Sentential Priority

Several sections of Basic Laws (§§10, 28–31) appear to offer intrinsically metatheoretic and, indeed, proto-model theoretic proofs. These sections are also notoriously puzzling: the proofs seem obviously incorrect, and it is difficult to understand how Frege could have thought that they worked. In this chapter it is argued that the puzzles in question are artifacts of the Standard Interpretation. They result, in particular, from the assumption that a subsentential expression’s having Bedeutung amounts to its referring to an extra-linguistic entity. The solution to the apparent difficulties is to see that a version of Frege’s context principle—a sentential priority view—is operative even in his later works.

The Context Principle, Sentential Priority, and the Pursuit of Truth

Frege’s attempt to show that arithmetic is a part of logic requires definitions of the numbers. What criteria determine whether his definitions are acceptable? It seems to stand to reason that the definition of, say, the number one must pick out the object to which we have been referring, all along, when we use the numeral “1.” However, Frege does not assume that there are objects to which we have been referring all along when we use numerals. Definitions of the numbers must be, at least in part, stipulative. But how, then, can a science based on Frege’s definitions be our science of arithmetic? The key to answering this question is Frege’s sentential priority view. To be accurate to our arithmetic, Frege’s definition does not need to preserve reference; what they need to preserve is, rather, the truth of sentences expressing the “well known properties of the numbers.”

Telic Priority: Prioritarianism’s Impersonal Value

I develop the recent claim that prioritarianism, and not only its egalitarian competitors, must be committed to an impersonal outcome value (i. e. a value that makes a distribution better even if this does not affect anyone’s welfare). This value, that I label telic priority and that consists in the goodness of benefits going to the worst off recipients, implies implausible judgments that more than compete with ‘pure’ (Parfit) egalitarianism’s applause in leveling down scenarios. ‘Pure prioritarianism’, an axiological theory that would consist in an unqualified commitment to telic priority only, must therefore be developed into a pluralist version of the priority view. Contra Parfit, prioritarianism and egalitarianism are on a par concerning the relationship between their pure (and implausible) formulations and their pluralist (and plausible) versions. The final section explains why telic priority always assigns preference to the worst-off (and not merely to the worse-off).

Children’s Distributive Outcomes: Equality of Opportunity?

In this chapter, I consider the extent to which my account supports equality of opportunity, understood roughly in the Rawlsian sense known as FEO (Fair Equality of Opportunity). FEO seems inconsistent with the priority view defended in Section 2. However, I argue there are powerful reasons of justice to think that justice requires limiting the ability of parents to pass on economic advantages to their children. I show an argument for equalising opportunity flows from my account of children’s wellbeing. I argue that children’s social relations with one another are dependent upon FEO, and in particular that children interact with the world as agents. This means that their lives take the shape they do because of their own actions and abilities.

Priority, Not Equality, of Welfare

In this chapter I consider various possible distributive principles, that assess what a fair distribution of welfare would look like. I reject the principle of distributive equality because equality favours levelling down, making the lives of some people go worse while making no one’s life go better. In place I adopt the priority view, which suggests that the concern of justice should be promoting the welfare of the least advantaged children. I then consider the sufficiency principle, which holds that justice is about securing each person ‘enough’ and is unconcerned with advantages above this threshold. I argue that this sufficiency view should be rejected, even in its more plausible moderate forms, but that it does provide a useful intermediary role in working out what are the implications of prioritarianism.

Pre-emotional Awareness and the Content-Priority View

Much contemporary philosophy of emotion has been in broad agreement about the claim that emotional experiences have evaluative content. This paper assesses a relatively neglected alternative, which I call the content-priority view, according to which emotions are responses to a form of pre-emotional value awareness, as what we are aware of in having certain non-emotional evaluative states which are temporally prior to emotion. I argue that the central motivations of the view require a personal level conscious state of pre-emotional value awareness. However, consideration of extant suggestions for the relevant type of evaluative state shows them all to be problematic. As such, I conclude that at present we do not have a persuasive formulation of the content-priority view, and that to get one defenders of the view need to specify which version they are committed to and defend it against the criticisms raised.

Hierarchy and the Value of Outcomes

Acceptable versions of distributive principles will take status into account, so that an animal at a given level of well-being will, by virtue of its lower status, have a correspondingly weaker distributive claim than would a person at the same level of well-being. This chapter sketches some promising ways of modifying the various distributive principles, making them sensitive to differences in status. The details remain uncertain, however, as the author illustrates by pointing out some problems for the modified version of the priority view. Turning to the question of whether the very value of well-being itself (that is, the contribution it makes to the overall goodness of an outcome) should also depend on status, the author answers in the affirmative. Surprisingly, an appeal to the principle of equal consideration of interests cannot be used to reject this view, on pain of begging the question.