The Normative Significance of Human Beings

The chapter addresses classic Moorean challenges to relational value with a focus on worries about normativity. The author rejects the suggestion that personal value—whatever is good for one person but not for another—generates reasons that are only agent-relative—reasons for the beneficiary but not for others. She shows why, as she understands the components of a theory of value, being such as to benefit a person explains why something is of value, and for that reason such as to give reasons that are reasons for all human beings. The argument makes clear why people, who are relationally valuable in a sense she has explained, make ethical demands on one another

Conclusion

At the end of his book-length investigation into treatments of human dignity in the decades surrounding the second world war, a significant period for these discussions, Mark Greif gives voice to a conflicted feeling: I want to tell my contemporaries: Stop! Anytime your inquiries lead you to say, “At this moment we must ask and decide ...

On Valuing and the Good Life

Theunissen develops the emerging positive proposal by specifying that in virtue of which human beings are relationally valuable. Her starting point is that human value depends on the distinctive relationship we bear to objects and activities of value. In her view this is the capacity for having final ends: roughly, the capacity for pursuing interests, projects, relationships, and self-ideals for their own sake. She offers a new account of this complex cognitive, affective and behavioral disposition, and the analysis contributes to discussions of valuing and care. How does the capacity for having final ends ground our value? By identifying connections between valuing and the good life, Theunissen defends the claim that it grounds our value by making us relationally valuable in the sense that it makes us able to lead a good life—a life that is of value, in the first place, for the person who leads it.

Must We Be Absolutely Valuable?

There is an argument according to which something must be absolutely valuable for anything to be of value. The chains of dependence between values must come to an end, and humanity meets the specifications. Theunissen explores alternatives to terminating a regress in absolute value and gives reason to reject the “borrowing” conception of relational value that drives the argument. Theunissen doubts that the non-relational value of humanity can be secured by an argument from the structure of value, but she is optimistic about the prospects for explaining our value relationally, and gives reason to favor a reflexive relational model.

Common Humanity

The author confronts the unavoidable topic of “speciesism,” and the questions about grounding, and about the scope of an account of the value of humanity, to which it gives rise. The author rejects the view that there is something distinctive about all and only human beings which justifies our special moral status. Instead, proposing to account for the value that is typical of human beings, she argues that we are one among other bearers of value that give rise to reasons to be treated in certain ways and not others. The author defends a value-based approach to practical reason, and by working through various distinctions in goodness, she outlines the components of a theory of the value of humanity.

Introduction

The aim of this book is to develop a positive account of the value of human beings. This involves thinking about the nature of value itself. Following Judith Jarvis Thomson, when we say of something that it is “of value” we mean that it has some property that makes it reason-giving. Theunissen takes the humanist position that the relevant property is being such as to contribute to the quality of the life of human beings (or individuals more generally), and she explores the implications for the value of human beings themselves. The author situates her proposal between absolutist and eliminativist positions—between views that see human beings as absolutely valuable, and views that deny that there is a meaningful sense in which human beings are bearers of value at all.

Of Absolute and Relative Worth

Theunissen explores Kant’s legacy. As she reads him, a crucial dimension of Kant’s view that human beings are absolutely valuable is that human beings are of value independently of the good they do or stand to do. Absolute value is importantly a benefit-independent form of worth. The author brings out Kant’s significant departure from ancient (and in particular Socratic) conceptions of value according to which there is a conceptual connection between goodness (or value) and benefit. The author uncovers the sense in which contemporary readers are likely to inherit Kant’s elision of benefit with instrumental value, something that is regarded as a lowly and even morally worrisome form of worth. She gives reason to resist this identification.