Topic 15.

Value Judgements

1. In most of the discussions so far we have, as far as possible, avoided reference to values. When considering choice, however, it became impossible to do so; choice implies value. For anybody to choose, there must be identified options, an assumption of predictable outcomes and a preference for one such outcome over all others. We should, therefore, before moving on to consider moral questions (which plainly must invoke values), examine whether, and if so in what way, value-judgements - judgements that one situation is preferable to (or intrinsically superior to) another - are different from `ordinary' judgements.

a. Plainly there are prima-facie differences. Compare

    i) This seat is hard/there is a young man across the street/his wife is very fat - with

    ii) this seat is uncomfortable/the young man across the street is handsome/his wife is too fat.

There seems to be a degree of subjectivity about the second group which is not apparent in the first group. Being hard, or young or across the street or fat are all things that are quite simply demonstrable. If people disagree, they can look again and, presumably, be able to decide by the appearance presented to them who is right and who is wrong. But comfort has to be somebody's comfort (different people noticeably choose different chairs); handsome-ness is `in the eye of the beholder'; being very fat is not necessarily being too fat - `too' implies rejection or disapproval and some people (Rubens for instance) have admired very fat women.

We might say that, whilst these are things that people can, and do, argue about, there is no obvious court of appeal for settling the arguments. Where values are involved, people often feel that they must simply agree to differ.

Not uncommonly people acknowledge this by asserting that ordinary judgements (about what is or is not so) are matters of fact but value-judgements are merely matters of opinion - with the assumed implication that these cannot, therefore, be right or wrong. But this is a very strange claim when we think about it: what kind of judgement could it be that cannot be right or wrong?

b. Here think of the discussion of `reason' and `cause' in Topic 14, 1. a): although these terms `fit naturally' into different contexts they are, nevertheless quite interchangeable; there are not two different concepts involved. And the same applies to `opinion' and `belief'. We tend to describe as our opinions those of our beliefs which we do not expect everybody else to agree with, indeed, which we are unwilling, or feel ourselves to be unable, to persuade other people about. But all beliefs are some individual person's beliefs (which other people may or may not agree with) and if an opinion is not a belief, what in Heaven's name could it be? Whether or not Brown believes that X is so is totally irrelevant to whether or not Jones believes that X is so, or, indeed, to whether X is so.

Look again at the verifiability criterion of intelligibility: unless Jones is aware, in straightforward perceptual terms, of what would count as his belief being right and what would count as its being wrong, there simply isn't anything for him to believe. Beliefs are that particular possibilities are actualities and, however we may choose to use the word `opinion', we cannot hold an opinion without - a. believing ourselves to be right (about the actuality) and b. being either right or wrong (about the actuality).

Since such assertions as `This chair is uncomfortable' and `She is too fat' are plainly intelligible - are used in quite effective communication - then there must be some state of affairs, observable by normal processes, which does count as their being right - i.e. true propositions. And we must here remember that nothing can be true for Brown but not true for Jones. A proposition which is true just is true whether anybody knows this or not.

But we can't deny that there is a difference between judgements like `He is a young man' and `He is a handsome man' and, if that difference cannot be in the natures of the believings, it must be, in some way, in the natures of the situations believed to pertain.

c. In Topic 14 (2. a.) the point was made that, in an important sense, every believing is a choosing. To speak of a behavioural response to a perceived situation is to assume some preference for one outcome of action over another on the part of the responder. When we say that Jones's believing that this is the doorway just is his walking through it, we are assuming that Jones wants to be in the other room.

It is very difficult, therefore, to think of the manifestation of a belief (and what could an unmanifested belief be?!) which does not have, as it were, a built-in value-component. What counts as judging that this is a chair? Sitting on it - if we want to be seated. What counts as judging that it is an uncomfortable chair. Looking around for another (better) one. The important difference between these cases is that Jones may or may not want (at that moment) to be seated - but he must want to be comfortable. We shall return to this point a little later.

d. Notwithstanding the value-component (the element of choice) in all believing, we can and do distinguish quite clearly between value-judgements - like `This is a better chair than that one' and ordinary (let's say value-neutral) judgements - like `This is a bigger chair than that one', or, even more simply `This is a chair'. Yet, overwhelmingly, they occur in pairs; when we make a value-neutral judgement we normally also make a value-judgement. We observe very little (if anything at all) without some measure of approval or disapproval. This is not really surprising. Think about motivations (which must account for our `little' choices as well as our `big' ones); what interests us is not what something is, but how its being what it is predictably affects our own future well-being - how it relates to our hopes and our fears. From the vast mass of data being presented to us at any time, we are pretty selective about what we notice, and what we find ourselves focussing our attention upon. Even so-called simple curiosity generally has a `what's in it for me?' element to it. So that when Jones makes the judgement, about the person approaching him, `This is a young woman' (value-neutral), he also makes the judgement `She is pretty'. And the two judgements seem to occur together, to be simply the judgement that this is a pretty young woman.

Yet there must be two separate judgements. What counts as prettiness in a young woman is quite different from what counts as prettiness in a vase of flowers or a parrot or a cottage. Thus, until it is established that this is a young woman, the question of whether or not this is pretty cannot be considered. In this sense, value-judgements are always dependent upon appropriate value-neutral judgements. It might be felt that to accept this is to abandon the claim made that there is always a value-component in any judgement; if we must know what it is, simply as what it is, before we can evaluate it, then it seems to follow that the initial judgement is completely value-indifferent. But it is not so much value-indifferent as value-undetermined; to recognise X as a young woman is to recognise X as having a potential for being pretty - or ugly - i.e. for delighting or distressing, attracting or repelling, us. [Here compare: to recognise X as a picture is to recognise it as a representation of something; one can then decide what it is a representation of].

What this amounts to is that the difference between the two kinds of judgement is not between judging objects to have a value or not to have a value; it is between identifying potentially valuable objects and determining what their value is.

e. And this implies, when we examine it, that what their value is is not inherent in the objects themselves but is attributed to the objects by the makers of the value-judgements. We are now better placed to return to the question left rather in the air: Since there must be some conceivable situation which can count as a value-judgement being right or wrong (or it would not be a judgement), just what kind of conceivable situation can this be? Plainly the value is not part of the appearance presented in the way that the colours and sounds are - and, through the perceptual process, the chairness or young- womanness are.

If Jones were asked to describe his pen he might well say, without any feeling of oddity: `It is blue, ball-pointed, rather long and a very good one'. In ordinary conversation we include value-characteristics and value-neutral characteristics in the same descriptive catalogues as though they were all qualities of the thing described in just the same way. But -

    i) The blueness and the ball-pointed-ness are sense- perceivable qualities of the pen in a way that the very-good-ness plainly is not.

    ii) The longness seems a bit more like goodness in that nothing is just long or short; it is longer or shorter than something else (in this case the most common instances of penness) in the same way as nothing is just good or bad - it must be better or worse than something else.

    But the comparative longness is sense-perceptually perceived in just the same way as the blueness and ball- pointed-ness are, whereas the comparative goodness is not.

    iii) So, if the goodness (albeit comparative) were a property of the pen itself, it would be a very strange non- perceivable property. And since all that can count for any of us as any particular object is the totality of `its' perceivable properties (refer back to Topic 10), the notion of non-perceivable properties of an object is plainly unintelligible.

    iv) It seems that all that we can say intelligibly, vis-a-vis the goodness of Jones's pen, is that Jones prefers this pen to other pens - and expects that other people would do so as well.

But here we must be very careful. We are in danger of saying that, since all we can be talking about is somebody's preference, the value is not in the object judged, it is in the maker of the judgement - so the value-judgements we make are really about ourselves. And this is pretty obviously rather silly; when Jones says `By Jove, that was a good film' he is not talking about Jones; he is talking about the film - even though what he says about the film arises from his own enjoyment of it. Jones is certainly not intending to say that it is a good film because he enjoyed it; he definitely feels that he enjoyed it because it is a good film. But, remember that becauseness is intelligible only in terms of necessity - of must-ness. So what counts as a good film is a film which (predictably) will be enjoyed. We don't decide to enjoy things; we discover that we enjoy them because they are the way that they happen to be. We do not quite arbitrarily impose values on things; we discover what values those things, being as they are, have for us.

2. All our judgements are an acceptance of certain propositions as true. And these propositions can be stated only as assertions in the language we use. We tend to assume, therefore, that our language assertions always indicate whether or not a value- judgement is being made - and, if so, what that value-judgement is. But, because language is necessarily public and concepts are necessarily private and, where values are involved, the state of affairs referred to by the public language must include, in addition to `what is going on out there', people's reactions to `what is going on out there', there can be, and frequently is, considerable confusion about what assertions are, in fact, value-judgement-assertions.

a. It should be obvious that no value-neutral judgement (proposition) can imply a value-judgement (proposition). What X is always leaves open the question whether X is a good thing or a bad thing. Compare these assertions -

    i) The campaign ended in retreat

    ii) The campaign ended in a massacre

    iii) The campaign ended in disaster

    iv) The campaign ended in victory.

Although there is little doubt that the person making the assertion in each case feels it to be a good or bad thing, you should see that, in i and ii, he is not asserting it to be either good or bad. The assertions, as such, are value- neutral. A retreat is simply people ceasing to go forward and going back the way they came. It would be quite possible to explain, e.g. to a child, exactly what counts as a retreat without any reference at all to whether people enjoy or disenjoy retreating. The concept per-se does not in any way invoke values. And exactly the same applies to massacres. A massacre is simply a large number of people being killed violently by other people. Whether we find this appalling, as no doubt most of us do, or find it jolly good fun, as presumably the people who perpetrate massacres do, in no way affects what counts as a massacre. So the question `was it a nice massacre or a nasty one?' is quite intelligible - whatever we might feel about the people who answer `Nice'.

But there just can't be a nice disaster. To the extent that it is a good thing, it cannot count as a disaster. Value is `built-into' the concept expressed by that term. So `The campaign ended in disaster' is stating a value judgement - irrespective of for whom this was disastrous.

When we turn to `victory' it is more difficult. Could anybody have a bad victory (from his own viewpoint)? He might say `I won - but now I wish I hadn't' - but at the time that he won, he must have wanted to win (whatever the winning amounted to) or it would not have been (for him) winning. There cannot be a victory without a contest - and there cannot be a contest unless the contenders are contending - i.e. trying to win. We might well feel that we can conceive easily enough of two parties contending and one overcoming the other without invoking any values at all - but can we apply the term `victory' to this without, as it were, `taking sides' (or assuming the viewpoint of one antagonist) in the struggle? This is very difficult indeed to answer and shows that it is by no means clear in every case whether an assertion implies values or not. We can make the rule that, if you can add `and that's a good thing' or `and that's a bad thing' without being either tautological or contradictory, it follows that the assertion, as such, is value-neutral. But it is often not so easy to apply this rule.

b. In the case of `victory', the problem arises (if it does) because we are a bit hazy ourselves about precisely what concept we are attaching to that term. But we might be very clear about this but much less clear about what concepts other people attach to the same term and thus, however clear our thinking may be, run into misunderstandings in our communications. Here consider the three terms `sexy', `pornographic' and `obscene'.

One of the things that defines Jones's concept of X-ness (for Jones - it can't for anybody else) is precisely whether it does or does not have value-implications. Let's say that, for both Jones and Brown, being sexy is value-neutral; they agree that what they are talking about is simply observable characteristics of people which do tend sexually to attract (this is observable too) other people. Jones, who is a bit of a puritan, doesn't like sexiness; Brown, who is a bit of a lad, likes it very much. But they agree that this is just a difference between them; what they like or dislike is just what it is - much as one might prefer tea and the other coffee without this telling us anything at all about tea or coffee as such. But when Jones tells Brown that a book is pornographic he is very surprised that Brown says `Good, I must read it'. For Jones it is (literally) inconceivable that anybody would like pornography because, as he uses that term, it is necessarily a bad thing. Jones assumes that the people who buy and enjoy what he calls pornography would have to deny that it is pornography since they patently approve of it. But, for Brown, there can be good pornography and bad pornography - so that `X is pornographic' is a value-neutral assertion; it merely states that X is deliberately designed to be sexually exciting - and whether we like this or not is up to us.

But Brown does not allow that anybody could enjoy obscenity. This would be a contradiction; if he enjoys it, he is not finding it obscene since, for Brown, the obscene (for anybody at all) is that which he finds upsetting in such a way that he just wishes that he didn't know about it. Yet it could be that Jenkins, told by Brown that he would find a book obscene, says `So what - I may enjoy it all the more'.

Obviously what we are looking at here is the problem of concept/symbol correlations which is examined in Topic 5, (3. d.). Brown and Jones and Jenkins do not have different (effectively non-equivalent) concepts of value; they just -

    i) find that they value things differently (make different value-judgements) and

    ii) use language differently - and in a way which might lead them to suppose that they have different (not effectively equivalent) concepts of value. But they don't or they could not communicate about values at all. And, interestingly, most human communication (and very effective communication) is about values.

We do have effectively equivalent concepts of valuableness and we must derive those concepts (abstract them) from experienced situations. So we are back with the question: What are these observable situations which are instances of valuableness?

c. Imagine a passing lady peering into a perambulator, as people do, and saying `What a chubby little fellow'. The proud mother would probably beam upon her. But if she said, instead, `What an obese child', the mother would be deeply offended. Now, since what counts as obeseness is precisely what counts as chubbiness (in simple, value-neutral terms), the difference can only be in the suggestion, by the choice of words, that it is a good thing or a bad thing to have these characteristics. When the mother protests that the child is not obese, it is simply chubby, the dimensions of the child are not at issue (a tape-measure will show that it has more flesh than average children of its age and size) - but the mother certainly feels that you are wrong - i.e. that what you say is contrary to what is the case - and she will attempt to prove this (persuade you) by appealing to other people - `You wouldn't call this child obese, would you?'

So, let's agree that, in some way, values are `in states of affairs' but they are not `inherent in' the things that are valued. At this stage it should be apparent that -

    i) Nothing could be good or bad in itself ;it must be good or bad for some person (or other animal).

    ii) Even for some person, nothing is good in itself; it must be good for some purpose.

    iii) We might then ask: Why is that purpose assumed to be good? `If you do A you will get B' does not make B `a good thing'.

    iv) So, although different people's purposes may seem to be quite different, we must assume that what is good (for them) about the sought ends, whatever they may be, is understandable to us only because, ultimately, and in very general terms, people do all have the same purpose.

    v) And, indeed, we all do assume this whenever we try to persuade people, to show them, that something really is a good thing. Salesmen spend their lives doing this! We are not saying simply `Try this and see if you like it'; we are saying `When you have heard and considered these arguments, have noted all the things I am drawing your attention to, you must conclude that this is a good thing'. And, in so doing, we are assuming (as we must in all communication and argument) that goodness (whatever it be) is (effectively) the same thing for all of us.

So what is this `common concept' of value - and in what way is it drawn from our experience?

d. For our purposes, it is enough to use the simple, unequivocal terms `good' and `bad'. Other value-terms (like `disaster' - see 2. a) above) distinguish different (value-neutral) situations but are value-terms only by virtue of implying goodness/badness. So, let's look at some everyday uses of `good' and `bad' -

i Good morning!------- ii a good spanner------- iii a bad cold------- iv a good apple------ v a bad child------ vi a bad liar------- vii a good thrashing------- viii a good woman

It might appear that `good' is being used differently - but it is not; the fact that we can ask `Whatever is good about a thrashing?' (with a feeling that this is a paradox) shows that it is not.

(I wish you) `Good morning' is straightforward enough - I hope that you will find your morning enjoyable. A good spanner is one that enables somebody to perform a range of tasks efficiently. It is assumed that we all find colds nasty and a `bad cold' is one which is nastier than most. `Good apple' may seem equivocal; in some contexts it means one that hasn't gone rotten, in others it means one that tastes nice. So that when a child reaches for a green `cooker' and asks `Is this apple good?' we might reply `Yes - its good - but you won't like it'. A bad child is generally a disobedient one - because its disobedience causes us inconvenience and embarrassment. A bad liar is somebody who rarely succeeds in deceiving other people. A good thrashing is one that inflicts enough pain on the thrashee to satisfy the purposes of the thrasher - to punish, deter or whatever. `A good woman' all too often is said apologetically; she may be terribly dull but she does behave as women are supposed to behave.

So what is the connecting thread between all of these? We seem to be looking at three criteria for goodness:

    i) coming up to expectations (good apple, good woman ....)

    ii) efficiency (good spanner, liar, thrashing...)

    iii) enjoyment - which must, of course, be somebody's enjoyment of that which is held to be good.

But, when we ask `What is good about that?' the answer that satisfies us can only be in terms of enjoyment. When our attention is drawn to our everyday uses of `good' (or `bad') we might well ask - `What is good about things being as we expect them to be? I agree that this is a typical example of cabbage - but why a good example? I don't like cabbage'. Or `What is good about efficiency? Being efficient is, surely, just achieving a particular goal rapidly and economically. And that applies whether the goal in question is a good thing or a bad one - so efficiency, as such, is value-neutral'.

And we might respond to these objections thus:

    i) It is not the cabbage which is good; it is the example which is good. It is because things are normal, are as they are expected to be, are typical examples of their kinds, that we can perceive, and thereby predict, accurately, can achieve our goals, can secure the situations we want. Such normality is, therefore, conducive to our greater comfort/less discomfort and, as such, a good thing.

    ii) We cannot speak of efficiency without invoking goals; nothing can be efficient in itself, it is efficient in achieving some specific purpose. A goal must be - a. somebody's goal and b. desired by that somebody. Being good is being good for somebody for some purpose. For the somebody in question maximum efficiency is, therefore, the least unenjoyable achievement of a predictably enjoyable situation.

What we see here is that, even in the various `extended' uses of `good' (or `bad') we are always assuming that the reference is ultimately to (somebody's) enjoyment.

e. Whether or not anybody does enjoy something is a matter of what he finds himself choosing; there can be no rule that everybody must enjoy any given situation. So that, although our observations of a wide consensus of people's choosings lead us to assume that certain conditions must be good for everybody, it is still quite intelligible to ask `What is good about that?'. Consider for instance -

    i) It's a good thing to look after your health -

    ii) It's a good thing to study diligently -

    iii) It's a good thing to tell the truth -

There is always an implied `if' - if you want to remain fit and active, if you want to pass your exams, if you want society to function smoothly - etc. But it still makes sense to ask `Why should I? What's good about being fit, passing exams, smooth- running societies?' - `Well, if you pass your exams you will get a better-paid job' - `So?' - `You will be able to buy things' - `So?' - `You will enjoy having those things you buy'. And at this point, and only this point, we can no longer ask `What's good about that?' We can, of course, deny that we would enjoy owning things, whatever other people might enjoy, but we cannot deny that, if we did enjoy it, that enjoyment would be a good thing; anything that is not, for me, a good thing could not count as enjoyment.

f. At this stage, perhaps we should spell out what should have become apparent - that the perceivable situation which counts as a value-assertion being right or wrong, which gives intelligibility to such assertions, [the situation for meeting the verifiability criterion of intelligibility demanded in 1. a. and c. and in 2. b.] is not simply the perception of the state of affairs valued; it is also the perception of somebody's enjoyment (or disenjoyment) of that state of affairs. Provided that we know (in terms of presented appearances) what counts as a particular state of affairs being so, and we know (in terms of presented appearances) what counts as somebody enjoying (or disenjoying) that state of affairs, then we know what it is that we are asserting when we assert that any particular state of affairs is or could be a (comparatively) good or bad thing.

3. It might be protested, however, that we know (in terms of presented appearances) what counts as somebody enjoying or approving a state of affairs, only on the assumption that we can recognise the value, as such, in that state of affairs to which the somebody is reacting, that to enjoy just is to perceive the good as good. Whereas any such protest would in fact arise from the kind of half-notion discussed in Topic 14 (1. c.) that our overt behaviour is caused by some secret, `internal' mental state, it is probably wise to use a less nebulous term than `enjoy' to make it clear that value-reactions are in fact just as observable as any other events.

a. If we think again about pushing the question - `What's good (or what's bad) about that?', we see that the `stopping point' is the point at which pleasure or pain is implied. Since being good is necessarily being good for somebody, it is irrelevant whose pleasure or pain is implied; whoever it is, it is good or bad for him or her.

We do all understand pain/pleasure and part of our under- standing of it is the realisation that it just does not make sense to ask `What is good about pleasure; what is bad about pain?'; these are the paradigms of value. They are the experiences from which valuableness is abstracted. Compare: `What is bright about a light?' - without experience of lights we could have no concept of brightness. And - think very carefully about this - in the same way, if we had no experience of pain and pleasure we could have no concept of value, we could not make value-judgements, we could not choose.

b. But let us be totally clear about what we are speaking of -

    i) Any pain or pleasure must be somebody's; there can be no shared pain or pleasure, only a `sharing' of those situations which happen to give pleasure (or pain) to those who share them. To say that Jones and Brown shared the pleasure of attending the concert is merely to say that Jones and Brown did attend the same concert and that each found that he derived pleasure from this.

    ii) We are not distinguishing between bodily pains and pleasures (like toothaches and orgasms) and emotional pains and pleasures (like embarrassment at farting at the dinner table or pride at winning a game of chess). To the extent that we are responding with joy or sadness, all pains and pleasures are emotional; to the extent that the pain or pleasure must be manifested to be pain or pleasure at all, all pains and pleasures are bodily. No intelligible distinction can be made between having a pain or pleasure and feeling a pain or pleasure. When somebody says `It pains me to have to tell you that....', he may be lying but, if he is not, then his pain just is pain. [Compare: the blue colour presented by the sky and the blue colour presented by the paintwork on that sky-blue car are not, thereby, different blue]

    iii) We do not wince because something hurts us or smile because something pleases us. The wincing is the being hurt; the smiling is the being pleased. Again, refer back to paper 14 (l.c.) - we discover what we like and dislike by observing our own reactions.

    iv) Thus the pain or pleasure is not `in' the state of affairs; it is `in' the responder to the state of affairs - who, thereby, attributes a value to, or sees a value in, the state of affairs in question. Put very simply: the value of the state of affairs (the object) is, for the perceiver, that which creates the pro or con response he finds himself making to that state of affairs or assumes that some other person or persons would make to that state of affairs. When we say things like `Spinach is good food - though I don't happen to like it myself', we are, as it were, speaking on behalf of other people (their assumed wants) in calling it good. Or we may , of course, mean `Although I don't like the taste of it, it makes me healthier - and that is good.'

But, bear in mind that since the pain/pleasure is not `in' the state of affair, the value-predictions always are assumptions. Think of two people standing with their bottoms very close to the fire on a cold night. At different points of time (probably quite different) each of them will move away; what had been pleasant has suddenly been found to be painful. Discovering that this is so just is finding oneself moving away so as to terminate that experience. And the fact that the level of warmth has become painful to one of them cannot imply that it is not still pleasant to the other. We cannot decide what to like; we can decide to do what we predict will produce what we think we will like - but we can be wrong.

c. Here note that finding it painful just is attempting to stop it happening, whatever the 'it` may be. To talk of pain is always to talk of an experien ce which we find ourselves attempting to terminate or, if it be predicted, to avoid. To talk of pleasure is to talk of what, when we have it, we seek to perpetuate and, when we do not, we seek to secure. Our choices are our preferences - and are sometimes surprising to ourselves. `Why' Jones asks himself `did I sit through that awful programme when I could quite easily have turned it off?' He thinks he is puzzled that he chose to do something he didn't want to do - but in fact he is puzzled that he found himself wanting (or least dis-wanting) something that he would have expected himself to have rejected. [Here, again, think of the `motivation mix']

d. And what some people find themselves actively seeking, or attempting to perpetuate - i.e. find pleasant - can be very surprising to other people. For this reason masochism is often described as the enjoyment of pain - but this is plainly nonsense; pain is (by definition) what we disenjoy, what we seek to avoid. The so-called masochist simply finds himself or herself seeking to perpetuate states of affairs which most other people would find themselves seeking to terminate. On that basis many of us could regard people's enthusiastic drinking of a well known non-alcoholic beverage as masochism.

And, while we are looking at `queer people', what about the sadist. He derives his pleasure from other people's pain. But this does not mean that, in this case, pleasure is not a good thing - that would be contradictory. Value is intelligible only in terms of individuals' evaluations (pain/pleasure reactions) so, to say that it is in general a bad thing that there are sadists is to make a value judgement about society: more people would have better pain/pleasure balances if nobody deliberately hurt anybody else. But, simply as pleasure, the sadist's pleasure is (necessarily) a good thing, just as anybody else's is.

e. With this in mind, think again of the `motivation mix', the conflicting pressures upon us to choose in this way or that. These pressures are (actual or anticipated) pains and pleasures - what else could they be? And the vital thing to note here is that they do not cease to be pains or pleasures simply because they are `countered by' other pleasures or pains. The sum total effect is whatever it is - and always what we take to be, since we are choosing, the optimum pain/pleasure balance in these circumstances. But pains and pleasures do not homogenise; if Jones is aware that eating garlic gives him indigestion, this may inhibit him from eating garlic (which he likes very much). But, if it does not, then the eating (as such) is still pleasant notwithstanding that the contemplation of belly-ache is painful. In whatever combinations they occur, pleasures are pleasures and pains are pains; otherwise there could not be a conflict of motivations. And the pleasures are necessarily good - and the pains necessarily bad - so that the total situation (that which we may or may not choose) is considered a comparatively good situation or a comparatively bad one according to which predominates. [Here consider again hope and fear motivations and our feelings about freedom of choice].

f. Now, what we have established, put very simply, is that a value-judgement can only be - i.e. is intelligible only as - a judgement that a given state of affairs is conducive to (somebody's) pleasure or to (somebody's) pain. From which it follows that any (purported) value-assertion is in fact quite vacuous if it cannot, under examination and analysis, be shown to imply (and here think back to Topic 13; causal explanations are intelligible only in terms of assumed implications) that somebody will enjoy pleasure or suffer pain. Suppose there is a big, cumbersome piece of machinery in the middle of a paddock miles from anywhere and Jones examines it and says to Brown `Do you know, this is still a good machine'. `What's it good for?'. `It's a traction engine'. `Would anybody want a traction engine out here - and would it be worth moving?'. `Well, no - but if it were somewhere else...'. It has been said that rubbish is simply goods (think about that use of `good') which are in the wrong place.

Here the value-assertion (the use of `good machine') is at least defensible since it is explanable in terms of pleasures - even though that explanation involves if's and would-be's. If it were somewhere else it could give pleasure to somebody who wanted to do whatever one does with traction engines.

But, all too often, people make what purport to be value- assertions without any reference at all to anybody's actual, or predicted, pain or pleasure. We hear things like `People should learn to control their passions'. When we ask, quite reasonably, `Why should they; will that make them happier, or anybody else happier?' we are told that that has nothing to do with it. Now, it is possible (though it seems unlikely) that a convincing argument could be constructed to show that our lives would have more pleasure and less pain if everyone behaved dispassionately - and anyone prepared to argue on these lines is at least saying something intelligible when he claims that passion is a bad thing. But to use value-assertion-language without even claiming to be referring to conceivable situations in which living creatures must experience pain or pleasure in response to states of affairs is simply to make noises.

Note the reference to living creatures. Life is a capacity for pain and pleasure. When we say `He had a good life' we mean that, on balance, he had more pleasure than pain. And when we say `He didn't have a very good life, poor chap' (we rarely talk of bad lives), we mean he had, on balance, more pain than pleasure. [Whether he gave more pain than pleasure is another issue which we shall look at when we consider morality].

So, what appalling nonsense people are uttering when they talk of the `value of life' - as though life per-se were (in some necessary way!) a good thing. Life is a precondition for both pleasure (the good) and pain (the bad) - just as being certain is a precondition for being right or being wrong. So, just as certainness cannot, as such, be right or wrong, so life, as such, cannot be good or bad. Contemplating death might be painful (or, for some people, might be pleasant) but being dead cannot be either painful or pleasant - it is simply not being. Thus, it makes no sense at all to suggest that a world with life in it is better than a world without life in it. Again - and do take it seriously - values are intelligible only in terms of the pain/pleasure balances of particular living creatures - and these pains and pleasures are simply whatever the living creatures in question find themselves seeking to secure or to avoid at any given time.

4. Finally, something should be said about aesthetic values since it could be felt that these are value judgements and that they don't meet the criteria we have established.

a. `I will accept that this is a good statue, picture (whatever), but I personally don't get any pleasure from it - and I doubt that anybody else does' seems to be intelligible - but, if it is, what makes it so? Perhaps, in this context `good' simply means `clever' - but if we say that the picture is `clever' then, either -

    i) we are equating cleverness with efficiency (which is fair enough - cleverness must involve the achievement of aims however pointless those aims may seem to other people) and we are saying that aesthetic uses of `good' are simply references to efficiency (as discussed in 2. d. above) - or

    ii) we are saying that aesthetic judgements are not value- judgements at all; they are based on arbitrarily established norms (like the rules of chess) and simply (mis)use value-language.

b. Most of us, however, would feel uncomfortable about either of these moves; we feel that we are talking about the value (to somebody) of the painting in much the same way as we talk of the value (to somebody) of a steak pudding - the creation by this thing of pleasure/pain in that somebody.

Here it is helpful to consider the cultivation of tastes. Jones cannot decide to enjoy lapsang souchon tea if he finds that he doesn't. But when he observes that many other people, most of whose tastes (choices) are like his own, do plainly enjoy it, he can go on trying it in the hope that he will come to like it - he is `putting himself in line for' a possible pleasure. Learning to appreciate (i.e. get pleasure from) art is rather like that - except that most of us don't try very hard. We reason something like: Experience shows that, as our understanding develops, we find ourselves gaining pleasure from things we did not gain pleasure from before. So I am prepared to believe this expert when he assures me that, if I did know as much about painting as he does, (or as I do about, say, cookery) I would gain pleasure from this picture but not from that one (or more pleasure from this than from that). Since I can't be bothered to study art, I simply delegate to him (and experts generally) the authority to say what would please most people if they `took art seriously'.

But note that we are still vesting the intelligibility of value assertions in the experience of pain and pleasure.

c. This is, of course, a very sketchy approach to aesthetics, an area of philosophical enquiry deserving of serious, detailed treatment, but it does at least provide a starting point free from fairies in the garden. It also has some implications for morality; the `delegation of authority' to philosophers, priests and such, to tell us what we should or should not do is closely parallel.

But, for our present purposes, it is enough that we have shown that, the oddity of aesthetic judgements notwithstanding, all value-assertions are intelligible only as (implied) assertions about people's pain/pleasure balances.

Return to Top of Page
If you have any suggestions, comments or questions please let us know.
NB your e-mails will not be published on this site unless you request it.

Click on this e-mail address

sybillas@westnet.com.au

  • 1: Possibility, Probability, Actuality and Necessity

  • 2: The Nature of Believing

  • 3: The Nature of Knowing

  • 4: Inference and Significance

  • 5: Symbols, Language and Communication

  • 6: Fact, Propositions, Statements and Sentences

  • 7: Identity and Similarity

  • 8: Personal Identity - the `Centre of Experience'

  • 9: Sensing

  • 10: Perception and prediction

  • 11: The perception (and nature) of space and `objects'

  • 12: Time and memory

  • 13: Causality

  • 14: Choice - the notion of freedom

  • BACK TO MAIN PAGE