Values and Reality - Essay Example

VALUES The question Is value a part of the world' is completely redundant and it is in the nature of ivity which needs to be altered in perspective. Values change from individual to individual, community to community. Values that are cherished by one individual may not be a guideline for another individual at all. Indeed the values which underline the character of one community may not be accepted at all by another community. The concept of values is entire subjective in nature. Values are not there in the world for any observer, one without our human interest in morality.

The test for an objectivity of a property is whether it used in judgements for which there are developed standards of rational argument and whether they are needed to explain aspects of our experience that are otherwise inexplicable. John McDowell thinks that both these test moral properties are in a sense "subjective" but not in a way that undermines their reality. The connection between McDowell's general metaphysics and this particular claim about moral properties is that all claims about objectivity are to be made from the internal perspective of our actual practices.

Characterising the place of values in our worldview is not, in McDowell's view, to downgrade them as less real than talk of quarks or the Higgs boson.Mackie, In Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong Part I, acknowledges that subjectivism is often thought of as a kind of skepticism. However, he claims that "subjectivism" is also used to refer to a first order normative view. It is the view that each individual ought to do whatever that individual happens to think he should. The term "subjectivism" has also been used to convey different second order views as well.

There are second order linguistic claims about the nature of moral language, of moral terms and moral judgments. Mackie feels the type of second order subjectivism is really a report or expression of the subject's feelings or attitudes. He differentiates his own moral skepticism from this view on two grounds - one that his is a negative claim, and two, that his thesis is ontological, not linguistic. Mackie observes that there is a connection between these differing forms of skepticism; Many people get attracted towards the linguistic type of second order moral skepticism because they already embrace the negative ontological attitude towards objective value.

Mackie's skeptical claim that there are no objective values is consistent with the idea that values are subjective in the sense that they are agreed upon or shared. It may also be that such values can be made universal without being objective. He also distinguishes between objectivism about values and descriptivism. Descriptivism is a view about moral language, according to which, the meanings of moral terms are purely descriptive. It does not involve evaluative or prescriptive component.The descriptivist about moral meaning holds that someone can judge an act cruel without condemning it.

Mackie points out that the mainstream European tradition of moral philosophy since Plato holds that values are objective and also that moral judgments refer to these values and are essentially motivating or action-guiding. This mainstream view of moral discourse implies that descriptivism is false because it implies motivational externalism, whereas the mainstream tradition embraces motivational internalism. Mackie observes the objectivity of moral judgments in the sense that they can employ intersubjectively valid standards.

Since those standards themselves are not valid because they reflect in turn objective values, he maintains his fundamental moral skepticism about the objectivity of values. Value is part of the world and subjectivity is not distinct from it in the traditional understanding. Sources - 1. Mind Value and Reality - John Mc Dowell (Harvard 1998)2. Needs, Values Truth - D. Wiggin's (OUP 1998)3. Ethics : Inventiing Right and Wrong Part I