The Realm of Value

The "Value" section consists of the following essays:

3.00 Person and Value - an Overview

3.01 A Defence of Naturalism

3.02 Transcendence and Personhood

3.03 Value and Imperatives

3.04 Objective Moral Value

3.05 The Authentic Person

At present, only the introductory essay is in place.

Summary of Contents

The introductory essay Person and Value - an Overview sketches the whole field to be covered in this section, introducing concepts and arguments which are to be developed further in the following essays. It seeks to articulate and then defend the following two assertions about the nature of the human person.

The human person, although wholly natural in origin, transcends the natural order of the world.
There is an objective moral law, to which all persons are subject.

These two assertions are taken together, because part of the argument is that the existence and nature of the objective moral law derives from the "post-natural" nature of the person. The arguments in this and succeeding essays draw heavily upon the conceptual framework laid down in the essay 2.06 Emergence and Transcendence.

In the essay A Defence of Naturalism I will argue that on the basis of the evidence now available to us it is rational to believe in a purely natural world. This means that there are no ontologically independent minds, and that the fundamental causal framework of the world is one of purely efficient causation. There is no prior final causation in the world.

The absence of prior final causation does not mean that the world can not develop posterior final causation as an emergent feature. In the essay Transcendence and Personhood I will argue that this is precisely what has happened with the evolution of human beings.

The claim that there are objectively true moral values, entailing imperatives binding on all persons, presupposes a theory of how value judgements can be said to be true (or false), and how they can entail imperatives. In the essay Value and Imperatives I will sketch what such a theory might look like.

In the essay Objective Moral Value I will develop the argument for an objectively true set of moral values. Primary values are intrinsically subjective, but out of the community of these subjective valuations a set of values logically emerges which is independent of the content of the individual valuations and which is binding upon all the valuers. These are the moral values, and their independence enables us to characterise this emergent feature as being objective.

Moral imperatives are obligatory. There are in addition a set of values about the way we should live our life which entail imperatives which are advisory though not obligatory. These will be discussed in the essay The Authentic Person. As the title suggests they are about living our lives in a manner which is coherent with the underlying dynamic of our shared personhood.

If you have comments on this site, you can contact me at: ian@dunbar-i-l.demon.co.uk.

Last updated 26 May 2001