PHIL 611
Axiology
Graduate seminar · Fall 2019
Axiology is the study of what makes the world better or worse. (This is also one way people use the phrase "value theory".) Among other questions, we will ask: What things are non-instrumentally good, and how good are they? Are there different kinds of value that make the world better (e.g. moral, aesthetic, epistemic)? What sorts of things constitute human well-being-- that is, what makes a life go well for someone? Is human well-being a matter of experience, or does it extend beyond the experiential? Is the goodness of the world overall just some kind of aggregate of individual well-being? If so, how does this aggregation work? If not, what more holistic factors apply? Does merely adding more happy people to the world improve its overall value? And finally, how do all these considerations relate to prudential and moral questions about what we should do?
Readings
Goodness and rightness
- Schroeder, Teleology, Agent-Relative Value, and “Good”
- Brown, Consequentialize This
- Korsgaard, Natural Goodness, Rightness, and the Intersubjectivity of Reason: Reply to Arroyo, Cummiskey, Moland, and Bird-Pollan
Section 3, pages 386–390
Comparing value
- Chang, Value Incomparability and Incommensurability
- Wasserman, Indeterminacy, Ignorance, and the Possibility of Parity
- Grimm, Easy Cases and Value Incommensurability
- Nebel, The Good, the Bad, and the Transitivity of Better Than
- Huemer, Lexical Priority and the Problem of Risk
Well-being
- Kagan, The Limits of Well-Being
- Fletcher, Objective List Theories
- Lin, Welfare Invariabilism
- Velleman, Well-Being and Time
- Hawkins, Well-Being, Time, and Dementia
- Carbonell, Sacrifice and Relational Well-Being
Atoms and aggregation
- Chappell, Value Holism
- Brown, Two Kinds of Holism about Values
- Greaves, Population Axiology
- Parfit, The Unimportance of IdentityOptional
- Greaves and MacAskill, The Case for Strong Longtermism
- Gustafsson, Our Intuitive Grasp of the Repugnant Conclusion (opens in a new tab)
- Budolfson and Spears, Why the Repugnant Conclusion Is Inescapable
The formal material in section 3.0 may be skipped; the main point is explained in section 3.1.
- Meacham, Person-Affecting Views and Saturating Counterpart Relations
- Greaves and Ord, Moral Uncertainty about Population Axiology