Personal Value

Certain things, like justice, have impersonal value, other things, like your children, carry personal values: they have value for you. Besides whatever value, period, they have, they are valuable to you. The philosophical as well as non-philosophical literature is inundated with suggestions about the kinds of thing that are good-for us or, if it is a negative personal value, what is bad-for us. For many years this has been, and still is, a stimulating and vivid area of philosophical research. However, it is also a field which, perhaps too readily, has tended to monopolize the notion good-for (linking it necessarily to welfare or well-being). Since these more or less well-grounded pieces of advice seldom are accompanied by any analysis of the notion good-for, there is a need for such an analysis. This work purports to remedy this need, by offering a novel way of analyzing the notion of personal value. It defends the idea that we have reason to expand our classical value taxonomy with these personal values. By fine-tuning a pattern of value analysis which has roots in the writings of the Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano, this sort of analysis will come to cover personal values, too. In addition, the book leaves substantial contributions to a number of issues, e.g. hedonism vs. preferentialism, subjectivism vs. objectivism, value bearer monism vs. value bearer pluralism, the wrong kind of reason problem – all of which are much debated among today’s value theorists