Thanks for your detailed reply. There is a lot to address here, so I’ll reply with multiple comments to address the parts.
There are several problems with this kind of argument, so let’s go over them in sequence. The first problem is that it’s vacuous. “People only value X because something in their lives caused them to value X” is true for any X you could suggest (provided, of course, that the X in question is valued by at least some people), and thus it fails to distinguish between values that are worth preserving and values that are not. Unless your thesis is literally “no values are better than any other values, which makes it okay for our current values to be replaced by literally any other set of values” (and if that is your thesis, I think it’s worth saying explicitly), the notion that we should be willing to relinquish any of our current values simply because something at some point caused us to acquire those values is an incredibly poor criterion to use.
That brings us to the second problem: even if your thesis really were that no values were better than any other, there would still remain the question of why the reader ought to accept such a thesis. You can’t justify it via some external argument, because no such external argument exists: the question of “what values should we have?” is itself a fundamentally value-laden question, and value-laden questions can only be addressed by an appeal to other values. With some effort on the part of the reader, the article could (vaguely) be interpreted as making such an appeal, but even if such an interpretation is used, much of the philosophical force of the argument is lost. The sense that the reader is compelled to accept that values cannot have greater meaning, because the author has triumphantly explained that “values” exist only as “after-the-fact reifications” of a particular agent’s actions/judgments—and, after all, nobody cares about those—is lost.
How do you measure what values are better than others? Unless we have special access to moral facts that I don’t see evidence that we have, we must do this via a process powered by our minds, and our minds decide what is better or worse based on how they values, thus I read your complaint as circular, i.e. you claim the problem is that I don’t show how to value valuing via valuing. And I agree, this is maybe the fundamental conundrum of talking about values, and it creates the same kind of circular dependency problem we see in the problem of the criterion and, for example, naive set theory, and thus as you can imagine I think we suffering in our attempt to reason about value and epistemology we suffer the same sorts of problems we had in mathematics prior to the development of something at least a little better than naive set theory.
I think it’s a big jump to say no value is better than another, though, because to say that is to give up being a mind altogether. Although there may be no outside ground, no absolute facts on which we can base what values are better than others, we can still each codependently make valuations. That is, I can’t deny you or myself our values, even if they are not consistent with anything other than ourselves, and grounded only in our conditional valuations, and certainly it gives way to no sense of what values are “right”, only those we collectively most prefer in any particular moment, and offer no reason to privilege the ones we consider best over the ones we could consider best in any other circumstance other than biased attachment to what is now vs. what is othertimes.
Thanks for your detailed reply. There is a lot to address here, so I’ll reply with multiple comments to address the parts.
How do you measure what values are better than others? Unless we have special access to moral facts that I don’t see evidence that we have, we must do this via a process powered by our minds, and our minds decide what is better or worse based on how they values, thus I read your complaint as circular, i.e. you claim the problem is that I don’t show how to value valuing via valuing. And I agree, this is maybe the fundamental conundrum of talking about values, and it creates the same kind of circular dependency problem we see in the problem of the criterion and, for example, naive set theory, and thus as you can imagine I think we suffering in our attempt to reason about value and epistemology we suffer the same sorts of problems we had in mathematics prior to the development of something at least a little better than naive set theory.
I think it’s a big jump to say no value is better than another, though, because to say that is to give up being a mind altogether. Although there may be no outside ground, no absolute facts on which we can base what values are better than others, we can still each codependently make valuations. That is, I can’t deny you or myself our values, even if they are not consistent with anything other than ourselves, and grounded only in our conditional valuations, and certainly it gives way to no sense of what values are “right”, only those we collectively most prefer in any particular moment, and offer no reason to privilege the ones we consider best over the ones we could consider best in any other circumstance other than biased attachment to what is now vs. what is othertimes.