The claim that “values are subjective” can be understood in a wide variety of ways, ranging from extremely controversial to nearly trivial interpretations of the claim. Throughout this chapter, I will introduce various versions of the claim and examine what these different versions imply, as well as whether the scholastic view can make sense of the claims that seem the most intuitively plausible. Two constraints, I argue, turn out to be very plausible. The first constraint I call “object-subjectivism.” Although this constraint has fallen into some disrepute, I will argue that when properly understood, it is a quite plausible constraint. The other constraint, which I call “authority-subjectivism,” is more popular among contemporary philosophers. These two constraints seem to pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, object-subjectivism places constraints on the content of what one ought to desire or what can count as valuable; such content must be suitably related to the agent's mental states. On the other hand, authority-subjectivism makes value depend somehow on the evaluative attitudes of the agent. Something is valuable, according to the constraint, only if it is properly related to the agent's evaluative judgment or to other similar attitudes. It seems perfectly possible (and in fact true) that an agent might judge to be good (or have whatever other evaluative attitude ultimately figures in the constraint) objects other than mental state or fail to judge to be good (or fail to have) whatever other evaluative attitude ultimately figures in the constraint toward any mental state.

Accidie seems to be a phenomenon in which evaluation and motivation come completely apart, the kind of phenomenon that could only be explained by a separatist view. Someone who suffers from accidie supposedly still accepts that various things are good or valuable but is not motivated to pursue any of them. This phenomenon seems harder to accommodate within the framework of the scholastic view than akrasia because here there is not a different (even if lesser) good that motivates the agent. At any rate, our way of explicating akrasia by means of the scholastic view does not seem to have any straightforward application to the cases of accidie; it is quite implausible to say that an agent who is in the state of accidie is somehow persuaded by an appearance of the good of, say, “staying put.”

I will try to show in this chapter how one can account for accidie within the scholastic view. This account will depend on defining a relation I call “conditioning,” a relation that may obtain between certain states of affairs and evaluative perspectives. Roughly, an evaluative perspective is conditioned by a state of affairs if and only if whether the objects that appear to be good from this perspective should be allowed into one's general conception of the good depends on whether that state of affairs obtains. I will argue that the person suffering from accidie takes certain evaluative perspectives to be conditioned by certain states of affairs.

So far, we have understood practical reasoning as governed by the ideal of forming a legitimate general conception of the good. Most of the reasoning described so far seems completely teleological in character: A certain object appears to be good; we reflect on the adequacy of this appearance; we infer from the fact that this object appears to be good that other objects also appear to be good; and so on. Moreover, the good in question is an object of pursuit, the kind of thing that could be brought about in an action. For nonconsequentialists, this will seem like a serious strike against the theory; there seems to be no room in it, for instance, for deontological constraints. Concerns of this kind have made nonconsequentialist authors wary of the notion of good, and certainly of the notion of the good as something to be promoted or brought about. Scanlon, for instance, gives primacy to the notion of a reason and defends a “buck-passing” account of the good according to which “being good, or valuable, is not a property that itself provides a reason to respond to a thing in certain ways. Rather, to be good or valuable is to have other properties that constitute such reasons.” Moreover, Scanlon claims that various things we have reason to do, such as being good friends, cannot be understood as cases in which we have a reason to promote a certain good.

I hope to have shown that the scholastic view can accommodate “subjectivist” intuitions quite well. In the sense that it is correct to say that values or reasons are subjective, the scholastic view can endorse this conclusion. Is there any sense, however, in which practical judgments are objective? Just as in the case of “subjective,” there are many things that one could mean in saying that values are objective or that one is committed to objectivity in the practical realm. The aim of this chapter is to understand how various notions of objectivity can have application in the practical realm and how these notions can be understood within the framework of the scholastic view. The chapter will not show that any particular practical judgment is (or fails to be) objective; it merely explains what it is to make claims of objectivity and correctness in the practical realm.

I start by examining how understanding the difference between beliefs and desires, and theoretical and practical attitudes more generally, in terms of the different formal ends of theoretical and practical reason can help us understand notions of objectivity in the practical realm. In particular, I want to argue that although the difference in formal ends is an important difference between practical and theoretical reason, the structural analogy between both fields allows us to use notions of theoretical objectivity to guide our understanding of what kinds of objectivity are possible in the practical realm. The following sections engage in that project.

INTRODUCTION

In the first two chapters, I present the basic elements of the scholastic view. The first chapter focuses on the notion of desire at the center of the scholastic view. According to the scholastic view, for an agent to desire X is for X to appear to be good to this agent from a certain evaluative perspective. Section 1.2 introduces what Kant calls the “old formula of the schools,” the claim that we desire only what we conceive to be good. I define a scholastic view as any view committed to the old formula of the schools. However, I will be interested only in scholastic views that understand the notion of the good in the way presented in the introduction: The good is supposed to be the formal end of practical inquiry in the same way that truth is the formal end of theoretical inquiry. Thus, one can take “conceiving to be good” as analogous to “conceiving to be true.” To say that desiring is conceiving something to be good is to say that a desire represents its object, perhaps implicitly, as good – that is, as something that is worth being pursued. Of course, in this sense of “conceiving,” the claim that in desiring something I conceive it to be good is not particularly strong. Compare this, for instance, with what can be said about imagining. If I imagine p, I do conceive, at least implicitly, that p is true.

Whether accurate or not, Stocker's description of the philosophical landscape in the late seventies would have rung true to many philosophers at the time. Views that accepted what Kant calls the “old formula of the schools,” or, as will call them, “scholastic views,” enjoyed widespread acceptance through long periods of the history of philosophy. I would hazard a guess that something like what Kant describes as the “old formula of the schools,” and perhaps even stronger versions of it, were widely taken for granted around Kant's time, and they were certainly still very influential when Stocker wrote “Desiring the Bad.” But wherever the historical truth lies, the climate has changed significantly. Most philosophers accept that we do not necessarily desire the good. Partly because of the influence of Stocker and others, the current philosophical “mainstream” position is that evaluative attitudes (such as judging that something is good, valuing, etc.) do not determine and are not to be identified with motivational attitudes (such as desires, wants, etc.).

INTRODUCTION

The fact that one desires something does not suffice to establish that one ought to pursue it. The fact that a course of action appears good from a certain perspective does not guarantee that this course of action is in fact good. Insofar as the agent is rational, she evaluates the reliability of various perspectives on reflection and tries to come up with a coherent understanding of what she should pursue. Thus drawing on all particular perspectives, the agent forms a reflective perspective that underwrites what I call the agent's “general conception of the good.” Section 2.2 presents, and discusses the importance of, a notion of a general conception of the good.

A perfectly rational agent would always act in accordance with his conception of the good. However, an imperfectly rational agent could have a certain general view of the good and yet act otherwise; an imperfectly rational agent could form an intention at odds with his general conception of the good. According to the scholastic view, what the agent judges to be good is the agent's intention in action. Given that the scholastic view identifies desires with appearances of the good in part because what makes them mere appearances is the fact that they ought to be evaluated from a reflective perspective, it is indeed natural for the scholastic view to identify intentions with judgments of the good. However, this kind of identification has been the subject of various criticisms.

We can think of an apparent continuum of behavior and actions that starts from the most fully deliberated actions of human beings in one extreme and ends at the other extreme at the movement of the “dumb” animals. The scholastic view seems to be at its best in dealing with one end of the spectrum: fully deliberated actions performed by reasonable agents at their most reflective moments. I hope to show, however, that it can also account for a wide range of human behavior that includes merely intentional and merely voluntary actions. However, as we approach the other end of the spectrum, the scholastic view might seem to be in a poor position; in fact, it may seem that it is completely inadequate to explain the actions of the perverse, the odd or mentally ill, children, and other mammals. And one could argue that a view that tries to understand human action in a way that cannot accommodate these instances of human and nonhuman action cannot claim success. After all, the fact that there is such a continuum seems to speak in favor of a unified explanation for the whole spectrum of animal behavior.

The last three chapters try to show how the scholastic view can reach far into this spectrum and, perhaps, to the very end of it. At first, it might seem that the troubles for the scholastic view start much before the end of the spectrum.

Not all the systems mentioned in this book have been shown to be complete, only the ones for which a method has been described for converting trees into proofs. In this section, a more powerful strategy for showing completeness will be presented that applies to a wider range of propositional modal logics. It is a version of the so-called Henkin or canonical model technique, which is widely used in logic. This method is more abstract than the method of Chapter 8, and it is harder to adapt to systems that include quantifiers and identity, but a serious student of modal logic should become familiar with it. The fundamental idea on which the method is based is the notion of a maximally consistent set. Maximally consistent sets play the role of possible worlds. They completely describe the facts of a world by including either A or ∼A (but never both) for each sentence A in the language.

The Lindenbaum Lemma

A crucial step in demonstrating completeness with such maximally consistent sets is to prove the famous Lindenbaum Lemma. To develop that result, some concepts and notation need to be introduced. When M is an infinite set of sentences, ‘M, A’ indicates the result of adding A to the set M, and ‘M ⊢S C’ indicates that there is a finite list H formed from some of the members of M, such that H ⊢S C. Set M′ is an extension of M, provided that every member of M is a member of M′.

The completeness of quantified modal logics can be shown with the tree method by modifying the strategy used in propositional modal logic. Section 8.4 explains how to use trees to demonstrate the completeness of propositional modal logics S that result from adding one or more of the following axioms to K: (D), (M), (4), (B), (5), (CD). In this chapter, the tree method will be extended to quantified modal logics based on the same propositional modal logics. The reader may want to review Sections 8.3 and 8.4 now, since details there will be central to this discussion. The fundamental idea is to show that every S-valid argument is provable in S in two stages. Assuming that H / C is S-valid, use the Tree Model Theorem (of Section 8.3) to prove that the S-tree for H / C closes. Then use the method for converting closed S-trees into proofs to construct a proof in S of H / C from the closed S-tree. This will show that any S-valid argument has a proof in S, which is, of course, what the completeness of S amounts to.

The Quantified Tree Model Theorem

In order to demonstrate completeness for quantified modal logics, a quantified version of the Tree Model Theorem will be developed here. This will also be useful in showing the correctness of trees for the quantified systems.

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the adequacy of many of the modal logics presented in this book. Remember, a system S is adequate when the arguments that can be proven in S and the S-valid arguments are exactly the same. When S is adequate, its rules pick out exactly the arguments that are valid according to its semantics, and so it has been correctly formulated. A proof of the adequacy of S typically breaks down into two parts, namely, to show (Soundness) and (Completeness).

1. (Soundness) If H ⊢S C then H ⊧S C.

2. (Completeness) If H ⊧S C then H ⊢S C.

Soundness of K

Let us begin by showing the soundness of K, the simplest propositional modal logic. We want to show that if an argument is provable in K (H ⊢K C), then it is K-valid (H ⊧K C). So assume that there is a proof in K of an argument H / C. Suppose for a moment that the proof involves only the rules of propositional logic (PL). The proof can be written in horizontal notation as a sequence of arguments, each of which is justified by (Hyp) or follows from previous entries in the sequence by one of the rules (Reit), (CP), (MP), or (DN). For example, here is a simple proof in PL of p→q / ∼∼p→q, along with the corresponding sequence of arguments written in horizontal form at the right.