Personal Value

Certain things, like justice, have impersonal value; other things, like your parents, carry personal value: their value is related to you, and they are, in a sense, good or bad for you. Rønnow-Rasmussen examines the notion of 'good-for', and provides a new analysis of personal value that justifies its inclusion within our classical value taxonomy.

Certain things, like justice, have impersonal value. Other things, like your parents, carry personal values: they have value for you. Besides whatever value they have, they are valuable to you. The philosophical literature 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. This is a stimulating and vivid area of philosophical research, but it has tended to monopolize the notion of ''good-for'', linking it necessarily to welfare or well-being. Since these more or less well-grounded pieces of advice are seldom accompanied by an analysis of the notion of ''good-for'', there is a need for such an analysis. Rønnow-Rasmussen remedies this need, by offering a novel way of analyzing the notion of personal value. He 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 Rønnow-Rasmussen makes substatial contributions to a number of issues, including hedonism vs. preferentialism, subjectivism vs. objectivism, value bearer monism vs. value bearer pluralism, and the wrong kind of reason problem -- all of which are much debated among today''s value theorists.