Mattering and Objective Value
摘要
In this chapter Hauskeller focus on the notion of “objective value”, which most if not all objectivist and hybrid theories of meaning rely on. Prompted by Guy Kahane’s interpretation of our alleged “cosmic significance” and Richard Hare’s analysis of what it means for something to ‘matter, he explores different attempts to make the notion of objective value intelligible, for instance by invoking an “impartial” perspective that we can adopt to determine what is objectively valuable and what is not. However, the supposedly impartial perspective turns out to be simply a third-person perspective, which has no more epistemological authority than the first-person perspective that the subjectivist prioritises. Hauskeller concludes that the notion of objective value remains obscure, which poses a serious and yet unsolved problem for the objectivist.