This paper is concerned with the attempt to base a general theory of value on an idealist metaphysics. The most explicit and fully developed instance of this approach is, of course, found in Kant, on whom I shall concentrate, though I will also suggest that the account I offer of Kant has application to the later German idealists. While the core of the paper is devoted to commentary on Kant, what I thereby wish to make plausible is the idea that Kant's endeavour to base a general conception of value on an idealist metaphysics is of contemporary, not merely historical, interest. Specifically, my suggestion will be that a correct understanding of what is demanded by our ordinary, pre-philosophical grasp of value shows there is reason to think that something along the lines of Kant's transcendental idealism (or, like absolute idealism, developed from it) is required for a fully adequate metaphysics of value. Essential to the case I will make is a distinction between Kant's moral theory and his broader account of value, my claim being that, whether or not Kantian moral theory is ultimately dependent on any metaphysics, the broader conception of value to be found in Kant cannot be detached from his doctrine of transcendental idealism.

It is widely held that the normativity of truth and meaning puts a severe constraint on acceptable theories of these phenomena. This constraint is so severe, some would say, as to rule out purely ‘naturalistic’ or ‘factual’ accounts of them. In particular, it is commonly supposed that the deflationary view of truth and the use conception of meaning, in so far as they are articulated in entirely non-normative terms, must for that reason be inadequate.

I shall mean by ‘cosmic imagination’, first, the mental appropriating of objects, events, processes or patterns perceived in nature-atlarge (or ‘widest nature’), so as to apply them in articulating our own scheme of values (as we seek to establish, or to revise, these), and in our quest for self-understanding. I shall apply the phrase also to the synthesising activity of the mind in our appraising of items in wider nature itself or as a whole – whether we believe nature to have no value save what we choose to confer or project on it, or take it to have a value that sets limits on our appropriation, benign or exploitative.

It is unusual for an academic philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to discuss the subject of spirituality. Not so long ago this fact might have been attributed to a general view of philosophy as the practice of conceptual analysis and the theory of logic. However in a period when the discipline has developed to a point where almost every aspect of human life has been made the subject of some department of ‘applied philosophy’ it could hardly be said that the subject of spirituality, in so far as discussion of it may have normative implications, lies outside the sphere of reasonable philosohical enquiry. Yet it is almost entirely neglected.

By ‘a blank’, let us mean a situation including no actual existents: nothing beyond such platonic realities as that three groups of five apples, were there to exist such groups, would contain fifteen apples in total. Now, why is there a world and not a blank?

Oscar Wilde remarked in The Picture of Dorian Gray that, ‘It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Over three centuries of natural science show that, at least as far as the study of the natural world is concerned, Wilde's epigram is itself shallow. Weber used the term ‘disenchantment’ to mean the elimination of magic from the modern scientific world view: the intellectual rationalisation of the world embodied in modern science has made it impossible to believe in magic or an invisible God or gods, without a ‘sacrifice of the intellect’.

In our post-modern cultural climate we are often told that reality is value-free. Indeed sometimes it is even said to be fact-free. Yet almost all philosophers have been deeply concerned with matters of value, in addition to their other main pre-occupation: that is the nature of truth and our knowledge of it. The question therefore arises: why should these two – good and truth – be so powerfully connected? And why should this business of value continue to exert the hold on philosophers that it evidently does?

In this paper I shall speak sympathetically of a hedonistic theory of intrinsic value which, ignoring any other such theories, I shall simply call the hedonistic theory of value. How far I am finally committed to it will partly appear at the end.

If we cannot agree that evaluations are judgements that both describe things (ascribing properties to them) and express sentiments, we lack any shared understanding of a common topic. If we ever come to agree how the describing and expressing relate, we shall lose a debate. Suppose that evaluation is a mode of description essentially expressive of sentiment, and that some evaluations can be known to be true: then there must exist properties of such a kind that they can be apprehended only from appropriately affective points of view. Alternatively, it may be that evaluation involves some element distinct from description, so that, in principle, one could always accept the descriptive core of an evaluation while distancing oneself from a non-descriptive element that makes it evaluative. We may distinguish the two kinds of view as lumping, or descriptivist-cum-expressivist, and splitting, or descriptivist-plus-expressivist. Both ascribe to evaluations an expressive aspect as well as a descriptive content; what is at issue is whether the former is integral to the latter, or detachable from it.

My topic is the relation between the right and the good. I introduce it by relating some aspects of the debate between various British intuitionists in the first half of the present century.

In Principia Ethica (1903) G. E. Moore claimed that to be right is to be productive of the greatest good. He wrote ‘This use of “right”, as denoting what is good as a means, whether or not it be also good as an end, is indeed the use to which I shall confine the word’ (p. 18). By the time he wrote his Ethics (1912, e.g. p. 6) he seems to have weakened his position, and offers conduciveness to the good not as a definition of ‘right’ but as an account of the one and only property that makes acts right. Even if it be the only right-making property, conduciveness to the good will not be identical with the right-ness that it makes.

The theme announced for these lectures is the philosophy of value. It may seem that moral philosophy, along with aesthetics, the philosophy of art, the philosophy of environment … ought to be a proper part of the philosophy of value. I have chosen mottoes to illustrate the dangers of that supposition.

Integration and coherence are central values in human existence. It would be a serious objection to any proposed way of life that it led to us being alienated or cut off from others or from some importan part of ourselves. Morality, with the strenuous demands it makes on us, is one area in which alienation is both particularly threatening and peculiarly undesirable. If morality cuts us off from some important part of ourselves then it appears unattractive, and if it cuts us off from others then it seems self-defeating. While there are few philosophers who take the radical view that morality is, by its very nature, an alienating force, a more common complaint has been that some particular moral theories should be rejected because the picture of moral thought which they offer inevitably leads to the alienation of moral agents. The main target of criticism has been consequentialism, but some deontological theories, especially Kantianism, have also come under attack.

Kant claims that the judgement of taste, the judgement that some particular is beautiful, exhibits two ‘peculiarities’. First:

[t]he judgement of taste determines its object in respect of delight (as a thing of beauty) with a claim to the agreement of every one, just as if it were objective.

How are the beautiful and the good related? A popular answer to this ancient question takes it that to call something beautiful is just to bring it under the most general term of favourable aesthetic assessment and that since the good is in general what we reflectively want then, crudely put, the beautiful is the good's aesthetic dimension. Following this train of thought, we avoid the suggestion that there is any intimate connection between the beautiful and some more narrowly conceived moral or ethical good, since that is, again crudely put, restricted to the good's practical dimension, a dimension supposedly alien to aesthetic concerns.

The view that matters of fact and matters of value are categorically distinct, and that any credible account of ethics must begin from an acknowledgement of that distinction, has been a constant topic of debate in analytical moral philosophy throughout the twentieth century. It is not, however, as simple as it may at first appear to establish an uncontroversial articulation of the view under discussion, because in the course of the debate's evolution that view has been defined in a number of very different and not obviously equivalent ways.