Value and Variance: Dancy, Moore, and Scanlon

Tuck, Peter Nicholas (2021) Value and Variance: Dancy, Moore, and Scanlon. Masters by Research thesis (MA), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis deals with two important but often conflicting strands in ethical theorising. The first of these is the analysis of what the terms ‘good’ or ‘valuable’ really refer to at all, while the second deals with how what is really good or valuable can change, depending on context. While analyses of value often privilege one strand at the expense of the other, this thesis considers two popular approaches to how the second sort of view can in fact be reconciled with the first: Jonathan Dancy’s Value Holism, and George Moore’s Organic Unity. While these two approaches, which deal with different parts of the real-yet-contextual problem, are often held to be incompatible, this thesis argues that accepting a particular view about the first question, namely Thomas Scanlon’s buck-passing view, allows us to go on to accept both Dancy and Moore’s views about the second. Since Dancy’s view contextualises the real goodness or badness of individual things, while Moore’s view contextualises the value of groups of valuable things, or even good and bad things together, the novel argument in this thesis that allows the acceptance of a combined view promises to provide a complete and internally consistent ‘holistic’ analysis of value.