Prof Victor Tadros’ Talk Series: Goodness and Valuing

Here are three central questions in ethical and moral philosophy. What is good? What ought we to value? What ought we to do? Moral philosophers have mainly focused on the last question. They have also explored the relationship between answers to the first question and the last question. Some think that what we ought to do depends solely on what is good or best. Others think that there is a more complex relationship between what is good and what we ought to do – sometimes we are permitted or required to do something worse than some available alternative.

Philosophers have had less to say about the second question. Perhaps some assume that first question and the second question are identical; or they think that the answers to these questions are necessarily the same, as the answer to one is grounded in the answer to the other. As we will see, there relationship between these questions is more complex than that. And there is also a complex relationship between our answer to the second question and the third question. My aim is to begin to outline that complexity both because the relationship between goodness and the norms of valuation is an important topic in itself, and because it provides the groundwork of a general theory of moral conduct.