Value Magnetism: Why Conceptual Engineering Requires Objective Values
Conceptual ethics concerns the question: what concepts ought we use? The goal of this paper is to answer a related foundational question: what determines what concepts we ought to use? According to one view, it is our values — our goals, interests, purposes, etc. — that determinate what concepts we ought to use. Call this the subjective value determinacy thesis (SVT). In this paper, I take a critical look at SVT. While SVT is intuitive, it cannot make sense of conceptual disputes that are resolved by factors that are partly independent of our values. On my view, what concept we ought to use will be settled partly on the basis of moral or political values that we do not always possess. This is the objective value determinacy thesis (OVT). Our values do not settle what concepts we ought to use; rather, they settle what options are considered relevant for the purposes of normative deliberation. One surprising consequence of OVT is that many conceptual disputes that are ostensibly non-moral — like engineering the concept of truth — have a fundamentally moral basis.
