The Emergence of Value: Human Norms in a Natural World

by Lawrence Cahoone

Overview

Philosophers, social scientists, and natural scientists argue over whether a natural scientific account of human being is compatible with uniquely human norms like ethics, justice, art, and the concern for truth. Many attempts at such an account have been tried and failed; others, like evolutionary psychology, have tried but stumbled. The Emergence of Value argues that a broad enough understanding of nature and human nature can incorporate human values and norms, without reducing them to inhuman processes. Lawrence Cahoone advances the position that nature includes values as well as facts, and human uniqueness is therefore compatible with nature, as it must be. To demonstrate this, we must consider multiple sciences and recent philosophical traditions and their impact on our notions of truth, morality, justice, and beauty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438494463
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	03/02/2024
Series:	SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lawrence Cahoone is Professor of Philosophy at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of The Orders of Nature; The Ends of Philosophy; and The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture, all published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

I. Approaching the Fact-Value Problem

1. Facts, Values, and Other Dichotomies

2. An Objective Relativism

3. Emergence in Nature

II. Nature and Human Judgments

4. The Feud over Purpose

5. Animal Minds, Theirs and Ours

6. Dimensions of Human Agency

7. Beyond the Naturalistic Fallacy

8. Values in Judgments

9. What Modernity Did to Values

III. Emergent Norms

10. Objective Morality

11. Truth and Logical Validity

12. Ethics of the Truly Social Animal

13. Political Rights, Political Wrongs

14. Art Works

15. The Good

Notes
Works Cited
Index