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The Limitations of Speaking About 'What Really Matters' in Terms of Value

Authors: Strammer Philip

Year: 2022

Type of publication: ostatní - konference, koncert

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	The Limitations of Speaking About 'What Really Matters' in Terms of Value	In my paper, I will subject to a critical discussion the concept of value as it has currency in large parts of contemporary moral philosophy. To this end, I will proceed in a twofold way: Firstly, I will develop a brief sketch of the historical development of the concept of value as a distinctively moral-philosophical terminus technicus out of the concept of value as it played a central role in the bourgeois economic theory of the 18th and 19th century. In doing so, I will trace how the concept of moral value has retained some vital features of its economic origins, above all its tendency to present what is subsumed under it as reified, comparable and substitutable. By reverting to Kant’s well-known distinction between relative and absolute worth, a distinction that can be understood to mark the radical break between an economic and a moral way of thinking, I will then transition to my second concern, namely to sketch a brief phenomenology of the language involved in talking about what is of greatest moral importance – of what really matters – to us. In doing so, I will illustrate how the ‘jargon of value’, precisely due to its economical, objectifying overtones, does not help us to get a better understanding of these phenomena but rather obstructs us from doing so.