It's taken a while but here is the third draft of my earlier piece of the same name. It is now much longer so the only part reproduced here is the first third which roughly follows and expands upon the initial draft. When it's done I hope to have a substantial paper plugging in the gaps I left in Choice and Action, my small effort to address issues of moral philosophy (ethics) in book form. Unfortunately I concluded, after re-reading it that there was a significant element I had left seriously under elaborated. Perhaps it wasn't essential to the final conclusions of that book, but it forms a crucial underpinning for those conclusions.

This new version tries to take account of, and to answer, some of the criticisms offered by readers here of the first version. It is by no means complete yet, though. When finalized it will include the other two sections (I think), if they continue to seem to warrant inclusion, of course. The synopsis of the full paper follows:

That values and facts are logically distinct, neither implying the other in any actual judgment, is an old story since Hume, the resultant fact/value dichotomy challenging thinkers to account for the significance we typically apply to moral judgments ever since. Of course, no one thinks it unreasonable to look to one’s own needs or wants in most cases but, when following a moral course, we suppose we must find reasons to subordinate our own interests to those of others. But what fact makes this so? What is it about the world, or about some actions or objectives we may have within it, which provides us with reason to put our own interests aside? If valuing is nothing more than finding ways to satisfy our particular momentary needs (or expressing personal sentiments, as suggested by Hume), then the moral type of value must stand on quicksand—dependent on the next feeling we may have and the next. Moral valuing then can differ in no significant way from any other craving or desire we have, unrelated to any fact of the matter beyond the occurrence of the motivation itself and the fact in the world that motivates us. In what follows, I attempt to show that it is not facts that support our moral choices but a valuing mechanism which infuses our total experience and which joins with the representative power of language to make even discourse about facts, themselves, possible.