As a latecomer to philosophy (I waited until retirement, after 30 odd years of working, before re-engaging actively with philosophy, both contemporary and historical) I have had to play catch-up. It meant reading a lot of stuff I'd missed after graduating college (and moving out into the world), and learning (and re-learning) things I had otherwise forgotten -- or missed entirely. It meant wrestling with philosophers at a depth I hadn't engaged in for decades despite having kept up a passing interest in the field, reading sporadically when I had the time. But at a certain point we start to feel caught up and, while I am certainly no expert in all fields, I have been pretty well steeped in one, Ethics, a philosophical concern that's interested me since my late undergraduate days and I now hold some well-formed views on the subject.

No, I don't claim to be an expert on every ethical theory or meta-ethical account out there but I am pretty well steeped in the stuff by now. And have reached a point where there is not that much that's new to me to be discovered -- or at least it no longer seems like there is. There are still fine points to be explored and domains to be further explicated, and areas on the edges of ethics which remain fuzzy in my own mind. I'm particularly interested in the nexus of the subjective, as in how WE feel about things, and the objective, as in how publicly available evidence tells us things are. Can evidence imply oughts for us, though, contra the likes of David Hume? I think it can and have got to the point where I would argue that, in fact, facts are not divorceable from values as Hume supposed, but are intricately connected to them. In the late Hilary Putnam's words, facts are entangled with values and vice versa.

Putnam argued that you can't take values out of fact claims, nor can you take such claims from the valuational sort. Aside from the obvious here, that we value things in the world, thus facts, as claims about what's true about the world, are relevant to every valuational claim we make, there is the further important point he made that fact claims are, themselves, valuational at bottom. Truth claims, which apply to facts, are valuational and are, especially so in complex matters, like theorizing, as we see in the sciences (the quintessential domain of facts). As Putnam reminded us, theories in science are not just about what's true in the simple sense of correspondence between statements and the things they are statements about. Science deals with elaborate stories concerning how things are what they are, how they come to be and how, when we meddle with them, they will respond. Scientific theories are not like simple claims of fact, confirmable or disconfirmable by taking a look. They involve judgments about what theories are the cleanest, the least encumbered by intellectual and irrelevant (or perhaps higher risk) detritus. They are about which theories are simplest, most elegant, most consistent with other things we hold to be the case and so require the least alteration of other beliefs we already hold. Claims made in and via theories about the world are susceptible to judgments about their coherence, their elegance, their simplicity . . . and these ARE value terms.

Science, as the pursuit of knowledge about the tangible world, the world we can observe via our senses, is about developing beliefs which fit with things we already believe we have reason to take as true. And judgment, the assessment of our reasons as worth our belief or not, is no less valuational than our moral claims. It's just that scientific pursuits, the search for truths about the world, rely on different facts, the publicly observable sort which others can see and agree to, or not, as well.

Moral truths, which also involve observations, look elsewhere though, i.e., they oblige us to consider what is the case about ourselves and, by extension, about others who are selves like us. Considering moral claims of truth requires our attention to a concept, namely that of selfhood, a concept that is not, itself, observable (no concepts are!) and which is represented in discourse by words that refer to something not found as a simple observable in the world. The concept is, itself, the referent here. We see persons as selves, of course, but not only in their physical appearance to us, even if it's through physical appearance, observation of them in action, that we see them as something more than walking and talking pieces of meat, i.e., that we see persons as well as the bodies that move about and make noise.

Moral valuation is about this then, the facts of personhood. It is about what and who we take persons to be and that means about how they relate to their world, including to others like themselves who share it with them. To see persons is to see a sort of being in the world that is more than the physical manifestations of it. But this doesn't mean their presence and activity as persons are not also facts for us in the way the color of the sea or the sky, is a fact, or the rain that is falling or isn't is, or the sun that is shining, or not, is. It just means that different factors matter in recognizing and assessing persons as referents in our world. It means that we see, through the physical aspects of their presence, something else and to the extent that we do we have facts we can agree or disagree about.

Persons and their status, their condition, how they stand in relation to their world, are facts in that world no less than the other furniture of the world, is. Moral valuation is thus about facts, too. Facts and values are entangled and this is always so. We cannot have a fact without valuing the claims we can make about it, even that it is or is not the case (i.e., one of those things we call "a fact"), nor can we value without facts to be valued. To have facts, to have truths and their opposite, we must be able to value our claims about what is the case, too.

Ethics, moral valuing, in the end rests on claims about which we may argue and disagree, no less than claims about the nature of the world we can see with our eyes, smell with our nose, hear with our ears, etc. Finding agreement about ethics, no less than about the observable sensory world, rests on sharing beliefs about how things are, in the case of ethics that there are things about us that are not simply reducible to the sensory inputs that constitute our observations. It's about finding agreement about motives and intentions and which are to be preferred and which disfavored. Facts are not only reducible to what is seen or not seen but also to how we understand things and this requires conceptualization and the ability to hold and share concepts, notions about things. This cannot happen if we could not value in the first place.

Truth claims are value claims, made possible by our capacity to sort and relate things to other things and, most importantly, to ourselves. And among all the things we value or can value are the selves we take ourselves to be. There are facts about what it is to be a better or worse self just as there are facts to be discerned about what it is to be a better or worse thing or situation to have or bring about. All that's needed is agreement among the referrers, those engaged in identifying and speaking about the facts. And agreement which, when achieved in the case of worldly observation depends on shared sensory inputs (or the belief that they are shared), depends, in the case of concepts, on shared understanding of these, i.e., of the concepts we construct with language in the shared community of language speakers. And, as concepts, they exist on the same level as the concepts we have which organize our stimuli and so make of them our world.

All the world, which is discovered through our capacity to turn our sensory inputs into concepts (and which has no existence as a world outside of that), rests on valuing, no less than it rests on having the inputs that we collect and organize into worldly stuff. Moral valuing, as an activity we engage in, is just a sub-species of this valuing activity generally. It cannot be peeled off from the rest and so be discarded as mere subjective fantasy while we continue to take seriously claims we make about the world we observe through our senses.

This is what I've come to see by spending the past few years rediscovering the thinkers and thoughts that once consumed me but which I set aside when I left the university and entered the world. Valuing is a -- no it is the -- fundamental foundation of rationality itself and, more, of our particular human capacity to have and live in a world rather than in a mere environment of stimuli as other creatures do.