The Feeling of Value

Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness

By: Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

Narrated by: Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

This revolutionary treatise starts from one fundamental premise: that our phenomenal consciousness includes direct experience of value. For too long, ethical theorists have looked for value in external states of affairs or reduced value to a projection of the mind onto these same external states of affairs. The result, unsurprisingly, is widespread antirealism about ethics.

In this book, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette turns our metaethical gaze inward and dares us to consider that value, rather than being something “out there”, is a quality woven into the very fabric of our conscious experience, in a highly objective way. On this view, our experiences of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, ecstasy and despair are not signs of value or disvalue. They are instantiations of value and disvalue. When we feel pleasure, we are feeling intrinsic goodness itself. And it is from such feelings, argues Rawlette, that we derive the basic content of our normative concepts—that we understand what it means for something to be intrinsically good or bad.

Rawlette thus defends a version of analytic descriptivism and argues that this view, unlike previous theories of moral realism, has the resources to explain where our concept of intrinsic value comes from and how we know when it objectively applies, as well as why we sometimes make mistakes in applying it. She defends this view against G. E. Moore’s open-question argument as well as shows how these basic facts about intrinsic value can ground facts about instrumental value and value “all things considered”. Ultimately, her view offers us the possibility of a robust metaphysical and epistemological justification for many of our strongest moral convictions.

©2020 Sharon Hewitt Rawlette (P)2022 Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

Critic reviews

Winner of New York University's Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award

Incredible

Always great to have the author read their own book. This was a particular treat. A wonderful survey of related ideas and really challenging and interesting philosophical inquiry while being super accessible to an armchair philosopher.

Reading this helped me maximize my utility.

Wonderfully constructed reasoning

This book has been very much influenced by Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos but is a wonderful complement to that book. I highly recommend this volume.