Josiah asked:

What is the most paramount value (freedom, life, etc.) and why is this value the most paramount?

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There may be no single paramount value, simply because there is no single standpoint from which
we can judge. Roughly we can see the world in two ways, from our personal or subjective point of
view and from the impersonal or objective point of view. The problem is that each of these makes
different demands on us. For example from my subjective point of view my freedom, say, is the most
important value, moreover for each person their freedom is most important to them. But from the
objective standpoint equality is one of the most important values. We would feel hard done by if either
of these is subsumed over the other, that one is given priority. Somewhere an injustice would have
been done. But how then are we to combine the two values into a complementary account?

To make the situation even more difficult: there appears to be no third standpoint from which we can
say that the personal or the impersonal is most important. Both the personal and the impersonal
make equally forceful demands of us.

So in actual fact there may be a plurality of values. Would this mean that there would be
circumstances where the multiple, but fundamental values come into conflict? As the example above
shows this is certainly possible and perhaps also common.

But it is hard to take comfort in this. If we are in a situation where whatever we do we cannot avoid
wrong doing it is no use saying to ourselves "well this is just an unavoidable consequence of my
world view, So I'd do well to sit back and hope for the best". So what should we do?

If you are not happy with idea of the multiplicity of value, then perhaps you may think we have to
change our world view, or at least our ethical conceptions. Each of these options would however
involve a radical reorientation in our thinking. Lets consider them.

The above description is one heavily influenced by modern analysis of ethics (by modern I mean over
the last 400 years). The ancient Greeks had a different conception. Aristotle for example thought of
the paramount value in terms of a human being excelling in the particularly human activities, what he
called eudaimoniabut which can be read as fulfilment or living well. The ethical life would then be one
aimed towards living the good life. More recently (I mean around 1960) the French philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas suggested that we need to progress in our thinking, to move beyond the accounts
offered by Plato and Aristotle. For Levinas the subjective/ Objective divide is one that originates in a
conception of Totality, an attempt to account for everything in the world in one all-encompassing
theory. Opposed to this Levinas offers an account of Infinity, that which could never be accounted for
in a theory. Levinas thinks (roughly) that other people constitute the Infinite. Other people are
transcendent of the personal/impersonal distinction I described earlier. In a sense for Levinas other
people are the paramount value.

1 am not sure that we can actually overcome the world view that incorporates the subjective and
objective description in these ways, or even at all! And if we can't then we may have to accept that
there is no paramount value, this would mean that we would have to rethink the way we approach
ethical situations, how we need to rethink this is the pressing demand.

Brian Tee
Dept of Philosophy
University of Sheffield