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Professor Moon Has Very Ably demonstrated a serious inadequacy of the predominant modernist and positivistic approach to value theory: its treatment of value statements merely in terms of what such statements or judgments reflexively imply in regard to the motives, intentions, feelings, experiences, and actions of the persons who make such statements, rather than in terms of what those statements impute to, or predicate of, their value-ascribed objects. Thus the author suggests, I think appropriately, that a normative statement is truly “normative,” or has axiological status, only for its objective, not its subjective significance. That is to say, only by recognizing what is being asserted non-reflexively in a value statement can we speak of values in a meaningful, normative (i.e., not merely descriptive) sense and ascribe to them truth or falsity. Short of this, we in fact deny the very possibility of making value judgments and certainly the whole enterprise of specifically normative theory. |
