Personal Value

Certain things, like justice, have impersonal value. Other things, like your parents, carry personal values: they have value for you. Besides whatever value they have, they are valuable to you. The philosophical literature as well as non-philosophical literature is inundated with suggestions about the kinds of thing that are good for us or, if it is a negative personal value, what is bad for us. This is a stimulating and vivid area of philosophical research, but it has tended to monopolize the notion of 'good-for', linking it necessarily to welfare or well-being. Since these more or less well-grounded pieces of advice are seldom accompanied by an analysis of the notion of 'good-for', there is a need for such an analysis. Ronnow-Rasmussen remedies this need, by offering a novel way of analyzing the notion of personal value. He defends the idea that we have reason to expand our classical value taxonomy with these personal values. By fine-tuning a pattern of value analysis which has roots in the writings of the Austrian philosopher Franz Bretano, this sort of analysis will come to cover personal values, too. In addition, Ronnow-Rasmussen makes substantial contributions to a number of issues, including hedonism vs. preferentialism, subjectivism vs. objectivism, value bearer monism vs. value bearer pluralism, and the wrong kind of reason problem -- all of which are much debated among today's value theorists.

Toni Ronnow-Rasmussen is a Professor in Practical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Lund University. He has co-edited several philosophy anthologies, and he is the author of Logic, Facts and Representation -- An Examination of R. M. Hare's Moral Philosophy. From 2004 to 2010 he was co-editor of the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and he is presently Consulting Editor for the International Journal of Wellbeing and a member of the Editorial board for the Journal of Applied Ethics and Philosophy. In recent years he has published articles in value theory and metaethics in different international philosophy journals.