Abstract
Despite its apparent ubiquity, philosophers have not talked much about sentimental value. One exception is Anthony Hatzimoysis (The Philosophical Quarterly 53:373–379, 2003). Those who wish to take sentimental value seriously are likely to make use of Christine Korsgaard’s ideas on two distinctions in value. In this paper I show that Hatzimoysis has misrendered Korsgaard’s insight in his discussion of sentimental value. I begin by briefly summarising Korsgaard’s idea before showing how Hatzimoysis’ treatment of it is mistaken.
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Notes
Kagan (1998) pursues the same line.
The meaning of ‘sentimental’ here is its everyday and pre-theoretical one (the one commonly referred to on Antiques Roadshow), rather than the one in the sentimentalist tradition in metaethics.
In the sentence this quotation comes from the charge of misrepresentation is also levelled at what Hatzimoysis calls the ‘orthodox view’—the view that all final value is intrinsic value and vice versa.
Hatzimoysis (2003: 377) presents his quotation thus ‘(Korsgaard, p. 264)’ and suggests that it is from the original appearance of the article in The Philosophical Review. Given that the page numbers of its appearance there are 169–195, this must be a mistake. His page reference to the example corresponds to its appearance in Korsgaard’s (1996) Creating the Kingdom of Ends, so I assume that this is where the quotation is in fact taken from.
References
Hatzimoysis, A. (2003). Sentimental value. The Philosophical Quarterly, 53, 373–379.
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Korsgaard, C. (1983). Two distinctions in goodness. The Philosophical Review, 92, 169–195.
Korsgaard, C. (1996). Creating the kingdom of ends. Cambridge: CUP.
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Acknowledgement
Thanks to Brad Hooker, Debbie Roberts, and an anonymous referee for their help in improving this article.
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Fletcher, G. On Hatzimoysis on Sentimental Value. Philosophia 37, 149–152 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9142-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9142-8