Abstract

At the first Online Philosophy Conference back in 2006, I offered some pretty thorough comments on Joshua Knobe and Erica Roedder's x-phi studies on valuing. While they suggested that our concept of valuing involves moral considerations, I argue here that we can explain the observed asymmetries in attribution of values by appeal to the Principle of Charity, even if the concept of valuing is purely psychological and descriptive. Roughly, to make sense of people with conflicted attitudes, we tacitly attribute to them background attitudes that make them come out as lovers of the good as well as believers of truths and as rational as possible.