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Sharon Hewitt Rawlette
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The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness Paperback – June 25, 2016

by Sharon Hewitt Rawlette (Author), Thomas Nagel (Foreword)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 9 ratings
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Winner of New York University's Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award

For the past hundred years, ethical theorists have primarily looked for value in external states of affairs or reduced value to a projection of the mind onto these same external states of affairs. The result, unsurprisingly, is widespread antirealism about ethics.

In this book, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette turns our metaethical gaze inward and dares us to consider that value, rather than being something “out there,” is a quality woven into the very fabric of our conscious experience, in a highly objective way. On this view, our experiences of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, ecstasy and despair are not signs of value or disvalue. They are instantiations of value and disvalue. When we feel pleasure, we are feeling intrinsic goodness itself. And it is from such feelings, argues Rawlette, that we derive the basic content of our normative concepts—that we understand what it means for something to be intrinsically good or bad.

Rawlette thus defends a version of analytic descriptivism. And argues that this view, unlike previous theories of moral realism, has the resources to explain where our concept of intrinsic value comes from and how we know when it objectively applies, as well as why we sometimes make mistakes in applying it. She defends this view against G. E. Moore’s Open Question Argument as well as shows how these basic facts about intrinsic value can ground facts about instrumental value and value “all things considered.” Ultimately, her view offers us the possibility of a robust metaphysical and epistemological justification for many of our strongest moral convictions.

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  1. Print length
    252 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    June 25, 2016
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 0.63 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1534768017
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1534768017
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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"[E]xceptionally bold and philosophically absorbing...a real achievement...the kind of muscular, intuitively motivated philosophical stance that brings the subject to life." - from the foreword by Thomas Nagel

About the Author

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette earned her PhD in philosophy from New York University in 2008, studying under Thomas Nagel and Sharon Street and writing the bulk of her dissertation while a pensionnaire étrangère at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. From 2008 to 2010 she was Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethics at Brandeis University before leaving academia to devote herself to writing and cottage farming.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 25, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 252 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1534768017
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1534768017
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.63 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette

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Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia.

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4.7 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Binod Rijal
    5.0 out of 5 stars Genuine work of art......well done.
    Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2020
    Verified Purchase
    I had just completed Thomas Nagel's 'The view from nowhere' and wanted to look into other books on phenomenology. Sharon's book came up under that search. I read some of the pages that amazon allows as sample download. Instantaneously the book got me hooked. The forward is written by Mr Nagel himself. I bought the kindle version and combed through the book and was absolutely delighted to learn valuable ideas. The best part for me was that Sharon quotes several authors and the titles of their books as she is going through her narrative. This gave me further opportunity to look into those other authors to see they had to say about phenomenal consciousness.
    What this book did for me is it added six other books that I have in my reading pipeline on phenomenogy....I appreciate the time she has put into this. This is a genuine work of art......Thank you
    8 people found this helpful
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  • Michael Coughlin
    5.0 out of 5 stars A pioneering case for objective value and morality grounded in the felt qualities of conscious experience
    Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2016
    The Feeling of Value is a remarkable and exemplary work of moral philosophy and philosophy generally. It is ambitious in a way that few works of philosophy are, and manages to fulfil its large ambitions to provide a comprehensive defence of objective moral value along with a complementary moral worldview. It asks and answers deep and fundamental questions in moral philosophy: 'What makes it the case that our concept of goodness objectively applies to certain things in the world?' and 'How can we know to which things it objectively applies?' I first came across The Feeling of Value as a postgraduate student specialising in moral and political philosophy, and I hope I convey in this review how refreshing I found it. It's a work at the intersection of the philosophy of consciousness and ethics, two subfields in philosophy where scepticism about both the subject-matter and even the subjects themselves have been dominant in modern Western philosophy until quite recently. The Feeling of Value represents a rejection of scepticism, reductionism, nihilism and other such positions in a way that is intellectually satisfying and genuinely persuasive, even to someone sceptically-minded, as I was.

    The central claim of The Feeling of Value is that goodness and badness are felt qualities of our conscious experiences, like colours or sounds. Just as we come to know the properties of sound and colour directly in experience, Rawlette argues we know goodness and badness in just the same way, as pleasantness and unpleasantness, respectively. Philosophers have a technical term for the qualities that constitute our experiences: they are 'qualia'. There are 'colour qualia', 'sound qualia', and others, but the kind of qualia Rawlette is interested in she dubs 'normative qualia'. 'Normative' is another philosophers' term that describes properties relating to norms: in the most important case, moral properties.

    Rawlette argues that the normative qualia she identifies provide all the objective moral authority required to ground the truth of moral claims: in other words, to vindicate moral realism. She argues that we can come to see this by just considering normative qualia as we know them in conscious experience. A terrible bodily pain or the joy of a good conversation, for example, can provide us at least in some cases with reasons to undertake certain actions: to take medicine or to spend more time in someone's company. Crucially for moral realism, Rawlette argues that we have no special reasons to promote or avoid our own good or bad experiences, as opposed to anyone else's: that if we were able to experience others' normative qualia as clearly as we experience our own, we would realise that they have no more or less value than ours and so provide no less reason for action than ours. In other words, our tendency to be moved more by our own pleasant or unpleasant experiences can have no principled justification, but can be based only on ignorance or other contingent reasons (like knowing how to promote our own pleasant experiences better than others'). Moreover, the goodness and badness of normative qualia exist objectively: that is, independently of anyone's judgements about them. (There is a defence of objectivity as judgment-independence rather than the more commonly accepted mind-independence that I cannot go into here.)

    All these considerations lead Rawlette to an ethical position that is nowadays very unfashionable and unpopular: hedonistic utilitarianism. The hedonistic utilitarian claims that pleasure and displeasure are the sole metric by which we should morally appraise all actions: the best actions are the ones that promote a maximum of net pleasure; the worst actions, just the opposite. One of the reasons hedonistic utilitarianism is so unfashionable is because of how dramatically it clashes with our common-sense intuitions. For example, Robert Nozick came up with the 'experience machine' thought experiment, in which anyone could choose to enter into their own maximally pleasurable virtual reality world powered by a futuristic supercomputer. Nozick suggests that hedonistic utilitarians must say that there is overwhelming reason to enter such a simulation; but that this is just too counterintuitive - that no-one should really want to enter the simulation - and so hedonistic utilitarianism must be rejected. Rawlette goes into a long discussion of this and other cases like it, and argues that there may be more hedonistic reasons not to use the experience machine than Nozick realised, alongside other arguments to mitigate what looks like a strong reason to reject hedonism.

    I have only provided a small glimpse of the wealth of arguments presented in The Feeling of Value. As may already be clear, it is at times a technical and difficult work of philosophy. However, this is helped by Rawlette's prose style, which is conversational and conveys a passion and conviction for her arguments and subject. I think both philosophers and non-philosophers who are interested in the deepest questions of moral philosophy and dedicated enough to pursuing them will take a lot from it. As its aims were so broad, inevitably there are a few areas where more needs to be said. For me, this was most conspicuously true in Rawlette's discussion of moral agency and its relation to normative qualia. 'Agency' is another technical term used by philosophers used to describe the part or parts of us that make us morally accountable: typically it is taken to involve our ability to choose, to reason, to make decisions, to entertain different courses of action, and so forth. Rawlette does not spend very much time on this topic or the related topic of free will. I see no reason to think why Rawlette's work can't be extended for anyone who would like to see more on this or other topics. In any case, The Feeling of Value is a wonderful achievement and I hope it will be influential in moral philosophy.
    8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Jacob
    5.0 out of 5 stars Original and important
    Reviewed in Australia on March 19, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    Great book.
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