Tutorial # 3. Value. Discussion Questions

After having read Isaiah Berlin, “On the Pursuit of the Ideal,” New York Review of Books, 17 March 1988, pp. 11-18., think about these questions.

• Compare “Inter Milan is a better football team than AC Milan”, “Vodka is good”, “Miriam is a good person”. What’s the difference? How ‘good’ is used in these statements?
• Are the objects of value subjective psychological states or objective states of the world?
• Do we value money, sex or power for their own sake?
• Are there intrinsic values? Think about knowledge and scientific endeavours highly abstract (e.g. certain branches of math)?
  
• Is pain intrinsically bad?
• Can we observe values?
• Can we measure values? Can we measure how good a person is?
• Can values such as liberty and safety be commensurable? For example, can you promote personal freedoms at the same time as attempting to protect national security (e.g., through anti-terror legislation)? Can you promote freedom of choice while protecting the sanctity of life (e.g., in issues of euthanasia, abortion, and animal rights)?
• Can we resolve a disagreement about who is the hottest: Johnny Depp or Cristiano Ronaldo? Why?
• What’s the relationship between desirability and value?
• Where do values come from?
• What’s the difference between values and norms? Consider for instance the claims: “It is good to give to charity”, “One ought to give to charity”.
• When are human relationship false? Think of the quote from T.S. Elliot.
• Is Berlin’s confidence on the objectivity of values in a pluralist schema justified? Why/why not?
• Berlin describes two factors that shaped human history in the 20th century. What were they? Do you think he is right?
  
• Berlin mentions relativism. What do you think about what he says? What’s the difference with pluralism?
• At one point Berlin says: "any study of society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands. The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for...but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solution of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements—and so on, forever—and unpredictably." (p. 14) What does he mean?
  
• Berlin begins his final section, VI, with a question: "If the old perennial belief in the possibility of realizing the ultimate harmony is a fallacy, and the positions of the thinkers I have appealed to—Machiavelli, Vico, Herder, Herzen— are valid,…[then] ‘What is to be done?’ How do we choose between possibilities What and how much must we sacrifice to what? (p. 17)." How would you try to answer that question?