The Arbutus Review • 2018 • Vol. 9, No. 1 • https://doi.org/10.18357/tar91201818381

Being as Value: The Phenomenology of Value
and the Ontology of Self-Realization in Charles

Taylor’s Sources of the Self
Andrada-Elena Holmgren ∗

University of Victoria
elena.holmgren@gmail.com

Abstract

This article explores one way of putting selves and values back into the world. I analyze Charles
Taylor’s, Iris Murdoch’s, and Donald Walhout’s arguments showing that to be a self is to relate to
being as a value. I show that the intentional relation of world-directedness that is central to self
discloses being first as a value. I argue that our best account of what it is to be a self commits us to
the objectivity of values.

I then explore Taylor’s arguments that, by denying a place for objective values in nature, the
standard naturalist ontology leaves a gap between nature and self. I argue that this gap arises
because current naturalism cannot account for the place of the intentional relation in the world, the
latter of which is our first guide to value. It thereby leaves a gap between third- and first-personal
perspectives that obscures the nature of values as properties of relational situations. I explore Michiel
Meijer’s objection that Taylor leaves an unresolved gap between ontology and phenomenology in his
defense of value realism. I draw on the little-known work of Donald Walhout to show how this gap
can be filled by analyzing value in terms of function.

Keywords: Metaphysics of self; metaphysics of value; naturalism; phenomenology; experience

The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or
detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation,
especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence. . . . There are realms
of reality or—more exactly—of abstraction from reality in which the most complete
detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in
terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to
apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become
a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing.
You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you
change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the
very act of knowing. Existential knowledge is based on an encounter in which a new
meaning is created and recognized. (Paul Tillich, 1952, pp. 123-124)

This article argues that the metaphysics of self depends on the metaphysics of value. I arguethat to be a self is to relate to being as a value. In everyday life, we encounter ourselves invalue situations that are never entirely our own making. For instance, consider the experience
of seeing a beloved corner of nature. The pattern of what we see is born of the interplay between

∗Many thanks to my supervisor Dr. David Scott for his support, feedback, reading recommendations, as well as
for teaching me most of the background on Aristotle—in particular his notion of function—upon which I draw here.
Thanks also to JCURA for funding the research out of which this essay grew, and for the peer reviewers and editors
of The Arbutus Review for their insightful suggestions for revision.

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mailto:elena.holmgren@gmail.com 


The Arbutus Review • 2018 • Vol. 9, No. 1 • https://doi.org/10.18357/tar91201818381

what we bring to the scene (our capacities and predispositions) and the form of the landmarks
themselves. If we bring a friend, we are struck by the fact that each one of us sees a different
landscape in the same place. And yet, we also know the place as a site of possible convergence
between the various gazes of the subjects that enter into it: I can show you the mossy heap. As this
commonplace example of aesthetic perception illustrates, we are used to the fact that our being
there with things makes a pattern from which we can isolate our contribution and that of things
only through an artificial, after-the-fact analysis. Aesthetic perception is chosen here because it is
perhaps the most common and well-known experience of value. In this case, aesthetic experience
discovers the intrinsic value of the moss. By intrinsic value, I mean the value that a thing has “in
itself,” by virtue of the way that it is. The moss is known to have intrinsic value because it acts as
the co-creator of the value situation (the emerald hue) that I see. It would be a different green were
the moss any different from what it is. Such experiences reveal how our being there with things
creates a value that is not reducible to our subjective contribution. They also reveal how our being
a self is intimately bound up with this cooperative co-creation of values.

The problem, as Charles Taylor points out in his seminal work Sources of the Self, is that
the philosophical picture of nature that interprets modern science today leaves no room for this
experience that is so central to selfhood. On this naturalistic view, there is no element of discovery
in value experience. Rather, values are features of mental states that we project onto a valueless
world. In this perspective, we can reduce all talk of values to descriptive talk about psychological
facts (namely, the contingent beliefs and desires of the individual). If this view is correct, then,
in the example above, the moss itself has nothing to do with the value that it comes to have for
us, except as a material to be shaped as we please according to our subjective interests. This is a
problem because, as Taylor argues, our best account of self implicitly commits us to the objectivity
of values. By objectivity of values, I mean those values, such as beauty or truth, that lie outside the
individual and that do not depend on that individual’s mental states alone. Taylor argues that selves
are crucially grounded in the world through their orientation to those regions of the real that they
register as intrinsic goods. Thus, value distinctions are an ineliminable part of our starting point as
thinkers. As a result, objective values must be given a central place in any ontology. Hence, as far
as ontological status goes, Taylor argues that selves and values must either stand or fall together.

Taylor shows that if the standard naturalist ontology of our day is correct, a conflict arises
between the explanation of nature and the explanation of self. One must be eliminated in favour
of the other. We are left with a dilemma. If we choose in favour of nature by eliminating value
experience, we’re left with an incoherent ontology of self that implicitly presupposes the objective
values that it purports to explain away. And if instead we choose in favour of self, we lose all
continuity between nature and experience, thereby leaving an insuperable divide between practical,
evaluative reason, on the one hand, and theoretical, scientific reason, on the other. Moreover, since
value is a co-creation between nature and self, we lose sight of the relational situation in which
value emerges, too. This unresolved conflict makes finding a unified explanation of our place in the
natural world unattainable in principle. Instead, all we can have is a fractured paradigm composed
of two autonomous spheres: the world of meaningful experience and the alien world of fact.

I argue that Taylor rightly diagnoses the problem with current naturalist ontologies of both
value and self. However, he fails to offer an alternative metaphysical account that solves the issue of
grounding the objectivity of values, and therefore of putting selves back into our divided picture
of being. Ultimately, there remains a gap between Taylor’s phenomenological arguments, which
reveal the inconsistency between our best account of self and the ontology of natural science and his
ontological conclusions that naturalist ontology requires substantive revision. It remains unclear in
just what that revision consists.

Donald Walhout’s The Good and the Realm of Values provides a possible way of bridging the gap

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that remains between phenomenology and ontology in Taylor’s arguments. I show how Walhout’s
concept of function bridges the gap between the first- and third-personal perspectives, between the
normative and the descriptive, between value and being. As such, it can offer a positive alternative
to naturalism that secures the objectivity of value that our best account of self presupposes. I
conclude that we need to revise our current exclusively third-personal naturalist ontology in favour
of a first-personal naturalism based on a revised Aristotelian bridge concept of function. This
first-personal naturalism allows us to define objective value as complete being, or as fully realized
functioning.

I argue that the divide between the normative and the theoretical dimensions of explanation can
be bridged only if we recognize both the logical and the ontological priority of the first-person stance
in our worldview. In particular, this divide can be bridged if we recognize, like Iris Murdoch, that
the idea of value is a regulative principle of all reasoning, rather than being some epiphenomenal
side-issue, as naturalistic ontology makes it out to be. I strive to show that our first knowing
encounter with the world is through our intentional relation to reality experienced as a value
for us. If this analysis is right, then there is no complete metaphysical explanation without a
normative component. This evaluative dimension makes merely theoretical knowledge existentially
transformative in Tillich’s sense. An essential part of what it is to really know something is to
grasp its value for the self. This grasp of value grounds knowledge in the “infinite concreteness”
of individual encounter. Grasping the value dimension of situations is what turns knowledge into
understanding, as opposed to just a formal exercise.

In all explanations, we must begin where we are: that is, in the first-person stance, where being
is first known as a value. And, once explanation is complete, we must connect our theories to where
we started from and still remain, despite all our theorizing.

Overview

In the first section, Taylor’s and Murdoch’s phenomenologies of value are outlined. Taylor
introduces a distinction between procedural and substantive reasoning. The former is the model
of practical reason enshrined in contemporary naturalist ethics, which locates value exclusively in
mental states or in properties of acts. Instead, Taylor follows Murdoch by arguing in favour of a
view of moral reasoning as substantive, which, unlike procedural reason, is contentful. Substantive
reason goes beyond an analysis of formal action procedures in its striving to identify those goods
that are the proper objects of love and that empower the self, qua creative agency, in its pursuit
of realization. I show that if Taylor’s view of practical reasoning as substantive is correct, then
morality, by concerning itself with the proper relation between self and the rest of reality, implicates
us in the metaphysics of self and value.

The second section offers an overview of Taylor’s arguments for the conceptual priority of the
first-person stance. In particular, I examine the dual role his “Best Account” (BA) principle plays
in both his phenomenological analysis of the structure of value judgments and in his ontological
argument for the insufficiency of naturalism as a theory of self and of value. I then explore how
the BA principle, by revealing the superiority of a model of substantive reason over the procedural
model of naturalist ethics, implicitly commits Taylor to ontologically-grounded value distinctions.

The third section highlights the gap that remains in Taylor’s account between phenomenological
and ontological arguments for the objectivity of values. In particular, I support Michiel Meijer’s
claim that Taylor’s transcendental arguments may tell us what the best account of experience might
be, but they are not by themselves guides to the objective features of the world. Therefore, they
cannot be used to determine whether values are ineliminable in a metaphysics of self. If Meijer is
correct, Taylor cannot legitimately use his BA principle as a criterion by which to evaluate ontologies.

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I ultimately agree with Meijer that Taylor needs something more than just transcendental arguments
if he is to escape both the closed circle of post-Kantian subjectivism and the incoherence of current
naturalist accounts.

The fourth section proposes what that “something more” might look like. I show how Donald
Walhout’s phenomenology of moral judgment complements Taylor’s own but does so while making
its ontological commitments more fully explicit. Ultimately, Walhout’s discussion of value as the
realization of a being’s characteristic function provides us with a plausible metaphysics of Taylor’s
substantive reason. It also provides us with the basis for conceiving what a first-person naturalism
that satisfies Taylor’s Best Account principle might look like.

1. What is Value, Anyway?: Taylor’s and Murdoch’s Phenomenology
of Value Judgment

Since values are known first through experience, “a phenomenological account of identity” is
the proper method for the study of value (Taylor, 1989, p. 32). Taylor argues that contemporary
naturalist moral philosophy operates with a flawed procedural model of practical reason that sees
moral reasoning as a set of formal action procedures. And yet, surely, as Taylor points out, the
procedural question of “what it is right to do” logically depends on the answer to the substantive
question of “what it is good to be” (1989, p. 79). This is because determining the content of
obligation presupposes a prior answer to the question concerning what the good life considered as a
whole might be, since it is through reference to such a view that we can evaluate the relative moral
priority of our various obligations. As such, it is the latter domain of substantive reasoning that
forms the more basic, as well as the more comprehensive, category of moral deliberation.

What’s missing in naturalist understandings of practical reason, then, is any notion of “what
it may be good (or even obligatory) to be or love” (Taylor, 1989, p. 79). In order to recover a
notion of moral value that makes sense of our experience, we need: i) a vision of the good life, which
displays how the good person is related to reality, ii) a notion of intrinsically valuable being (“what
is valuable in itself, or what we should admire or love”), and iii) a determination of the proper
objects we cannot but make reference to in our striving to realization, since striving doesn’t occur
in an ontological vacuum, but is motivated by a relation to something beyond the self (i.e., the self’s
“objects of love and allegiance”) (Taylor, 1989, p. 84, 79).

The issue is that the procedural view shows a bias towards identifying value with action considered
in just such an ontological vacuum. “Good” and “bad” are on this view supposed to be properties
that attach to actions considered without reference to being, either the being of the actor, or that of
the acted-upon. Instead, Taylor argues that moral judgments presuppose ontological determinations.
He points out that the analysis of action as the exclusive place of value presupposes the larger
background understandings of being that form the enabling context of action, which Taylor calls our
“background pictures.” A background picture is “the moral ontology which articulates [our] intuitions”
(Taylor, 1989, p. 8). In order to act, we implicitly draw on a moral ontology that situates us in
being by presenting us with a systematic view of the world that places us in it as moral agents. This
ontology specifies the nature of the relation that we adopt towards being in any given action (Taylor,
1989, pp. 5, 9). Moreover, a background picture is an “inescapable framework” or horizon within
which our lives can be seen as a meaningful whole (Taylor, 1989, p. 17). Taylor describes “acting
within a framework as functioning with a ‘sense’ of a qualitative distinction” (p. 21). Defining what
it is to act in terms of functioning with a background understanding of qualitative distinctions, where
qualitative distinctions are taken to be “defining orientations,” suggests that a value orientation
is constitutive of agency (Taylor, 1989, p. 41). A framework of qualitative distinctions then is a
condition for the possibility of agency. A framework can thus be described as a first-personal view of

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existence from the standpoint of value. To be an agent, on this view, is to navigate being through
an orientation to value.

The crucial point is that all moral reactions are “implicit acknowledgments of claims concerning
their objects” (Taylor, 1989, p. 7). Moral judgments, as well as value judgments generally, involve
an orientation to mind-independent features of the object, the latter of which constrain the range of
our possible evaluations, as we saw in the example of aesthetic perception. Taylor calls the capacity
for qualitative distinctions that lies at the basis of these judgments “strong evaluation.” Strong
evaluations are “discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not
rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these
and offer standards by which they can be judged” (Taylor, 1989, p. 4). Because we experience
these goods as being true independently of our mental states, they act as independent, objective
reference points that allow us to evaluate the worth of our subjective states. We judge the goods
disclosed by strong evaluation as “incomparable” in the sense that they do not admit of degree:
they are “not just more desirable, in the same sense though to a greater degree, than some of these
ordinary goods are” (Taylor, 1989, p. 20). Instead, they are implicitly accorded “special status” in
our reasoning around which all else is organized (Taylor, 1989, p. 20). Value judgments are not just
some epiphenomenal side-issue, then: They are at the heart of reasoning in its practical modality.

The immediate object of practical reason is what Taylor calls a “constitutive good”:

The constitutive good does more than just define the content of the moral theory. Love
of it is what empowers us to be good. And hence also loving it is part of what it is to
be a good human being. This is now part of the content of the moral theory as well,
which includes injunctions not only to act in certain ways and to exhibit certain moral
qualities but also to love what is good (1989, p. 93).

A value, so understood, is the shape of the real for us, as an object of love and striving. Now
we are in a position to understand the meaning of Taylor’s poignant phrase, “sources of the self.”
Constitutive goods are the sources of the self insofar as they provide our experience with content
and directionality. It is because of this that they can, I would argue, be understood as the ultimate
objects of intentionality. We first pick out the real as a value for us. If Taylor is right, value is the
real seen from the first-person stance of the subject.

Moreover, strong evaluation is a condition for the possibility of self-knowledge. Taylor makes the
radical claim that strong evaluation is not only a core part of moral reason, but also the instrument
that makes possible the twin processes of self-knowledge and self-construction:

To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the
commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can
try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done,
or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable
of taking a stand. (Taylor, 1989, p. 27)

Thus, to know who I am is to identify my characteristic orientation to those regions of being that I
register as constitutive goods. This relation to the good just is the individuating principle of selves,
in Taylor’s view. The spatial metaphors in such passages imply the situatedness and involvement
of selves with being, even in their most intimate acts of self-knowing. The fact that identity is
“defined” only within a “horizon” within which qualitative distinctions of what ought to be endorsed
or opposed suggests that there is an inextricable link between the process of identity formation and
the process of moral judgment. “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality,
turn out to be inextricably intertwined” (Taylor, 1989, p. 3). To be a self is to affirm a position in

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what Taylor calls “moral space” (p. 25). Thus, because self-knowledge is intrinsically a process of
orientation to being, it is impossible without qualitative distinctions of being.

The process of self-knowledge involves the articulation of a narrative structure that traces my
trajectory towards the strongly valued good that explains the direction I see my life taking. A
narrative answers the question of who I am by making explicit my relation to the good at different
points in my life (Taylor, 1989, p. 47). I find out where I am in my life by plotting my movement
either towards, or away from, the good that I recognize as binding on me. Suppose that the goal
that would give my experience meaning would be to learn as much as I can about the subject that I
am most passionate about. Suppose also that doing this requires that I go against the grain of my
lazy nature, tempted, as it is, to cut corners whenever possible. Further, suppose that my cutting
corners, while keeping me from genuine understanding, would nonetheless produce work whose
deficits are not noticed by others and that therefore would not be penalized, not even in the long
run. One could say that cutting corners pays in such cases, as far as any merely external measures
(pragmatic, social) can say. Nevertheless, there is still something available to me in such cases that
directs me in evaluating my situation when all external measures, of the kind that naturalists rely
on, fail. In other words, I still know that I am somehow cheating myself by cutting corners, even
when it makes no externally observable difference to do so. I know this because understanding is
for me a constitutive good that is not merely defined according to contingent, social, pragmatic, or
even (my own) subjective measures. Rather, the content of the goal, “genuine understanding,” is
fixed for me in a way that other such extrinsic measures are not. Hence, to know who and where I
am in my life at any given moment, I implicitly position myself in relation to the goods, such as
understanding, that I recognize as constraints on my possible range of actions. I progressively begin
to see my life as a whole, structured around the goal of understanding. I determine how I am doing
by measuring the distance between where I am (lacking in understanding) and where I ought to be
(an epistemically complete agent).

Taylor’s point is that, without reference to such goods, we cannot make sense of the narrative
shape and direction that our lives actually take. We understand who and where we are in our lives in
relation to the absolute reference point of a constitutive good (Taylor, 1989, p. 47). Ultimately, life
stories map out positions in moral space. Thus, explaining how life stories are possible ontologically
commits us to the existence of the moral space that alone grounds them. An adequate moral
ontology must make this implicit reference explicit.

Taylor’s analysis here of the normative structure of reason displays its indebtedness both to Iris
Murdoch and to Kant. In The Sovereignty of Good (1986), Murdoch showed that moral concepts are
unlike empirical concepts in that they are synthetic a priori1 truths that are best analyzed as ideal
limits against which we measure our progress and activity in experience (p. 28). Unlike empirical
concepts, they cannot be accounted for in terms of a genetic analysis that reveals their psychological,
causal history. On her view, a value term can best be understood as “an ideal end-point, as a
concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love” (Murdoch, 1986, p. 29). Murdoch
(1986) ultimately argues for a Kantian view of reason as intrinsically normative: “Reason itself is
(for Kant) an ideal limit: indeed his term ‘Idea of Reason’ expresses precisely that endless aspiration
to perfection which is characteristic of moral activity” (p. 31). In her view, “the magnetic pull
of the idea of perfection,” or of the intrinsically good, is a central regulative standard of practical

1In Kant’s terminology in the Critique of Pure Reason, synthetic a priori judgments are synthetic by virtue
of the fact that their predicate is not logically contained in the subject, and are a priori because they are known
independently of experience. Murdoch claims that value judgments are a class of synthetic a priori judgments that
have a regulative use by providing stable coordinates to which we refer as we actively organize our experience into a
unified whole. The fact that value judgments are both synthetic a priori and regulative implies that their meaning
is not dependent on any empirical facts that we could come upon. No empirical facts could fix the content of the
proposition “understanding is a supreme value of human life.”

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reason, in the sense that it is only by this idea that we can conceive of our experience as a coherent
whole (p. 43). As we saw above in the example concerning the pursuit of understanding, thinking
according to value concepts helps us achieve a unity that is otherwise missing in our lives (p. 94).
Altogether, Murdoch (1986) rightly points out that this analysis of value concepts as ideal limits
“bring[s] the idea of value, which has been driven by science and logic into a corner, back to cover
the whole field of knowledge” (pp. 29-30).

Thus it is that “moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and
logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world” (Murdoch, 1986, p. 28). The world they
set up is the world of experience, in which reality is first known as a value for the self. “‘Reality’ and
‘individual’ present themselves to us in moral contexts as ideal end-points or Ideas of Reason. This
surely is the place where the concept of Good lives. ‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love.’ These words are closely
connected,” writes Murdoch (p. 42). In this view, goodness is connected with knowledge, and moral
judgments are of reality. They are contentful, rather than formal. However, in the moral sphere,
“knowledge,” “truth,” and “reality” acquire a different sense than they do in the scientific sphere.
For Murdoch (1986), “the idea of ‘objective reality’ for instance, undergoes important modifications
when it is to be understood, not in relation to ‘the world described by science’, but in relation to
the progressing life of a person” (p. 26). The upshot for Murdoch, as for Taylor, is that moral
knowledge is finding in the real “the proper object[s] of love” (1986, p. 68) and striving. If Murdoch
is right, the taking up of a moral perspective is an inextricable part of what it means to really
understand the world.

If Taylor’s and Murdoch’s analyses of the phenomenology of value judgment are correct, the
model of procedural reason that naturalist ethics operates with provides an underdetermined account
of practical reasoning that fails to explain its implicit reliance on a background ontology of value. If
acting implies functioning with an implicit ontology of value, then any ethics that takes a view of
reasoning that denies this fact cannot in principle get us at the whole truth about either agents (as
acting selves) or values (as the intentional correlates of acts).

Ultimately, Taylor’s model of substantive reason, together with his rethinking of the concept of
moral value as a constitutive good that is contentful and empowering rather than merely formal and
procedural, suggests that we cannot separate ethics from metaphysics. This is because ethics asks
questions about the true nature of self, about the conditions of self-realization, and about the kind
of relation to the real that sustains self-realization and the good life.

The problem, as we shall see in Part 2, is that there is no place for either substantive reason or for
its qualitative distinctions in contemporary naturalist ontology. Our naturalist paradigm accounts
for reality as an object of theoretical study, but lacks the conceptual resources for displaying such a
reality as a fit “object of love” and striving. Failing to account for the real as an adequate bearer
of the qualitative distinctions without which we cannot make sense of our lives means that there
is a split between the theoretical explanation of natural science, on the one hand, and the kind of
knowing by which we shape our lives into a coherent whole, on the other. A seemingly unbridgeable
gap between these two rational modalities of explaining and evaluating remains, and we are left
with an ontology without any place for the self as we live it.

Using Taylor’s analysis, we can reformulate the challenge for value realism today as being one of
explaining the place of substantive reason in the world. Moreover, we must somehow make sense of
constitutive goods as being both objectively-binding constraints on experience, and mind-independent.
The answer is found in a first-personal naturalism.

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2. Putting the First-Person First: Strong Evaluation and the
Arguments Against Naturalism

As we saw above, identifying moral value with the good life, together with the various kinds
of objectively-grounded qualitative determinations of being that that identification entails, means
that neither value theory, nor any account of the self as moral subject, can do without metaphysics.
Moreover, Murdoch’s and Taylor’s phenomenological analyses have revealed that value terms are
“inescapable structural requirements of human agency” (Taylor, 1989, p. 52). Thus, we cannot think
of value without self, or of self without value. What this part shows is that we must begin to look
for the ontological grounding of value in the ontology of the first-person, subjective perspective. I
do this by looking at Taylor’s arguments that phenomenology ought to be seen as a constraint on
ontology.

As we saw above, all moral judgments are implicit affirmations of a background ontology. This
being so, the challenge for us is to make our implicit moral ontologies explicit, and to then see which
ones offer the best explanation of experience. Taylor introduces what he calls the “Best Account”
(BA) principle as a criterion for evaluating the phenomenological consistency of various ontologies of
self and value. The principle states that phenomenological adequacy must be a central criterion for
evaluating the truth of ontologies. This to say that any ontology must be able to place us, as we
recognize ourselves in our experience, on the map of “what there is” if it is to be able to guide our
life practice. Hence, Taylor (1989) argues

the aim of this account is to examine how we actually make sense of our lives, and to
draw the limits of the conceivable from our knowledge of what we actually do when
we do so. But what description of human possibilities, drawn from some questionable
epistemological theories, ought to trump what we can descry from within our practice
itself as the limits of our possible ways of making sense of our lives? After all, the
ultimate basis for accepting any of these theories is precisely that they make better sense
of us than do their rivals. If any view takes us right across the boundary and defines as
normal or possible a human life which we would find incomprehensible and pathological,
it can’t be right. (p. 32)

According to the BA principle, those concepts without which we cannot make sense of our lives should
set our priorities in determining the order of ontological explanation. Thus, ontology does not only
have the theoretical function of grounding science. It must also make sense of the form of experience
as we cannot help but live it. In this sense, Taylor denies that we can ever take experience just as an
object for theorizing. Rather, it is a continuum of interchanges with our world, one in which we are
always inextricably involved. Taylor here draws on a distinction between theoretical and existential
knowing familiar to existentialists such as Tillich. The former characterizes reality (including that
of self and value) as an object that we can view from a perspective built on abstraction. The latter
discloses reality only insofar the self is “involved” with it, or stands in relation to it (Tillich, 1952,
pp. 123-124). The BA principle merely states that there must be no conflict between the two in a
complete ontology. Where we must choose between the one and the other, we must never choose in
favour of theoretical over existential knowledge of the self.

Ultimately, the BA principle establishes “that the horizons in which we live must include strong
qualitative discriminations” (Taylor, 1989, p. 32) and that naturalist ontologies of self and value are
false due to their failure to account for this fact. Taylor thus uses this phenomenological principle in
exposing the gap in naturalist ontology where self and value should be. In particular, the principle
forms the basis of three main arguments against naturalist ontology. First, he uses it to show that
the naturalist assumption of a value-neutral stance fails to account for the moral phenomenology

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of a functioning human subject and is, as such, conceptually incoherent. Second, naturalism, like
procedural theories of practical reason, implicitly presupposes the strong evaluation view that it
explicitly refutes. Finally, naturalism leaves an unbridgeable gap between theoretical and existential
knowing that fails to account for practical reason as an ontologically-situated activity.

First, Taylor argues that naturalism, in seeking to expunge value from ontology, creates a
conceptually incoherent stance. This is because the naturalist is implicitly committed to the
conceptually incoherent fiction of a “superman of disengaged objectification” (Taylor, 1989, p. 27).
That is, if the naturalist value-free ontology is right, it must be possible to conceive of “an agent free
from all frameworks” or what Taylor calls a “disengaged, punctual” subject who is defined merely
by self-consciousness and by its contingent collection of mental states (Taylor, 1989, p. 27). Recall
that Taylor has shown that the primary way that the real is given to the self is as a value with
which the self is involved in the making of its life story. This shows that frameworks are conditions
for the possibility of subjectivity, and that, as such, they form an integral part of the structure of
the first-person stance. As Taylor (1989) puts it, “living within such strongly qualified horizons is
constitutive of human agency, [such] that stepping outside these limits [as naturalism asks us to do]
would be tantamount to stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged
human personhood” (p. 27). The self, as conceived by the naturalist, cannot function as a human
subject. The naturalist’s “superman of disengaged objectification” (Taylor, 1989, p. 27) then, is an
unrealizable fiction.

The trouble is that the naturalist picture sees the self as an object, whereas the fact that “the
self is crucially an object of significance to itself” (Taylor, 1989, p. 49) is a basic requirement of
self-consciousness. Hence, the self cannot be defined in neutral terms (that is, outside a framework
of questions about the good) as an object in causal relations to other objects. This implies that the
self cannot be captured in an explicit description, as objects can. Nor can the self be considered
apart from its meaning to itself (Taylor, 1989, pp. 33-34). Taylor’s point here recalls Tillich’s (1952)
view that “you must participate in a self in order to know what it is” (p. 124). That the self is not
an object suggests that the methods of natural science alone could not exhaustively account for the
self. (Taylor, 1989, p. 34) Moreover, “the issue of identity is for us invariably a matter of strongly
valued good” since “an identity is something that one ought to be true to, can fail to uphold, can
surrender when one ought to” (Taylor, 1989, p. 30). Identity, then, is an essentially normative
concept. Hence, the naturalist supposition that we can answer the question of who we are through
reference to our contingent psychological states and preferences is “incoherent” (Taylor, 1989, p.
30). Thus, the naturalist postulate of a value-neutral stance is conceptually incoherent because it
violates the BA principle.

Second, naturalists cannot help but cover up the explanatory deficits of their view by implicitly
importing content from the first-person stance that their third-person, objective methodologies
explicitly reject. Naturalist ontologies, which operate with a procedural model of reason, assume a
value ontology that is more robust than the officially admitted view. Moreover, if Taylor is right and
practical reasoning really cannot function without qualitative distinctions grounded in an encounter
with being, naturalists cannot help but presuppose the qualitative distinctions they cannot explain
(1989, p. 30). For instance, Taylor (1989) shows how the continued commitment to human rights of
naturalist theorists presupposes a commitment to the constitutive good of intrinsic human dignity
that gives the concept of rights its content (pp. 11-13). In this way, an implicit commitment
to objective, intrinsic values continues to give content to theories and to empower practice, even
when theories explicitly deny the existence of such values. Taylor (1989) concludes that “there is a
great deal of motivated suppression of moral ontology among our contemporaries,” a suppression
that ultimately leads to a false self-understanding and to the “pragmatic self-contradiction” of
presupposing in practice terms our theories deny (p. 10). Ultimately, the naturalist “lives within

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a moral horizon which cannot be explicated by his own moral theory” (Taylor, 1989, pp. 31-32).
The conceptual ineliminability of value distinctions ought to be more problematic for the naturalist.
In fact, it reveals the conceptual priority of the first-person perspective from which values become
intelligible to us. The theories that explicitly deny substantive reason thus implicitly affirm it by
their failure to do without it in articulating their own alternative view.

Lastly, naturalism fails to supply an ontology that serves us both in our life uses and in theoretical
explanation. If the practices by which we make sense of our lives presuppose qualitative distinctions
and naturalism denies their possibility, it leaves a divide between theory and the kinds of everyday
understandings by which we give shape and meaning to our experience.

Thus, naturalist ontologies of self and value fall afoul of the BA principle and lead to a false
self-understanding that fails to explain the existential order of knowing by which we live our
lives. If the naturalist should ask why he should accept the conclusion of this phenomenological
analysis as decisive for ontology, Taylor (1989) answers that it is because “this is not only a
phenomenological account but an exploration of the limits of the conceivable in human life, an
account of its ‘transcendental conditions”’ (p. 32). Taylor makes disregarding the BA principle, and
therefore the lessons of phenomenology, a logical fallacy.

3. The Problematic Leap from Phenomenology to Ontology

So far, Taylor has shown naturalist, procedural models of practical reason to be implausible
accounts of self and value. He has used the Best Account principle as the basis for his argument
for the superior explanatory power of his own model of substantive reason. However, Michiel
Meijer (2014) has persuasively argued that while Taylor’s transcendental arguments help him to
ground values as structural requirements of well-functioning human subjectivity, “at the level of
transcendental justification, Taylor is open to the charge that philosophical anthropology and moral
phenomenology are just not the right methods to use in defense of ontological claims” (p. 452).
Meijer argues that Taylor has failed to argue for the unity that underlies and justifies his “hybrid
methodology.” He goes on to suggest that Taylor’s view evinces “an overly broad or relaxed notion of
ontology (that) conceals the fundamental tension between the subjective and the objective” (p. 451).
Meijer’s objection is premised on a sharp ontological divide between the subjective and objective
domains. From this premise, he goes on to argue that

Since transcendental arguments are anchored in human experience, it must also be clear
that ontological questions lie beyond their scope. This implies that, in his critique of
naturalism, Taylor himself cannot get away from the qualitative discontinuity between
morality and ontology. (Meijer, 2014, p. 450)

I would argue that Meijer is correct in identifying this overreliance on transcendental arguments as
the great weakness in Taylor’s account. Moreover, I do not think that the gap in Taylor’s argument
can be filled even if we deny Meijer’s premise that there is a divide between the subjective and the
objective domains.

This is because Taylor’s own account makes a distinction between the moment of creation and
that of discovery within value judgments. This implies a distinction between the subjective (created)
and objective (discovered) features of these judgments. On the one hand, creation takes the upper
hand:

We find the sense of life through articulating it. And moderns have become acutely
aware of how much sense being there for us depends on our own powers of articulation.
Discovering here depends on, is interwoven with, inventing. (Taylor, 1989, p. 18)

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On the other hand, constitutive goods are objective constraints that are there to be discovered.
Thus, in moral space,

One orients oneself in a space which exists independently of one’s success or failure
in finding one’s bearing, which, moreover, makes the task of finding these bearings
inescapable. (Taylor, 1989, p. 30)

This distinction between the created and discovered features of judgments secures a mind-independent
constraint on possible evaluation. For instance, if values were creations, we would have to say that
child marriage is good or bad only in relation to a given individual’s or culture’s perspective. On
this view, there is no perspective above culture or individual subjectivity that we could take in
criticizing a given culture’s ascription of positive value to such practices. A culture’s say-so makes it
so. And yet, this consequence deeply distorts a key feature of the phenomenology of value judgment,
and namely the fact that the properties it discloses exist “independently of one’s success or failure
in finding one’s bearing” (Taylor, 1989, p. 30) in relation to them. It is possible for us to fail to
recognize the intrinsic worth of girls, just as it is possible to fail to constrain our behaviour according
to this recognition by giving them the freedom to develop their potential before marriage.

As we have seen, it is in part their very mind-independence that makes constitutive goods
meaningful. Part of their meaning stems from the fact that they provide stable points of reference
that do not shift as our subjective assessments or social-pragmatic contexts invariably do. Instead,
they anchor such assessments to real features that are meaningful because they are constraints on
the self’s possible movements. This could only make sense if we take seriously the claim that there
is a “discovery” component to value judgment over and above any creativity it might involve. Nor
can we explain these objective constraints in terms of the structure of practical reason alone, as a
perspective-relativist reading of Murdoch’s notion of value terms as “ideal limits” might suggest.
This is because the applicability of these ideal limits in a given case presupposes our ability to discern
the value properties of situations. Thus, the principle of respect for human dignity as an ideal limit
in the child marriage case presupposes my ability to recognize a given child as having the property
of dignity. The appropriate application of the principle presupposes the accurate recognition of the
intrinsic properties of the situation.

But if Taylor’s analysis presupposes the distinction between creation and discovery, and thus
between the subjective and the objective moments of value judgment, then he owes us an account of
what exactly bridges the gap between the two. Meijer is right to suggest that he fails to provide
it. Below I explore a possible reconstruction of how the transcendental arguments of both Taylor
and Murdoch can be supplemented with a metaphysical account, and hopefully show how the gap
between phenomenology and ontology can be filled.

4. The Phenomenology of Value as the Ontology of Self-Realization

Donald Walhout’s work The Good and the Realm of Values shows how the distinct methods
of phenomenology, the ontology of self, and value theory converge on the Aristotelian notion of
function, where function is defined as the activity in which the characteristic mode of being of a
given thing finds its highest realization. For instance, the function of an eye is to see, and its good
is its ability to realize this characteristic function without impediment (e.g., disease).

According to Walhout’s perfectivist theory, value consists in the perfection of being that results
from realizing one’s characteristic function. Like Murdoch, he sees perfection, or completion of
being, as a central regulative ideal of reason. He argues that this idea of completion is the most
general concept of value from which all the other more specialized definitions proposed by the
various theories of ethics implicitly derive their content. Thus, the utilitarian’s analysis of value in

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terms of utility, the Kantian’s in terms of good will, or the naturalist’s in terms of psychological
desire states, all implicitly presuppose the more logically primary notion of value as completion,
fulfillment, or realization of being. As we shall see, by defining value in terms of function, which is
arguably a core feature of all beings (since we individuate all things in terms of the functions they
perform), Walhout successfully bridges the disparate domains of the first- and third-personal, the
evaluative and the descriptive, being and value. In so doing, Walhout’s constructive metaphysics fills
the gap in Taylor’s account between the subjective and the objective dimensions of value judgment,
or between value as creation and value as discovery. I show in this section how the conceptual unity
underlying Taylor’s “hybrid methodology,” as Meijer called it, can be revealed on the basis of such a
constructive metaphysics. Ultimately, Walhout’s discussion of value as functional realization makes
explicit what the metaphysical underpinnings of the best account of our experience might look like.

I start with a description of Walhout’s phenomenology, and I then trace more of its commonalities
with Taylor’s and Murdoch’s accounts. Finally, I try to show how we can move from phenomenological
descriptions to an analysis of the ontological commitments that these descriptions imply through
the concept of functional realization. Walhout sees need as a unifying concept for value theory. In
his view, any successful moral philosophy is built on an adequate account of the needs that drive
us. He formulates the concept of ontological needs, which, in contradistinction with contingent,
psychological needs and desires, belong to us by virtue of our nature, and thereby serve to guide us
to the realization of this nature in a way that our contingent, often self-destructive desires do not.
Ontological needs are reliable guides to the characteristic functioning of the self. The structure of
these needs discloses facts about human nature and about its most fundamental relation to the rest
of being. For example, the need for growth to a state that fully expresses a creature’s characteristic
form is an ontological need common to all living things. Similarly, as we saw in section 1, the need
to unify experience into a coherent perspective or story might be classed as an ontological need.
One might add that the need to express the image of the whole of which one is a part according
to the constraints provided by one’s starting point as a finite being is a fundamental ontological
need. Walhout argues that two fundamental needs drive the self in all acts of valuation: the need
for completion, which is born of our experience of our finitude and lack, and the need to exercise
our capacity for spontaneous acts of creation, or what Walhout (1978) calls our need for “variety”
(pp. 40-43).

The most basic ontological need of finite beings is the need for completion. Thus, the first
ground of evaluation is our experience of insufficiency, lack, and need. According to Walhout,
the phenomenology of value shows experience to be a striving for completion that springs from
our awareness of our finitude and of the precariousness that characterizes any finite, contingent
condition. This experience generates in us a desire for completion that acts as a structuring principle
of consciousness. One could say that this striving for completion is exhibited by the structure of
intentionality itself, as a perpetual tending-to, and as a restless striving to attain an object that only
provisionally brings the mental act to completion, only to have that provisional unity unravelled
again as consciousness moves on in search of another encounter with another object. Any moment of
experience is an unstable resting point for consciousness. The present moment is never experienced
as a sufficiency unto itself. In William Barrett’s (1979) poignant phrase, “since consciousness points
beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence” (p. 132). All intentionality is in this way a
self-transcending activity that is intrinsically aimed at completion. Values are, on Walhout’s view,
the response of the whole subject to the whole of being according to the subject’s innermost need
for completion.

The experience of the chasm that lies between the incomplete, fragmentary beings that we
are and the realized beings that we recognize that we ought to be is, according to Walhout, the
mainspring of morality and of value experience generally. This experience of incompleteness reveals

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an ontological divide between, on the one hand, the actual, psychological self, and on the other,
what Walhout calls the “essential” self, which is the pattern of the properly functioning self and
the source of ontological needs. On Murdoch’s analysis, we could say that the former is a given in
experience, while the latter remains a regulative ideal of reason by which we evaluate our experience.
Thus, our experience in its most basic moments is characterized by the nagging sense that “Here I
am; Yonder is my real self” (Walhout, 1978, p. 62). Our goal in action is so to relate to being as
to bridge the gap between the two selves. If Walhout is right, then the motivating source of value
judgment is the recognition of what I would call the “Two Self” distinction between the empirical
subject and the essential self that directs practical reason to its realization. Recall that for Taylor,
I determine who I am by measuring the distance between my actual, imperfect, and fragmentary
experience against a constitutive good that I implicitly recognize as defining an ideal of completeness
that is greater than the one that I have attained (see section 1). I can only measure the imperfection
that I am by referring to an object that exhibits greater completeness than I do. For Taylor, as for
Walhout, since I can only define my actual self in reference to the essential self that pulls me to its
realization, I know that my actual, empirical self is less real to me than is the ideal held up by my
essential, yet-to-be-realized self. The regulative ideal of completion without which I cannot reason
about my condition infinitely recedes from me the closer that I progress toward it.

The need for completion exhibited by a self-transcending finitude shows one reason why we value
things. We value things because it is only by finding the right way of relating ourselves to them that
we are delivered to our own possible completion as beings (Walhout, 1978, p. 43). Value judgments
point us to those aspects of being that fill the existential deficiency experienced by the self, thereby
completing and fulfilling our being. Using Walhout’s terminology, we could say that intentionality
relates us to being as a perficiens. Walhout (1978) calls a perficiens “any entity which contributes
to the fulfillment or perfection of another entity” (p. 16). As such, a perficiens is the objective
support of valuational activity. I would argue that Walhout’s perficiens is the metaphysical correlate
of Taylor’s constitutive good. I judge constitutive goods to be fit objects of love and allegiance by
which I can direct my actions, my strivings, and my becomings, so that I may more fully be, because
they exhibit a completeness that I lack.

While the need for completion is grounded in our being insofar as it is subject to necessity, the
second basic ground of evaluation, the need for creative action, stems from our being insofar as it is
free. This second “need” involves us more fully as active agents and as creators of the shape of our
lives.

Notice that the concept of function played a central role in structuring the phenomenological
account. What moves us in experience is the striving for completion, and completeness is defined as
the ability of a given entity to act according to its characteristic function. However, the notion of
function is not only central to the first-personal, phenomenological account. It is also central to the
ontological account of the objective constraints of value judgments that make sense of our claims
that we discover, rather than merely create, values. Value judgments are grounded in being if “they
pick out structure and function in the world. Structure and function are what exhibit perfection
of being” (Walhout, 1978, p. 206). Moreover, “function relates the world more immediately to
purposive worth, which often seems random and inexplicable” (Walhout, 1978, p. 210). Function,
then, describes not merely the formal features of a thing and is not restricted to characterizing its
causal role in a larger system defined by external causal relations. Rather, it is the ontic ground of
our judgments of value by virtue of its intrinsic purposiveness. In this account, value is a property
of our intentional relations as subjects to objective functional features in the world. Walhout’s
analysis of value in terms of function helps account for the mind-independent goods that Taylor was
concerned to cover with his notion of strong evaluation. This is because values, as fulfillments of
function, cannot exist solely as mental states. Fulfillments are objective. This implies that I can

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believe that I am fulfilled, and yet be wrong in my assessment of my condition. Consider addiction.
The addict’s struggle can be seen as an emblem of the universal conflict between the two selves
that power value judgment. My desires, as an addict, lead me to pursue precisely those things
that destroy me. What is good for me, then, cannot depend merely on my contingent desires and
interests. Moreover, as an addict, I can believe that I am fulfilled in getting what I want, and yet fail
to be accurate in evaluating my situation. This possibility refutes subjectivism, or any identification
of value with subjective states. It also refutes standard naturalist attempts to reduce value to the
subject’s contingent projects, desires, or goals.

Thus, the most comprehensive objective ground of value judgments is objective fulfillment,
not conscious liking. Value judgments have both a descriptive and a normative character. The
descriptive side of value judgments reveals the parameters of objective fulfillment, and whether
or not they are met in a given situation. Moreover, we can generate norms on the basis of these
descriptions (Walhout, 1978, p. 57). Thus, as we saw above in our analysis of the function of the
eye, describing the function of things implicitly involves us in qualitative distinctions that help us to
specify the course of their ideal functional development. This explains the normative judgments
we ordinarily make when we distinguish between “good” and “bad” functioning. I can know, for
instance, that my desires as an addict are functioning badly as reliable guides to value. If this is so,
we can find out whether a conscious liking is good or bad by seeing whether it is an ingredient in
a situation in which one of our ontological needs is in fact fulfilled. Hence, value judgments have
both a descriptive and a prescriptive character. Moreover, the latter presupposes the former, since
function is the object of conscious enjoyment (Walhout, 1978, p. 207). As such, there can be no
subjective enjoyments without objective fulfillments of function. Contrary to much modern moral
philosophy, Walhout shows that experience is, logically, a secondary category to being.

Our paradigm has difficulty conceptualizing values as fulfillments because it operates with a
thing-centric ontology that has difficulty recognizing relational properties. Values, as fulfillments, are
properties not of things, but of situations. “Value judgments describe or define relational situations
in which some objective condition, being, or reality fulfills some existential human need or is the
completing object of some variety capacity” (Walhout, 1978, p. 56). For instance, interlocutors
in a conversation act as one another’s perficiens, since each shapes the other in discourse. The
conversation, then, is the fulfillment of the individuals’ function as self-shaping beings by taking
them up into a larger pattern. As a relational situation of mutual perfecting of all parties involved,
a conversation is the paradigmatic example of a value situation. Walhout’s (1978) insistence that
“the good is alwaya [...] relational” precludes individualism (p. 167). Individuals cannot attain
functional realization as atoms in a void. Rather, they must relate themselves appropriately to
those objects in reality that support their process of self-realization. Thus, to complete itself, the
individual must occupy the place appropriate to its kind in the greater scheme of things that provides
it with the fuel for growth that allows its nature to unfold (Walhout, 1978, p. 207). If values are
properties of relational situations rather than merely of mental states, then it is no surprise that
strong evaluations can pick out non-human goods, as Taylor insisted that they must.

Moreover, it is not only humans that have a being that can be perfected. Rather, the value
of perfectibility applies to all finite beings. Thus, human values must be subsumed under a more
generalizable conception of the good as completion of being. Because of this, we have no reason to
assume, as much modern value theory does, that the good is a property that applies only to human
conscious states. And because the concept of value generalizes across all beings by being tied to
function, value is not some peripheral issue in ontology. Rather, it is an integral component of our
best concept of the real. This value theory can form the basis for a truly ecological ethics, as well as
for an ecological concept of self.

The purpose of this short section has been to provide an introductory sketch of the analysis of

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value in terms of function. For a fuller treatment of this many-faceted topic, as well as for replies to
some of the main objections facing the theory, I refer readers to Walhout’s book-length treatment.
This cursory discussion has, hopefully, shown that the goal of an ontology of value is to identify the
objective conditions of fulfillment for any being (Walhout, 1978, p. 42). The ultimate value is the
state of complete actuality (which corresponds to the traditional concept of absolute being). Since
no finite being can enjoy such a state, for us, value lies in the reciprocal relation of mutual-fulfillment
whereby we find as great a completion as our finite natures allow. Values lie also in the acts that
relate us appropriately to the rest of being: “the response of the whole self to the whole of reality
is relevant to every detail and [...] ultimate fulfillment requires such a response” (Walhout, 1978,
p. 234). Walhout proposes “harmonious perfecting” as the foundational concept of value that
comprehends all others. Just as the best theory is the one that unifies the most of what we know, so
the best act is the one that aims at the good of being conceived as a whole, since it is only through
such acts that we can experience an intensification of being that transcends the limitations of the
finite self (Walhout, 1978, p. 68). Value theory thus starts with phenomenology, but culminates
in metaphysics because it concerns the best things. Our incomplete experience tells us that the
best thing for us is not the given, empirical subject we are. Rather, it is the subject placed in that
relation to the whole that alone can complete it as the individual that it is.

Conclusion

Walhout’s analysis of value in terms of function shows a way to fill in the gaps that remain
between phenomenology and ontology in Taylor’s critique of third-personal naturalism. Walhout
shows that function is a concept that bridges between the first- and third-person stances, between
the subjective and the objective, between the being of selves, as functional units, and value. What
this paper attempts to show is that Taylor needs more than just transcendental arguments and
phenomenological redescription if he is to surmount the incoherence of the currently reigning
naturalist account of “frameworkless” selves. That “more” is a systematic metaphysics that can
bridge the gap between first- and third-person perspectives by giving an account of the intentional
relation in which value originates.

Ultimately, I argue that Walhout (1978) is right to remind us that the central problem of
philosophy is determining the nature of the relation between goodness and being (p. 170). Ethics,
together with any other normative endeavour such as epistemology, presupposes an affirmative
answer to this metaphysical question, and, if Taylor is right, so does our best phenomenological
account of the self. Third-personal naturalism cannot ground the affirmation of being as good,
according to both Taylor and Walhout. But, perhaps a first-personal naturalism might. This is a
naturalism that takes seriously Taylor’s Best Account principle that states that phenomenology, and
in particular moral phenomenology, can and must place constraints on ontology. The first-person
stance has both a logical and an ontological priority in any account of self for the reasons given
above. Moreover, we need a better account of reason that takes seriously the analysis of value
concepts as ideal limits that Murdoch, Taylor, and Walhout provide.

However the argument for a revised naturalism may turn out in the end, I believe that the
discussion above shows that the self is first and foremost a moral agent, not an object of scientific
description. This simple observation challenges the heart of the currently reigning ontology of self.

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References

Barrett, W. (1979). The illusion of technique: A search for meaning in a technological civilization.
Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Meijer, M. (2014). Strong evaluation and weak ontology. The predicament of Charles Taylor. Inter-
national Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 75(5),440-459.10.1080/21692327.2015.1019913

Murdoch, I. (1986). The sovereignty of good. New York, NY: Ark Paperbacks.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tillich, P. (1952). The courage to be. Binghampton, NY: Yale University Press.
Walhout, D. (1978). The good and the realm of values. London, England: University of Notre Dame

Press.

19


	What is Value, Anyway?: Taylor's and Murdoch's Phenomenology of Value Judgment 
	Putting the First-Person First: Strong Evaluation and the Arguments Against Naturalism
	The Problematic Leap from Phenomenology to Ontology 
	The Phenomenology of Value as the Ontology of Self-Realization