In Defense of the Internal Aspects View: Person-Affecting Reasons, Spectrum Arguments and Inconsistent Intuitions

Abstract

According to the Internal Aspects View, the value of different outcomesdepends solely on the internal features possessed by each outcome and theinternal relations between them. This paper defends the Internal AspectsView against Larry Temkin’s defence of the Essentially Comparative View,according to which the value of different outcomes depends on what isthe alternative outcome they are compared with. The paper discusses bothperson-affecting arguments and Spectrum Arguments. The paper doesnot defend a person-affecting view over an impersonal one, but it arguesthat although there are intuitive person-affecting principles that entail anEssentially Comparative View, the intuitions that support these principlescan also be acommodated by other principles that are compatible with theInternal Aspects View. The paper also argues that the rejection of transitivityand the Internal Aspects View does not help us to solve the challengespresented by Spectrum Arguments. Despite this, the arguments presentedby Temkin do succeed in showing that, unfortunately, our intuitions arechaotic and inconsistent. The paper argues that this has metaethicalconsequences that will be unwelcome by a moral realist such as Temkin,since they challenge the idea that our intuitions may track a moral realityexisting independently of our preferences.