Non-intellectual correctness and the normative sphere

17 Let us consider, first, the relations between non-intellectual correctness and the normative sphere. One candidate relation is intentionality or aboutness. Is correct love not that which by its nature loves what is ordered and beautiful? So runs a question in Plato (Rep. 403a7-8). Not everything which is desired is really a good, says Aristotle (De anima III 10, 433a9-b30.) but there is choice of what is truly good (NE III 7). The object of the desire of the fine man is what is really a good (NE III 6). In Brentano and his heirs, the idea that non-intellectual states and acts have determinate types of objects in virtue of their nature and that the same is true when these states and acts are correct is omnipresent. Sometimes the latter idea is spelled out as a type of fit, appropriateness, harmony, correspondence or adequation. A very different type of relation between non-intellectual acts and states and the normative sphere is illustrated by Plato’s claim that the most beautiful is the most worthy of love (Rep. 402a) and by Aristotle’s reference to what is worthy of joy and to appropriate pleasure (NE X 1). Worthiness, unlike correspondence and correctness, admits of degrees. Yet another by Plato’s distinction between hating what one ought to hate and loving what one ought to love (Laws 653b2-c4), and Aristotle’s reference to joy in what one ought to take joy in and hatred of what one ought to hate (NE 1172a 22) and to acting or feeling when one should, and about the things and toward the people and for the sake of what one should, and as one should (NE 1106b21-2; cf. also 1119b17), and to the praiseworthiness of correct behaviour. [9] Brentano, too, says that something may merit or deserve (verdient) being liked (Brentano, 1959, p. 169) or be worthy of being desired (Brentano, 1929, p. 141) and his heirs very often make similar claims. When we consider the nature of correctness we shall return to the relation between correctness, on the one hand, and oughtness and being worthy of or meriting a certain affective response, on the other hand.

Naïve Realism or Orthonomy?

18 The relation or relation-like phenomenon of intentionality between non-intellectual states, in particular correct non-intellectual states, and the normative sphere, is at the centre of the philosophies of Brentano and his pupils. Two diametrically opposed views may be distinguished. There is Brentano’s considered view and the view of Brentano’s most famous and influential students, Husserl, Marty and Meinong. Kraus coined the term “orthonomy” (Orthonomie) for Brentano’s mature philosophy of emoting and judging in order to indicate that it aims at a middle way between the errors of naïve realism and Kantianism (Kraus, 1937, p. 17; 1914, p. 35; cf. Kastil, 1937, p. 16) and also, presumably, to mark the role in that philosophy of Aristotle’s ὀρθός. Husserl, Marty and Meinong, followed by Reinach, Scheler, Hartmann and many others put forward views about emoting and value (and about judging and the world) which are more or less squarely those of the naïve realist and resemble the views of G. E. Moore. These views of Brentano’s heirs had in fact been anticipated by Brentano himself in the earliest phase of his thought, before he arrived at his mature view.

19 Brentano’s mature view, the view Kraus called orthonomy, is that for something to be valuable is just for pro-emoting or pro-desiring-of-that-object to be knowable-as-correct. Brentano’s account of value is, then, an epistemic account. His account of emoting and value parallels his account of judging and existence. For A’s to exist is for acceptance-of-A’s to be correct and, as before, for acceptance to be correct is for it to be knowable as such. To say that love is valuable is just to say that love of love, that is to say, love-of-lovings, is knowable-as-correct. To come to know that love of love is correct we require a conceptual presentation of lovings and an experience of love of these as correct. The inner perceiving of this experience of love as correct is a coming to know that love of lovings is correct. It occurs “at a single stroke” (Brentano, 1974, p. 59). [10] Kastil, in a discussion of NE I 4, 1095b6-7 and NE I 7, 1098b3-4, clearly thinks that Brentano’s great idea is anticipated by Aristotle: “the experience of authoritative (massgebenden) desiring, once acquired, puts us in the sudden possession of a general ethical principle” (Kastil, 1900, p. 3). But presumably the modal status of such principles is not the same according to Aristotle and Brentano. For the latter, love of love cannot fail to be correct nor can love fail to be valuable. But Aristotle’s general ethical principles are supposed to be true for the most part.

20 According to Brentano’s early view, emoting is correct if it fits or is appropriate to, is in harmony with or corresponds to value (Brentano, 1934, pp. 75-7, n. 25; 1930, 25, §53; cf. Cesalli & Mulligan, 2017), and judging is correct if it stands in the same sort of relations to what he called “judgment contents”, successfully baptised states of affairs (Sachverhalte) by Stumpf and Husserl. The relational locutions already mentioned are connected with correctness: if liking something is correct, then it merits (verdient) such liking (Brentano, 1959, p. 169), we call something good insofar as it is worthy of being desired (Brentano, 1968, p. 141), what is to be loved with correct love is what is worthy of love (Brentano 1934, 17, § 23). All affective and conative phenomena are fitting (passend) or unfitting (Brentano, 1930, 25, § 53).

21 Brentano refers to his early endorsement of the view that there are judgment contents “which obtain from all eternity” and says that both Marty’s judgment contents and Meinong’s objectives are creatures of this kind. In view of the popularity of objectives and states of affairs in Austrian philosophy, it is interesting to note Brentano’s explanation of his early erroneous view: “I am essentially a product of the school of Aristotle”. Aristotle, he says, often speaks as though when someone replies to the question whether it is true that p, « it is so », this has the same sense as when one says of a thing that it exists; but, Brentano adds, Aristotle also anticipates the correct view when he says that being in the sense of truth, what has been called veritative being, does not exist outside the understanding (Brentano, 1977, pp. 201-203; on Aristotle on states of affairs, cf. Simons, 1988; Crivelli, 2004, pp. 46-62).

Grounded vs Ungrounded Emotions

22 Husserl, Marty and Meinong, in their versions of this naively realist approach to the relations between emoting, desiring and the normative sphere, all think that where an emotion is correct, some value is exemplified, some objects merits or deserves the attitude, the attitude fits or is appropriate to the object. As we shall see, they also think that a relation of intentionality runs from the correct emotion to its object and its value. But before attempting to understand this last claim we should consider the claim made by Husserl and Marty which, more than any other, distinguishes their view from Brentano’s mature view: if an emotion is correct, there is something which makes it correct, which grounds its correctness – the exemplification of value, positive or negative, monadic or relational. In 1908 Marty argues that if emoting or judging is correct, then it is correct because of the way the world is. In particular, the exemplification of value, disvalue and comparative value makes emoting correct or incorrect. There are analogues of the correctness and incorrectness of judging in the realm of interest and so there is something “independent of the subjective phenomena of loving and hating… which grounds this correctness” (Marty, 1908, p. 370). Husserl, too, is of this opinion. The question about the “reasonableness” of some valuing (emoting), is first of all the question “whether it is correct, whether the meant value is really a value” (Husserl, 2004, 117) and secondly, whether it “is not merely correct but completely grounded” (Husserl 1988 pp. 240-241; cf. pp. 278ff..). This is perhaps not quite Meinong’s official view but in 1917 Meinong does say just this:

23

I am right to rejoice in the successes of the allied central powers insofar as the feeling of joy presents an object [a positive value] which can rightly be ascribed in a judgment (zugeurteilt) to the successes mentioned, because these successes actually have this object (Meinong, 1968, p. 414; my emphasis).

24 The two italicised connectives correspond to two distinct claims: if Meinong is right to rejoice in the successes of Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies, then these successes exemplify some positive value; if he is right to rejoice in the successes of the central powers, then he is right to do so because these successes exemplify some positive value. The view that if emotings are correct, they have correctness makers is easily generalised:

25

If indignation about the fact that p is correct, it is correct because it is unjust that p
If preference for x over y is correct, it is correct because x is better than y.

26 Aristotle says in a truthmaking mood: « the thing does seem in some way the cause of the statement’s being true; it is because the thing is or is not that the statement is true or false » (Cat. 12, 14b19-b22). If he identifies the correctness and the truth of belief (cf. NE 1142b7ff.), [11] then he is perhaps committed to correctness makers for beliefs. But as far as I can see, Aristotle never allows for the correctness makers for emotions or desires endorsed by Marty and Husserl, although he does seem to be committed to the claim that if a desire is correct, then it is for a good and says that we desire what we desire because it seems good to us (Met. 1072a29; cf. NE 1175a). Plato, on the other hand, tells us that that the idea of the good is the cause of what is correct (Rep. 517c2). [12]

Are Emotions directed towards Values?

27 The relation of making or grounding we have been considering, like those of being worthy of, meriting and deserving, runs from the world to attitudes. But attitudes are, it is said, intentionally directed towards the world. Are emotings intentionally directed towards values, the very things which constitute the correctness-conditions of emotings and which, when suitably exemplified, constitute their correctness makers? If so, then it is possible that correctness is constituted by some combination of such intentional directedness, correctness-conditions and correctness-makers. If the answer is negative, it might still be the case that emotions have correctness- conditions and correctness makers but their specification would be no part of the intentionality of emotions. The correctness-conditions of an emotion might, for example, belong to an account of the intentionality of some sort of mental act or state which is not an emotion but is intimately connected with emotions. The claim that a certain emotion is correct only if some value-property is exemplified does not by itself entail that the emotion is « about » or directed towards the value-property. Similarly, the claim that a belief that p is correct only if the state of affairs that p obtains does not entail that the belief is about any state of affairs.

28 The question takes on a sharper form if we assume, with Brentano and his heirs, that all mental acts and states which enjoy the property of intentionality possess a mode. The mode of conjecturing that p, unlike the mode of judging that p, clearly has an intimate relation to probability. Similarly, the mode of indignation, unlike the mode of sadness, enjoys an intimate relation to injustice. Is this intimate relation just that captured by the correctness conditions of the act or state? In the fullest account of modes in the Brentanian tradition, that given by Husserl in his Logical Investigations, the modes of acts, “act-qualities”, are sharply distinguished from the (token) contents and objects of acts. In an act, it is content which presents or represents objects. Modes do not present or represent anything. Rather, they colour a content. The modes of emotions inherit their content from their underlying cognitive bases. So, the content of fear of a dog is the content of the, for example, visual perception of the dog. It follows that the content of fear contains no presentation or representation of danger. Nevertheless, Husserl sometimes speaks of emotions as presenting or representing value. But this claim is arguably inconsistent with his account of modes and contents. Can the inconsistency be avoided? One interesting suggestion Husserl makes is that non-intentional affective items, affective sensations (Gefühlsempfindung) of pleasure (Lust), pain and unpleasure (Unlust), together with the content of an emotion’s cognitive basis do the job of presenting or representing value. But since affective sensations lack intentionality it is difficult to see how they can do the job they are supposed to do (Mulligan, 2017b).

29 Meinong makes an initially more promising suggestion. Since he thinks that emotions are directed towards values and accepts that only content can present or represent, he denies the claim made by Husserl to the effect that emotions have no content of their own but only an inherited content. But his account of the content of emotions is very cursory. We are told only that this content consists of pleasure and unpleasure. Since pleasure and unpleasure make up the content of emotions they cannot be emotions. They must, it seems, belong to the already mentioned category of affective sensations. But then the objection to Husserl’s way out applies also to Meinong’s solution. It is also by no means obvious that the multiplicity of pleasure and unpleasure is rich enough to match the multiplicity of emotions and so of values.

Brentano vs Fit

30 There are good reasons for thinking that it is highly misleading to call Brentano’s mature theory a fitting attitude theory, even though contemporary fitting attitude and buck-passing philosophies go back to Brentano, probably via Broad and Ewing. One reason for this is that in Brentano’s mature theory, even before he came to think there are no relations, there is no relation of fit. A love of lovings is intentionally related to what a conceptual presentation-of-lovings presents and the correctness of this love is internally perceptible and thus knowable but correctness is no relation, no relational property nor does it presuppose either of these. In a 1909 letter to Kraus, Brentano says :

31

You assert that everyone will say: (1) the concept of the « correct » presupposes a relation or a relative determination; (2) that it is applicable where someone behaves in an appropriate (angemessen) way to something else, and (3) that this concept cannot therefore be clarified by intuition as the concept « red » can be so clarified, since it (and the same holds of all reflex concepts) is not gained through abstraction. Is this perhaps Martian psychology? - If this is the case, it has departed from my psychology and that of Aristotle in essential respects… I am here referring to the two last remarks (Brentano, 1977, pp. 210-211, my numbering).

32 What is Brentano’s view about (1)? In the passage quoted it is not entirely obvious that he is rejecting (1). But in the same letter he goes on to reject the claim that when I grasp myself as something which loves correctly I must also know that something else exists; indeed, such a grasp does not entail that “a relation” to something else “obtains” (Brentano, 1977, p. 211; cf. pp. 184-185). This suggests that Brentano does reject (1). Brentano’s rejection of (2) in the passage quoted follows from his rejection of (1). The relational locutions, fitting, appropriate, suitable, all of which are often employed as translations of Aristotle’s πρέπον are, then, to be distinguished from the non-relational locution correctness. One reason for thinking that Brentano is right is that the relational locutions mentioned admit of comparative forms unlike Brentanian correctness when said of judgings and emotings.

33 The relations of fit, appropriateness, harmony, correspondence and adequation, then, which Brentano’s early philosophy applies, and which are employed by those who develop Brentano’s early theory, such as Marty and Husserl, do not fit well with Brentano’s mature theory since they are relations or relative determinations. However, in a letter written in 1906, Brentano asserts that “Correct says nothing other than the judgment or love is as it ought to be”. [13] Claims of this kind, to which we shall return, seem clearly to entail that correctness is a relation, a relation between a mental act and a deontic norm. And that Brentano’s account of value is an account in terms of a deontic property. Did Brentano change his mind between 1906 and 1909?

34 It is worth noting that although contemporary “buck-passing” and “fitting attitude” theories derive from Brentano’s theory they differ from Brentano on one point which is precisely what allows them to invoke relations of fittingness and appropriateness (Skorupski, 1997, 2007; Mulligan, 1998; Scanlon, 1998; Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen, 2004). In contem­porary fitting attitude theories, there is typically no denial of naïve realism about natural objects and properties. The fitting attitude theorist wants to understand the exemplification of value in terms of the appropriateness of some emotion to some natural fact or of there being a reason, a particular natural fact or situation, to emote in a particular way. She is then happy to say that a certain emotion fits a certain natural object or situation. But Brentano cannot say that. He gives an account of the existence of natural objects which is incompatible with naïve realism: for something to exist is just for acceptance-of-it to be knowable–as-correct. He is a thorough-going buck-passer, a buck-passer about both existence and value.

Normative? Axiological? Deontic? Sui generis?

35 Is correctness a normative property? Tappolet suggests that “to say that an emotion is correct is not yet to make a normative judgement”. [14] Correctness might be thought to be a non-normative property because it is defined in terms of or constituted by a non-normative relation such as correspondence.

36 Is correctness a value-property? Brentano occasionally seems to say that this is the case. Thus he says that what distinguishes “true and evident judging and inferring from prejudices and invalid inferences (Fehlschlüssen)” is a certain inner excellence (Vorzug) (Brentano, 1934, § 12, pp. 12-13). But correctness, in the intended sense, unlike value, is degreeless and Brentano’s considered view is that correct acts have value not that to be correct is just to be valuable. “All emotions which are characterised as correct are good in themselves” (Brentano, 1978, p. 186). Aristotle, too, seems to distinguish between correctness and goodness, for example when he says that correct desire is necessary if a deliberation is to be good (NE VI 2, 1139a22-26), that good deliberation is a way of being correct (NE VI 9, 1142b8-9), that for the noble man the object of desire is what is truly a good, that correct behaviour is noble and that the ability to judge correctly and to choose what is truly good is most noble. [15]

37 Brentano seems never to claim explicitly in the texts he published that correctness is a normative property. But there are passages in these texts which may suggest this view (Brentano, 1934, § 11, pp. 12-13; cf. Brentano, 1959, pp. 140-141) and, as we have seen, in his 1906 letter to Kraus he does say that correctness is to be understood in terms of ought to be. Husserl asserts in his Logical Investigations that a proposition dominated by the concept of correctness is a normative proposition (Husserl, 1975, § 47). [16] Brentano and many of his followers take the correctness and the truth of judgings to be the very same property. Husserl, however, follows Bolzano in distinguishing between the correctness of judging and the truth of propositions and in claiming that, properly speaking, judgings – and, he would doubtless add, believings – are neither true nor false (Husserl, 1975, § 47; cf. Wedgwood, 2007, p. 86).

38 Properly speaking, then correctness, unlike truth, is a normative property and what is correct is not true. Husserl, it should be noted, often fails to speak properly, by his own lights. In 1896, Husserl had said that “a judgment is correct, if it accepts what ought to be accepted or rejects what ought to be rejected” and says that this is the answer to the question about what it means to say that a judgment is correct. In the same passage, he says that judgmental correctness “must be based on something objective”, truth. This suggests that he here accepts that if a judgment that p is correct, then it is correct at least in part because the proposition that p is true or because of the obtaining of the state of affairs that p (veritative being). [17]

39 Husserl’s view that the correctness of judging and believing is a normative property has been popular in the twentieth century (Gibbard, 2003; Boghossian, 2003; Wedgwood, 2007, p. 153; Engel, 2014). If it is not a value, is it a sui generis normative property or is it to be understood in terms of, say, oughtness? According to Boghossian, it is distinct from and irreducible to oughtness and obligation and has more in common with permissibility than oughtness (Boghossian, 2003, p. 37). According to Gibbard, “Correctness is a normative matter, a matter of whether one ought to do what one is doing” (Gibbard, 2003, p. 85).

40 Evaluation of such views, I suggest, depends on whether one allows that there are two types of ought, ought to do and ought to be. Sidgwick’s distinction between these two types of oughtness was very popular with some of Brentano’s heirs and ought to be is prominent already in Husserl’s Investigations. As the expression “ought to do” suggests, in constructions such as “Sam ought to smoke” the deontic expression takes an action predicate in order to make a predicate. But de re deontic constructions do not always express an ought to do. Arguments ought to be valid. The de dicto constructions “It ought to be (the case) that” are sometimes thought to do no useful work at all (Geach, 1991). Semantically speaking, an ought to do bears on the sort of thing which may be within a person’s power. Pragmatically speaking, an ought to do functions as something which guides our actions in a direct fashion. It is perhaps because an ought to be does not guide in the way in which an ought to do does that Sidgwick calls it the ought of politicians (Sidgwick, 1913, p. 33).

41 If one is sceptical of the very idea of an ought to be or convinced that oughts have to be action guiding, then an account of correctness in terms of ought to be will not persuade and correctness may come to seem to be a normatively sui generis property which has at best some similarities with permissions to do this or that. Meinong, as we shall now see, thinks that correctness has to be understood in terms of ought to be. And if correctness has to be understood in terms of oughtness, this is indeed the most plausible option since judgings, believing, emotings and desirings are not immediately subject to the will.

42 As we have noted, Meinong at one point rejected the very idea of emotional (in)correctness. Meinong’s view was dictated by the conviction that only judgments could be correct or incorrect. This led him to deal with the phenomenon of apparent incorrectness of emotions in terms of the (in)correctness of the judgments these emotions are based on. But Meinong came to think that correctness is not always intellectual. During a period of “psychological, if not psychologistic Jugendmutes” he failed, he confesses, to appreciate properly Brentano’s views (Meinong, 1968, p. 278). There are indeed not only value-errors which are intellectual but also value-errors which are “so to speak emotional” (ibid., p. 630). But, according to his new view, the (in)correctness of judgments is still the primary phenomenon. And, as we shall see, he goes on to argue that a view very like Brentano’s is wrong.

43 Meinong refers to “the opposition between correct and incorrect in the hedonic domain” and it is clear that he takes the opposition between correct and incorrect emotions to be that between (non-defeasibly) justified or warranted (berechtigt) and unjustified emotions (Meinong, 1968, pp. 464 & 424) and that between the rightness and wrongness (Unrechtmässigkeit) of emotions. And indeed that between being right (Rechthaben) and wrong to emote, being entitled or not to emote:

44

It is […] striking and worthy of attention that a certain being right or wrong, more concisely, a sort of justification or its lack is noticeable also in the case of emotional experiences (ibid., 404).

45 Not only does Meinong seem to identify these four oppositions, following ancient precedent, he identifies them with the opposition between true and false emotions (ibid., III, p. 643). Since the distinction between justified and unjustified applies primarily to judgments, it applies to emotions only in an “extended sense” (id.) :

46

Right and wrong, insofar as these are said of emotions, means without any doubt something other than right and wrong in the case of judgments, but is nevertheless taken over (herübernommen) from the latter (ibid., p. 415).

47 Meinong, then, agrees with Aristotle that there is correctness and correctness.

48 How should we understand “extended sense”, “taken over”? The distinction between justified and unjustified emotions, Meinong argues, has a foundation (Grundlage), justified judgments. Suppose, to take an example which is not Meinong’s, Sam is afraid of a dog and the dog is the object of the cognitive basis or presupposition of Sam’s fear. The dog is what Meinong calls a presupposition object or acquired object of the fear, since fear gets this object from its presupposition. The fear has as what Meinong calls its proper object the disvalue of danger (I am here ignoring Meinong’s distinction between dignitatives and values. [18] It should also be borne in mind that what Meinong calls the proper object of an emotion is just what Husserl calls its improper object). Then, says Meinong, Sam’s fear is justified, he is entitled to be afraid, only if the judgment that the dog is dangerous is justified. Meinong does not, of course, say that fear of a dog involves such a judgment. His point is perfectly general:

49

We may consider emotions justified insofar as the judgments connecting their proper objects with their presupposition objects are justified. That… the justification of such judgements does not involve the justification of the… relevant emotions scarcely needs to be pointed out expressly: the judgments may be negative and thus signify the wrongness of the relevant emotions (ibid., p. 424).

50 In a later, interesting formulation, Meinong distinguishes between the correctness of judgments and objective truth:

51

If it is true that the presupposition object [the dog] has the proper object [danger] and so that the corresponding judgment is in the right, then someone who connects to the presupposition object [the dog] the value-experience with its proper object [danger] is in the right (ibid., p. 643).

52 Unlike Husserl and Marty, Meinong does not say here that the exemplification of danger by the dog or the dangerousness of the dog grounds the correctness of fear of the dog. But as we have noted he does endorse just such a view in 1917. His official position is that the correctness of emotions is a type of correctness derived from, « taken over from », an extension of, the correctness of judgments (ibid., p. 415). That, as we have noted, is why he thinks that the correctness of emotions is of a different kind than the correctness of judgments.

53 Although Meinong, like Brentano, endorses a distinction between correct and incorrect emotions, he rejects a view held by Brentano and those who followed him, that there is an analogue of evidence (Evidenz), quasi-evidence, in the case of emotions which differs from the evidence of judgings: “an analogue of evidence in the case of feelings and desires is not required” (id.). His naively realist account of emotions and values does not, he thinks, require quasi-evidence. Why not?

54 If Meinong is right, the Brentanian approach to both emoting and judging is wrong. The phenomenon of evident judging, Meinong argues, is not simply a feature of such judging but the relation between this feature and the factuality (Tatsächlichkeit) of objectives or states of affairs. Similarly, one cannot understand emotional justification simply as a “qualitative peculiarity” of certain emotions; it is a relation between such a peculiarity and the axiological way the world is (ibid., p. 405). As we have seen, Brentano thinks that the evidence of judgings and the quasi-evidence of emoting is simply a qualitative peculiarity of these acts and that the correctness of such acts is to be understood in terms of evidence and quasi-evidence. Meinong does not agree. Evidence, he says, is not and does not constitute rightness, evident judgments are about or treat of rightness (ibid., p. 412).

55 Meinong’s late account of the nature of the (in)correctness of emotions contains, as we shall now see, the fullest attempt to answer the questions raised above about the normative nature of correctness to be found in the Brentanian tradition.

56 What, according to Meinong, is the relation between something’s being valuable and the correctness or rightness of emotions? He distinguishes between personal and impersonal value. The personal value of an object is the emotional meaning or significance it has for someone (ibid., p. 642). Something has a positive value iff pro-emoting of that thing is right or correct. Somewhat surprisingly Meinong thinks that this equivalence yields a “definition” or “essential determination” of impersonal value (ibid., p. 644; cf. p. 277). Surprisingly, because Meinong clearly thinks that being impersonally valuable is an “absolute determination” and seems to think that a “definition proper” of impersonal value cannot be given (ibid., p. 641). Meinong nevertheless thinks that his equivalence between the absolute determination of impersonal value and the relational determination of correct emoting may be understood as a type of definition and gives an analogy:

57

If I call something blue, that is […] a completely relation-free and so […] absolute determination. But if I say of the thing that it is so constituted that the property of being blue can rightly be attributed to it, then I have […] said nothing essentially new, but rather simply replaced the first, more simple determination, by a more complicated equivalent […] which has without any doubt a relational character (ibid., p. 642).

58 Another surprising feature of Meinong’s “definition” of impersonal value is that it resembles Brentano’s view in one major respect. Brentano, too, as we have seen, aims to define value in terms of correct or right emoting. It is true that, as we have, seen, Meinong does not want to understand correct emoting in terms of its knowability. But the real difference between the positions of the Master and his pupil, I suspect, has to do with the different ways in which they understand definitions. Brentano’s view often looks like a reductive definition. Meinong clearly does not want to give any sort of reductive definition. [19]

59 Meinong notes an objection to his view and, in replying to the objection, sets out the fullest version of his account of non-intellectual correctness: “If the feature of rightness or justification occurs as an essential component of a value-concept”, he writes near the end of his life, “then what initially appears to be a difficulty emerges” which “may not be completely passed over”:

60

If one attempts to get clear about what “justification” means, one finds – and this is no disadvantage - that one is by no means obliged to leave the sphere of emotional presentation. But it might look as though the kinship between justification and value must be so great that the essence of justification can only be determined by appealing to value. A being [an existential or predicative state of affairs] is justified to the extent that, if it is sufficiently indeterminate, it “ought” to be… Justification is to begin with a desiderative [a deontic state of affairs] or is derived therefrom. But if one asks how what ought to be must be constituted, the obvious answer is: it can only be something which has value. Then what is justified is what has value and the attempt to determine (bestimmen) value with the help of the notion (thought, Gedanke) of justification seems to be open to the accusation of [containing] a vicious circle (ibid., p. 644).

61 Justification (entitlement, warrant) just is oughtness, oughtness presupposes value, so value cannot be determined with the help of the notion of justification (or, perhaps, the concept of value cannot be determined with the help of the notion of justification) – on pain of circularity. Meinong says that he owes the idea that justification is (to be understood in terms of) oughtness to his student, Franz Weber. [20] He unfortunately does not tell us exactly how the identification of justification and oughtness should be formulated. But perhaps he has in mind claims like the following:

62

x is right to pro-emote y (x is justified in pro-emoting y) iff It ought to be the case that (x pro-emotes y) & x pro-emotes y
It ought to be the case that (if x pro-emotes y, then y exemplifies the positive value which is the proper object of x’s emoting)

63 Examples which are more specific than Meinong’s own examples might be:

64

It ought to be the case that (if x is indignant about the fact that p, then it is unjust that p)
It ought to be the case that (if x is ashamed that p, then it is shameful that p)

65 The more familiar intellectual analogue of these is

66

It ought to be the case that (if x judges/believes that p, then p)

67 When Meinong tells us that justification is oughtness, he has in mind ought to be. For he thinks that oughtness is, in the first instance, a determination of objectives or states of affairs and only secondarily something which can be attributed to a person (ibid., p. 325).

68 Meinong thinks there is not really any threat of a vicious circle in his account:

69

But there can be no talk of a circle here because ought and, with it, justification belong to the sphere of the proper objects of desire, whilst our determination of impersonal value above was based only on value feelings and hence only on feelings. If it may therefore also be asserted that nothing could have justification which does not have value, this is definitely an important law, but not a law suited to cast doubt on the employment of justification in a definition of value (ibid., p. 644).

70 Here we see what Meinong had in mind in referring to rightness or justification as “an essential component of a value-concept” and in saying that value – or the concept of value - can be “determined” with the help of the notion of justification. He has in mind equivalences such as

71

This is beautiful iff it is right to be pleased by this

72 in which the right-hand side is the definition or analysis of the left-hand side. If this is indeed what he has in mind, then we may wonder what the relation is, according to Meinong, between the equivalence understood in this way and the type of – naïve realist – claim we have already noted,

73

If it is right to be pleased by this, then it is right to be pleased by this because it is beautiful. [21]

74 Correctness, then, according to Meinong, is a deontic property. As his pupil (and collaborator of Schlick), Weinhandl, puts it, correctness is agreement with a norm (Normgemässheit):

75

“[T]he predicate « correct » belongs to something which corresponds to a norm. By a « norm » we understand a guiding principle (Richtsschnur), a canon, quite generally: a standard” (Weinhandl, 1923, pp. 72-73).

76 Anselm, who seems to be one of the few philosophers who took seriously non-intellectual correctness before Brentano, [22] formulates the deontic view of correctness in De veritate.  [23] But the view that correctness is agreement with a deontic norm cannot be Brentano’s view, if he thinks that correctness is neither a relation nor a relational determination.

Values resemble Melodies not Colours

77 When Meinong says that a proper definition of impersonal value cannot be given, he says that the “indefinability of impersonal value is to be compared not to the indefinability of colour or tone but to that of a melody or Gestalt” (Meinong, 1968, p. 641). He is thus rejecting the infamous parallel drawn by Moore much earlier between the indefinability of goodness and of colours. His reason for doing so is that values or dignitatives, oughtness (desideratives) and objectives or states of affairs are, like melodies and other types of Gestalt, and unlike colours and tones, higher-order objects:

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The property ´beautiful` requires not merely, like the property ´red`, something to which it is attached as a property, but in addition a property or a complex thereof as its foundation, without which it would be as little able to exist as red without something red. It […] is bound to the nature of this foundation (ibid., p. 388).

79 A value-property, like a melody, is a dependent object. Husserl, too, argues that a distinguishing feature of values is that they are founded objects. Just as emotions have correctness makers, so too, valuable objects have value-makers, what Broad was to call valifiers. And Moore himself came to accept this sort of view in 1922. [24] Meinong, Husserl and early Moore, according to a plausible interpretation, all also agree that value is an ideal object or property and not a non-repeatable property (a trope).

The Perception of Value Qualities

80 The most extreme form of naive realism about values or goods is the view that value-properties and the property of being a good are qualities and that there is a perception or intuition of such qualities. In one of the earliests text in which Brentano’s mature view of value is formulated he dismisses two claims he attributes to Aristotle, that values are in things [25] and can be perceived. [26] This combination of claims is one which Brentano, like so many twentieth century philosophers, finds incredible. Is the ability to distinguish good and bad really comparable to a visual ability (cf. NE III 5, 1114b3-12)? Are value-properties really in things, qualities of things, like individual accidents? Are they universals exemplified by objects? The correct answers, Brentano argues, are all negative. But a surprising number of Brentano’s heirs give affirmative answers to at least one of these questions. [27] One distant precursor of such views is perhaps Aristotle’s claim that that in virtue of which we call someone a good boxer or runner, healthy or sickly, is a quality (Cat. 8, 9a14-27). [28]

81 ***

82 Brentano is right to say that he is essentially a product of the school of Aristotle and this is particularly true of his philosophy of correctness, which is at the heart of his philosophy. [29] Heidegger often stresses that Aristotle’s approach to philosophical questions is phenomenological. As Roderick Chisholm used to say, Aristotle is the first Austrian philosopher. [30]