The good and other values : in defense of neo-Platonic ethical non-naturalism.

For over a century, mainstream philosophy in the English-speaking world has given a secondary role to values. This trend comes as a result of the perceived failure of G. E. Moore’s arguments about intrinsic goodness. Value so understood is thought to be too inflexible to account for the subjective range of value responses and normative reasons agents have. These arguments, however, trade on a novel conception of what values are. On that view, values are denuded of any internal relationship to descriptive facts. Retrieval of a broadly Platonic theory supports a different conception, according to which values are finite ways of being good that are aimed at the transcendent Good itself. The neo-Platonic view avoids the objections faced by other value-based moral philosophies, and it also provides the conceptual machinery to explain the range of evaluative thinking better than competing theories.