In our unguarded momenst we all tend to be objectivists about values. We see ourselves as arguing with others who maintain values opposed to ours. in the heat of dispute it does not seem that we are expressing attitudes which our opponents are at liberty to differ, nor do we think we are merely truing to bring them to share our goals We are convinced that we are right and they are wrong, not just in the sense that our values are better than theirs, or more enlightened. but that we are objectively correct and they are not. We assume, and assert, that our judgements of what is good, rightor just and true, and taht those who disagree with us have false views.

These are our unguarded moments. On second though we are apt to grant that others may be as entitled to their opinions as we are to ours. Judgementsof walue are not, we generously allow, objectively true or false, thougt some values may be admirable or despicable. We may even be brought to feel ashamed of speaking and acting as though we thought there were truths about the right of worthwhile. It is politically correct to welcome the diversity of ultimate goals and aims; it smacks of cultural imperialism, we are told, to embrace the objectivity of values.

But should we rest with the second though? It is impossible, i think, to rest content with it, for it clashes with some of the most powerful intuitions we have; the vwry intuitions that come with the first, unguarded, though. Despite the manifest difficulties, no satisfactory theory of morality (or value generally) can fail to accomodate our lively conviction that moral claims are objectively either valid or not.

The denial of taht value judgements are objective, that they have truth values just as our ordinary judgements abut the physical world do, is not to be confused with relativism. The relativist does not question the objective validity of value judgement; he merely insist that what isvaluable or right is relative to time, place, person, culture, tribe or legal system. We are all moral relativists to some degree; any sane person must be. We acknowledge that is moraly wrong to kill someone in order to inherit their money, but that killing may be permitted, or even right, under certain other conditions. We do nost blame children for actions for which we would hold an adult responsible. It may (as Plato remarked) be right to hand a man beset by thieves a weapon, but wrong to give him the same seapon to a deranged would - be suicide. Relativism goes deeper the more persvasive the relevant conditions are made, and the more willing we become to recogniye that ourjudgement are valid only as relativised. We all accept to some degree the slogan "Do in Rome what the Romans do", but we are also apt to forget that we may be not in Rome.

Nevertheless, the relativist cannot in consistency deny the objectivity of values. The relativist holds that an individual act has its value objectively, thoug an act similar in many. ways might have a different, thogh equally objective, value. The relativist abut values is no more skeptical about the objectivity of values than the linguist is skeptical about the truth of an utterance just because the same sentence uttered in another context may be false ("It's raining".)

There are, of course familiar ethical theories which make evaluative judgements objective: the two best are Kantian nad the Utilitarian. Kant held that there are moral laws and principles or maxims which admit of no exceptions.They tell us that acts of certain sorts are obligatory or forbidden in every circumpstance, in the sense that no action falls under more than one principle. Such imperatives are cathegorical. As Kant put it, categorical imperatives are unconditional, "meaning that from the point of view of the practical reason the agent either must or must not perform them". There can, of course, be disputes as to what the unconditional principles are, and what particular action fall under them. But the question whether some principle is a valid moral principle is independent of our judgement, and so also is the question what action fall under a particular principle. Thus for a Kantian, the objectivity of moral judgements follow directly from the nature of principles. It also follows that, in any genuine moral dispute, at leat one party must be wrong.

Many utilitarian theories also have the obvious cosequence that questions of good and bad, right and wrong, reduce to question about the relative amounts of pleasure or pain. satisfaction or dissatisfaction, utility or disutility, a state produces or an act brings about; such views make judgementsof value as objective as any matter of fact can be.

I find that like many other philosophers I can accept neither the Kantian imperative nor utilitarian cosequentualism. it is harder to make a convincing case for the objectivity of moral judgements - and indeed, of values quite generally - if, unlike the Kantian or the utilitarian, you hold that the moral conflict are real. I am convicted that the objectivity of basic moral principles, but I hold that moral principles are real. I am convinced of the objectivity of basic moral principles, but I believe they can come into genuine conflict. By this i mean: genuine obligations can on occasion clash: it can happen that we are obliged to refrain from performing it. We are all familiar with what are taken to be examples: we have innocently promissed to perform an act itturns out with result in untold human misery; we are obliged both to stay home wih our ailing mother and to join the ressistance; we are obliged to save the lives of our children if we can, but are placed in a situation in which we can save either of two children, but cannot save both; we have made two promises which no amount of foresign could have led us to suspect could not both be honored. the last two examples, by the way, show that moral coflicts do not necessarily require two principles which collide in application; a single principle can apply to the same situation in conflict ways.

Some philosophers have reasoned from the existence of conflicting principles to the moral (or evaluative) judgements cannot have truth values, cannot be true or false. Thus both Bernard Williams and Phillipa Foot, in rather different ways, have argued that sincewe feel genuine regret when we know or believe that we have foregone a genuine value, or contraved a genuine obligation, we must admit the legitimacy of both the value or obligation served and the one foregone. But if obligations which are opposed may nevertheless both be legitimate, then neither obligation can be called objectively valid at the expense of the other, and judgements of validitu cannot, in the logical sense, be contradictory. In this way, the existence of conflict in the personal domain become arguments against the idea that interpersonal or intercultural conflicts have an objective solution.

Persuasive as some find this argument, I do not think the case against the objectivity ofmoral judgements has been conclusively made Regret than the course followed meant losing something valuable or neglecting a real obligation does not necessarily show taht it was not objectively the correct course.

How, though, can we hope to maintain that evaluative judgments are objectively correct if there are legitimate claims on us that coflict? Pretty clear, this can be the case only if such claims are not not exceptionless, not, in Kant's word, categorical. We must be prepared to allow that though it may be an objectively correct principle that we should honour our debts, there may be cases where it would be objectively wrong to do so. It would be trivial to take this to mean only that the maxim, "It is wrong not to pay one's debts", has a finite list of exception itis too boring to enumerate, for this would bring us back to the idea of exceptionless (but complicated) principles we are too lazu or unknowing to state explicitly. The interesting cases arise when there is no such list, when the exceptions are not really exceptions, but rather caseswhere the obligation to honor one's debt, though never inapplicable, is rather overruled by some obligations or value which under the circumpstances, is more pressing.

I cannot hope to give this view its due here; I have tried elsewhere. my present interest is in making pl~ausible the thesis thatthe admission of a plurality of ultimate obligations and values is consistent with the objective correctness of evaluative judgments.

Let me begin by making an bovious point which it is easy to forget when arguing about objectivity generally. A judgment isobjective if it is true or false, or possibly neither, but its truth value, (true, false or neither) is fixed: its truth value is independent of who makes the judgment, and of society or period in which the thinker lives. The truth value of a judgment depends on just two things: the facts, and the contents of the judgment, the propositio beingjudged.

If people throw rocks or shoot on each other, there is not necessarily, or perhaps even often any proposition the truth of which is in dispute. A dispute requires that there be some proposition, a content shared by disputants, about which options differ. If you are one of those who are sceptical about the clarity or usefulness of the concept of a proposition or content (and I am such a skeptic), this formulation of the concept of a dispute will need reworking. The same goes for formulations that depend on the notionof incompatible beliefs or judgments, for such formulation depend for their clarity on our understanding what is for two people to have the same belief or to consider the same judgment. Appeal to language will not directly help, since two people can agree on the truth of a sentence while not agreeing on what the sentence means. The concept of two people meaning the same thing by a sentence is as muchin need of further analysis as the question of the identity conditions of propositions, beliefs or judgments. But progress here is posssible, and, as we shall see, promises to throw light on our central problem.

The question of objectivity of moral judgements, or the nature of moral disputes is, then, as much a question about how the content of moral judgment is determined as it is a question about the nature and source of moral values. In this talk I shall concentrate on the first point at the expense of the second. I shall not try to say what is right or obligatory, but rather why the facts that determine the content of moral jugment give reason to suppose both that such judgments are true or false, and that there is more agreement on moral and other values than it might at firsr seem.

Discussions of the objectivity of value are frequently - and perennialy - infected by the inherent unintelligible question where values are. Hume puts it this way:

Examine the crime of ingratitude... Enquire then where is the matter of fact which we here call crime; point it out; determine the time of existence; describe its essence or nature; explain the sense or faculty to which it discovers itself... the crime of ingratitude is not anythe spectator, excites the sentiment of blame... The vice entirelu escapes you... till you turn your reflection onto your own breast¹.

John Mackie, in his attractively plain - spoken book, Ethics:Invwnting Right nad wrong, says that for the objectivist ".. there is something that backs up and validates some of the subjective concern which people have for things". And he adds "If there is were something in the fabric of the world taht validated certain kinds of concern, then it would be possible to acquire these merely by finding something out, by letting one's thinking be controlled by how things were". Mackie then asks,

What is connection between the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate cruelty - say, causing pain just for fun - and the moral fact that it is wrong?... It is wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty. But just what in the world is signified by this "because"? It is not ... sufficient to postulate a faculty which 'sees' the wrongness: something must be postulated which can see oncethe natural features that constitute the cruelty, and the weongness, and the mysterious consequentional link between the two².

We are meant to be reminded of hume, and we are.

Unlike Hume and Mackie, who deride the idea of objective values or reasons, Thomas Nagel wants to show that at least some reasons are objective. He says,

In deliberation we are trying to arrive at conclusion that are correct in virtue of something independent of our arriving at them. If we arrive at a conclusion, we believe that it would have been correct even if we hadn't arrived at it. And we can also acknowledgement we might be wrong... I want to concentrate on the process of thought by which, against a realistbackground, one might try to arrive at objectiveconclusions about reasons for action. In other words, if there really are values, how is objective knowledge of them possible?³.

In this passage Nagel takes the objectivityof values to entail two things: that evaluation can be considered to be correct or incorrect apart from all personal - including fully enlightened - reasons; and the correctness depends on correspondence with something real - they arecorrect, in Nagel's words "in virtue of something independent"- "there really are values". This second idea, the reality or existence of values in the world, is also dominant in Hume's and Mackie's accounts of objectivity: mackie says that according to the objectivist, values are part of "the fabric of the world"or are "in the world", "they are to be found or discovered, something we can point out". Like Hume, he asks the objectivist where and how he perceives these external values.

It strange to speak of values as being, or not bening, "out there". The things and events to which we attach values are certainly out there (for the mostpart, anyway); the properties we predicate of such things are neither here nor there, for properties have no location. When we speak of values, we don't even seem to be reffering to entities of some odd sort, and so objectivity of realism with respect to values can't sensibly be constructed as an ontological issue. The same is true of weights, colors, and positions. There aren't "out there" - or anywhere else.

I want, then, to separate two issues. It seems to me that close attentionto the nature of evaluation can throw light on the question whether such reasons can intelligiby be judged as correct or incorrect without setting the question whether values are real or exist "in the world". So I plan to concentrate on what might be called the epistemological problem and let the ontological problem, if there is one, take care of itself. For I theink that if we were to solve the epistemological problem we would lose interest in the supposed ontological problem.

I sympathize with Hare, who asks us to

... think of one world into whose fabric values are objectively built; and think of another in which those values have been annihilated. And remember that both worlds the people in them go on concerned about the same things - there is no difference in the "subjective" value. Now I ask, "What is the difference between the states of affairs in these two worlds? Can anyanswer be given except "None whatever"?⁴

Mackie quotes this passage only to chide Hare for overlooking the distinction between moral judgments and metaethical account of nature of moral judgments. Mackie allows that the difference would be matter to our everyday evaluations; but he thinks it does matter to philosophy. It matters so much, in fact, that his opinion, all our everyday value judgments are false, since all of them suppose, falsely, that there are values "in the world". I am sceptical about ethics - metaethics distinction, at least inthis case. It seems tome that if it matter to everyone else too. So, agreeing wirh Hare and Mackie both it it doesn't matter to everyone else, I conclude, with the satisfaction only an application of modus tollendo tollens can give, that it does not matter philosophically.

I also take comfort from the words of another anti-objectivist, Simon Blackburn. He writes,

...the extra ingredients the realist adds {to what the projections assumes, namely the existence of personal reasons} (the values or obligations which, in addition to normal features of things, are cognized...) are pulling no explanatory weight: they just sit on top of the story which tells how out sentiments relate to the natural features of things.⁵

I agree with Hare and Blackburn that it adds nothing to an account of values to insist that they are real, part of furniture of the world, something to be found or discovered. But I do not think that this settles the issue whether there are evaluations th correctness of which may be independent of even our enlightened pesonal reasons.

Blackburn argues that if values were in the world they would explain nothing; they just "sit on the top" of the natural features of the world, natural features that happen to turn us on. (This argument is also used by Gilbert Hartman). But plenty of real features of the world just "sit on the top" of others, are supervenient on them, without this counting against the objectivity of attributions of these features to objest that are certainly in the world. Being green, for example, sits on the top of more fundamental properties of objects, thouh in a very complicated way, and so in one sense the grenness of objectsexplains nothing. Colors (and the other so-called secondary qualities) supervene on the properties a really finished physics needs. Our perceivings and thoughts supervene on the physical properties of our bodies. But of course thoughts and colors do explain things, not in the way physics does, but in other ways. colors and thoughts aren't definable in physical terms - that's why they can explain what physics can't. But explanatory power is not in this case related to ontology. It is true - objectively true - that some things are green and people have certain thoughts. This doesn't require that there be objects or events in additionto physical events and objects, but it does empower and require explanations of a different order. Blackburn's argument does not, then, show that objects and events in the world may not really and truly have values.

There is an argument for objectivity which seems to me caught up in the same confusion; it is to be found in the work of John McDowel and David Wiggins. they claim that there is a variety of subjectivity which values share with secondary qualities, but which does not make values any the less objective. I think this thesis is misleading because I see it as an attempt to answer a bad question.

John Mackie says ".. my thesis is... spacifically the denial that there are values not contingent on any present desire of the agent"⁶ The bad question to which this is supposed to be an "answer" is: are values in any sense contingent on desires of agents? david Wiggins and John Mcdowell agree with Mackie that values are in some semse contingent on the desires (or other evaluative attitudes) of agents, but unlike Mackie they think that this does not bring the objectivity of values into question. For, they maintain, secondary qualities also are conceptually tied to how they are perceived by human agents, and yet such qualities are objective. I quote Wiggins:

...pillar-boxes, painted as they are, count as red only because there actually exist a perceptual apparatus (e.g., our own) that discriminates, and learns on the direct basis of experience to group together, all and only the actually red things...But this in no way impugns the idea that redness is an external, monadic property of a postbox.⁷

I think that unless redness is defined as the property something has if it causes us to see the things as red (under the right conditions, and all that), and this is an idea Wiggins quite properly disavows, unless redness is so defined, it is false taht things would not count as red unless someone had the right equipment to see them as red. I say this on the assumption, of course, that things count as red if and only if they are red - that is, that they count as red whethher or not they are so counted. (Of course, things would not be called "red" unless speakers were caused to use this word when confronted with red things.) But the apparent falsity of the proposal is not my real complaint, to which I shall come in a moment.

McDowell puts the position this way:

(To) ascribe a value to something is to represent it as having a property which (although it is there in object) is essentially subjective in much the same wayas the property that an object is represented as having by an experience of redness - that is, understoodadequatly only interms of the appropriate modifications of human... sensibility. (E)valuative 'attitudes'... are like...color experience in being unintelligible except as modifications of a sensibility like ours.⁸

These remarks seem to me mistaken of course because, as I just said, they are addressed to the pointless question where such properties as rightness and redness reside. Wiggins says that redness is "external" (it is in or on the pillar-box) McDowel that it is "there in the object", Mackie thinks values are "not in the world". Well, Mackie is right, but not because values are elsewhere - or that any other properties are "in the world", for they are nowhere. The question whether these properties whether primary, secondary or evaluative, are contingent on the existence of human sensibilities or sense organs is equally misleading. Some properties are relational in the sense that nothing could have them unless something else existed: examples are properties of being a mother, a murderer, or sunburned. But neither the secondary qualities nor the evaluative properties are like this; they are not defined or understood in terms of a relation. (Wiggins agrees that red is not a relational property, but says "it is one interesting sense a relative property", in that color is a category that "corresponds to an interestting sense a relative property", in that color is a category that"correspons to an interestthat can only take root in creatures with something aopproaching our own sensory apparatus " (ibid, p. 349.). It seems to me that in this sense all properties are relative).

This is not to say, of course, that there are no interesting correlations between the properties objects have and our perceptions of those objects. Red objects tend to cause us to believe the objects are red, square objects tend to cause us to believe the objects are square, and precious object tend to cause us prize them. It is because the objects and events have the attitudes ve do. So far, nothing in these platitudes points to a distinction be tween primary and secondary qualities, or to a distinctioon between these and the properties for which we value things. And genuine question about objectivity must lie elsewhere. Objectivity depends on the locatioon of an attributed property, or its supposed conceptual tie to human sensibilities; it depends on there being a systematic relationship between the atiitude-caausing properties of things and events, and the attitudesthey cause. What makes our judgments of the "descriptive" properties of things true or false is the fact that the same properties cause the same beliefs in different observers - or would if the observers were fully enlightened. This is not just a platitude, it's a tautology, one whose truth is ensured by how we interpret people's beliefs. My thesis is the same holds for moral values. Before we can saz that two people disagree about the worth of an actioon or an object, we must be sure it is the same action or object and the same aspect of those actions and objects that they have in mind. The considerations that prove the dispute genuine - the considerations that lead to correct interpretation - will also reveal the shared criteria that detemine where the truth lies.

If, instead of asking where values are, we turn to the problem of understanding whatit is like to judge tat an act or object or institution is morally desirable or ought to existor is obligatory, we realize that we must be attributing some property or other to an entity or group of entities. The semantic nature of such judgments is clear: we are classifying one or more things as havin a certain property. the thing or things must either have that property or not (assuming thethings exist). There is no coherent way to avoid this conclusion. We say, and think, for example "I ought to visit my sick friend and I will". No one doubts that the second conjunct is true or false. But then what does "and" mean here? No one has explained the role of conjunct except by saying: a conjunct is true if and only if each conjunct is. It follows tat the first conjunct is true if the sentence as whole is. (Simon Blackburn and Alan Gibbard are honorable exceptions to the rule that philosophers who deny that moral judgments have truth values have made no attempt to explain the semantics of such sentences. But I judge their attempts to be clearly inadequate.)

The central issue remains: how do we tell what the content of a particular moral judgment is? This is a question of interpretation, of the understanding by one person of the utterances of another, since there is no other conteyt in which the content of a judgment can be agreed to or disputed.

To take up the position of an interpreter is consciously to assume the atatus anyone with thoughts and attitudes must be in, for the attitudes of a person have a content - are interpretable - only if that person is in communication with others; only interpreters can be interpreted. Thus by explicitly introducing the interpreter we complete in microcosm the social situation which alone gives content to the idea of being right or wrong about a shared public world. An interpreter is not an idle bystander: he is an essential player in a performance that requires complex causal interactions between people and the world.

An interpreter cannot hope to determine the contents of a person's desires, without also determining what the person believes; and there is no way to determine the contents of either of these attitudes in a sufficiently detailed way without linguistic communication, which requires the interpretatioon of the person's speech. The problem is due to the holism of the mental: it is, so tospeak, all or nothing: if we fully understand anything of another person's propositional attitudes, we understand a great deal. One key to the solution of the problem of simultaneously identifying the meanings, beliefs and values of an agent is a policy of rational acoomodatiion (this is what I have called the principle of charity). This policy calls on us to fit our own propositions (or ourown sentences) to another person's words and attitudes in such a way as to render that person's speech and other behavior intelligible. Interpretation involves seeing the mnetal lives of other as much like our own in point of overall coherence and correctness - it requires us to see other agents as more or less rational creatures inhabiting a shared world which they conceive more or less as we do. Rationallity is a matter of degree; but in so far as people think, reason, and act at all, there must be enough rationality in the pattern of their behaviior for us to identify their particular acts as prudent or misguided. Only in a largely coherent scheme can propositional attitudes have a place, and only in a largely shared scheme can the attitudes of others be assigned a place.

The policy of rational accomodation or charity is not a policz in the sense of being one among many possible succesful policies. It is the only method available if we want to understand other people. So instead of calling it a policy, we do better to think of it as a way of expressing the fact that creatures with thoughts, values, and sppeech must be rational. creatures, must see themselves as inhabitants of the same objective world as ourselves, and must share many of their leading values with us. We should not consider this some sort of lucky accident, but rather something built into the concepts of belief, desire, and meaning.

In the case of belief, what insures that our general picture of the world is one wee share with other thinking creatures, and one that is, in its main common-sense features, correct, is that what we mean by our sentences, and the thoughts those sentences may be used to express, these meanings and thoughts, are causally tied to what they are about. For in the plainest cases we can do no better than to interpret a sentence that a person is selectively caused to hold true by the presence, say, of rain, as meaning that it raining. This rule can accomodate many exceptions, and its applicatioon is subtle and complicated, but to ignore it entirely is simply to abandon interpretation. It followsthat in the plainest and simplest matters, goodinterpretation will generally put interpreter and interpreted in agreement. The rule also ensures that most of ours plainest beliefs are true.

To what extent do these considerations apply to the evaluative attitudes? It is possible, I think, to show that the justified attribution of values to someone else provides a basis for judgments of comparison of value what is called the inretpersonal comparison of values. But the comparability of values does not in itself imply agreed-on standards, much less that we canlegitimately treat value judgments as true or false. Now I want ot go on suggesting that we should expect enlightened values - the reasons we would have for valuing and acting if we had all the (non-evaluative) facts straight - to converge; we should expect people who are enlightened and fully understand one another to agree on their basic values. An appreciatioon of what makes for such convergence or agreement also shows that value judgments are true or false in much the waz our factual judgments are.

Let me survey the considerations that make for this conclusion. First, there are the norms or values of rationality. It is a necessary ffeature of interpretatioon that the successful interpreter tends to match his own norms of rationality to those of the person he or she is interpreting. This is obvious in

the case of elementary logic. Our primary evidence for identifying and interpreting the logical constants of a speaker (such as "and", "or", "if", etc.), has to be the patterns, fixed or shifting, of the speaker's attitudes to his sentences. So if I find a connective that creates a sentence out of two sentences, and such that the speaker always (or almost always) assents to the compound sentence when and only when he assents to each sentence taken allone, I can do no better than treat that connective as the speaker's sign for conjunction . Of course, I say this on the assumption that this is how I understand conjunction; someone else may not mean what I do by the words "and" or "conjunctioon". The point is that by interpretingt by the only standards of interpretatioon available to me, I have, on a primitive level, made the speaker I am interpreting a good logician (by my own norms of reasoning, It should go without saying; I have no others). For I fave so fixed things (i.e., interpreted him) that he "infers" each conjunct from a conjunction. With respect to the simplest and plainest logical matters, a sharing of norms of ratioonality is an inescapable artifact of interpretati on.

Needless to say, no one is a perfect logician. Having made a start by assuming consistency, finding it where we can, we prepare the ground for making the fallings off from rationality in others intelligible. We expect failures in reasoning when memory plays an important role, when sentences Such deviations make interpretation difficult, and can easilly put the interpreter in the position of having to choose between equally plausible, but different, total interpretive schemes; there can be trade-offs calling on us to decide whether a speaker means what he usually (or we usually) mean by certain words, or is confused in his reasoning, or has made an egregious error of fact. In such cases there is not necessarily just one correct theory.

I do not say that there can be no real differences in norms among those who understand each other. There can be, as long as the differences can be seen to be real because placed within a common framework. The common framework is the area of overlap, of norms one person correctly interprets another as sharing. Putting these considerations together, the principle thatemerges is: the more basic a norm is to our making sense of an agent, the less content we can give to the idea that we disagree with respect to that norm.

Good interpretatioon makes for convergence then, and on values in particular, and explains failure of convergence by appeal to the gap between apparent values and real values (just as we explain failure to agree on ordinary descriptive facts by appeal to the distinction between appearance and reality). thus there is a basis for the claim that evaluations are corrct or incorrect by interpersonal - that is, impersonal, or objective - standards. For if I am right, disputes over values (as in the case of other disputes) can be genuine only when there are shared criteria in the light of which there is an answer to the questiion who is right. Of course, genuine disputes must concern the values of the very same objects, acts, or states of affairs. When we find a difference inexplicable, that is not due to ignorance or confusion, the difference is not genuine; put form the point of view of an interpreter, finding a difference ineyplicable is a sign of bad interpretatioon. Iam not saying that values are objective because there is more agreement than meets the eye, and I certainly am not saying that what we agree on is therefore true. The importance of a background of shared beliefs and values is that such a background allows us to make sense of the idea of a common standard of right and wrong, true and false.

Dummet at one point suggest that an attribution of courage to a person who has died without iver bein placed in a situation requiring courage has no truth value. Dummet's reason for saying this is that there is no way anyone will everbe ableto tell whether the person was brave. I agree that such an attribution may have no truthvalue, but the reason is not that verification is lacking, but that we simply haven't had make up our minds about such cases. I think the same applies to many of the puzzles philosophers raise about split brains, multiple ersonalities, or, more to the present point, very difficult or unusual moral problems. It isconsistent with objectivity that there should be no clear answers about what is right or obligatory in such cases. It may be no accident that not one of the Socratic dialogues which start as an attempt to define some moral oncept ends up with an answer.

Bur no matter what the subtleties involved, interpreting evaluative judgments rests on the same foundation as interpreting the evaluative attitudes: understandeng depends on finding common ground. Given enough common ground, we can understand and explain differences, we can criticize, compare and persuade. The main thing is that finding the common ground os not subsequent to understanding, but a condition of it. This fact may be hidden from us because we usualy more or less understand someone'slanguage befor we talk with them. This invites theimpression that we can then, using our mutually understood language, discover whether we shaare their view of the words and their basic values. This is an illusion. If we understand their words, a common ground exists, we already share their way of life.

Darwin considered the natives of ptagonia simple brutes, their language a series of grunts. Bruce Chatwin tells us however, about Thomas Bridges, a missionary to Patagonia in the 1880's. Bridges according to Chatwin, "uncovered a complexity of construction and a vocabulary no one had suspected in a 'primitive' people". Chatwin warms to this theme:

Finding in a 'primitive' languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concept of 'good', or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things⁹.

I agree: values are rooted to things. That has been the theme of this paper. I have argued that values are objective, that they are rooted to things, and I have tried to say as clearly as I could, what this entails. I wish i were able to declare that I know a way to decide, in those cases where a decision is called for, what the right decision is what we ought to o. This would be a foolish thought, a foolish hope. But perhaps it will be agreed that thesis of the objectivity of values is not only worth discussing, but that it may be one way of bringing about agreement on what is now disputed.

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