UC San Diego

Spinoza’s ethical theory has recently come under the sustained attention of anglophone scholars. Central to debates in the secondary literature is Spinoza’s theory of value—his account of the notions of good and evil themselves. At issue is how to reconcile two sets of passages of Spinoza’s masterpiece, the Ethics, that seem to point in two different directions. On the one hand, in Part 4 of the work, Spinoza claims that good and evil must be understood in terms of a ‘model of human nature’ which establishes that our perfection consists in increasing the power of our nature. On the other hand, he claims in Part 3 that we judge things good or evil because we desire them, and thus that good and evil must be understood in terms of joy and sadness, the affects that determine our desires. So, it is unclear whether Spinoza’s ethical theory is supported by a realist theory of value based on perfection, or an antirealist theory of value based on desire.

This dissertation defends an antirealist interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of value. More specifically, it argues that his account of value is best understood as a kind of error theory, on which our value judgments purport to be about real properties of things but are systematically false. This is possible if Spinoza also defends two further views about value. The first is value projectivism, the view that our desires determine us to represent things as good or evil, even if they have no such properties. The second is value fictionalism, the view that we must retain the notions of goodness and perfection, despite their falsity, as useful guides to practical reasoning. The dissertation defends both as the best readings of Spinoza’s perfection-centered claims about value in Ethics 4 and his desire-centered claims about value in Ethics 3, respectively.

This interpretation suggests that Spinoza’s theory of value proposes form of antirealism on which value notions enjoy practical but not theoretical justification. This can be understood on analogy with antirealist theories of color. On such theories, although we represent colors as real properties, this representation is in fact a product of own cognitive limitations. Even so, we should retain the notions of colors. For we cannot escape our cognitive limitations, and we must represent things as if they are colored. In just the same way, Spinoza regards the first-person standpoint of practical deliberation, in which the notions of goodness and perfection are used, as a product of our cognitive limitations. Yet he recognizes that we must occupy this standpoint. We must represent ourselves as agents who act for the sake of the good, even if this is a fiction.