Abstract
Our feelings transform an inherently indifferent world into “a new creation,” says David Hume. Belief that values are purely subjective presumes that mind is separable from world. Value subjectivism and moral realism adopt factoring philosophy. Hume’s mindset is disjunctive from the start: values lie either in the subject or the object. Hume finds a pattern: what we attribute to the world—causality, substance, beauty, goodness—are projections of the mind. Hume is a factoring philosopher par excellence. Two holes in Hume’s theory of value are: projecting feelings onto the world makes no sense, so nothing gets projected. Objective values, says John Mackie, would be queer things, but we find none. We invent serviceable morals. Nothing important is missing. For Thomas Nagel, pleasure and pain are objective values but are subject to moral discrimination. Values are artifacts of factoring philosophy; goods are worldly. Better to speak of goods.