In Defense of the Internal Aspects View: Person-Affecting Reasons, Spectrum Arguments and Inconsistent Intuitions

According to the Internal Aspects View, the value of different outcomes
depends solely on the internal features possessed by each outcome and the
internal relations between them. This paper defends the Internal Aspects
View against Larry Temkin’s defence of the Essentially Comparative View,
according to which the value of different outcomes depends on what is
the alternative outcome they are compared with. The paper discusses both
person-affecting arguments and Spectrum Arguments. The paper does
not defend a person-affecting view over an impersonal one, but it argues
that although there are intuitive person-affecting principles that entail an
Essentially Comparative View, the intuitions that support these principles
can also be acommodated by other principles that are compatible with the
Internal Aspects View. The paper also argues that the rejection of transitivity
and the Internal Aspects View does not help us to solve the challenges
presented by Spectrum Arguments. Despite this, the arguments presented
by Temkin do succeed in showing that, unfortunately, our intuitions are
chaotic and inconsistent. The paper argues that this has metaethical
consequences that will be unwelcome by a moral realist such as Temkin,
since they challenge the idea that our intuitions may track a moral reality
existing independently of our preferences.