1

AMBIVALENCE OF VALUE JUDGEMENT CANNOT BE

DELIBERATED AWAY*

Hili Razinsky

I. SOME DIFFICULTIES WITH AMBIVALENCE OF VALUE JUDGEMENT

Suppose that Hannah judges ambivalently that she ought and that she ought not to

apologize for something; or suppose that Samuel ambivalently judges his mother to be a good

mother and a not-so-good one; or suppose that David is ambivalent as to whether a certain

example is convincing. Let us use the term ambivalence of value judgement to refer to such

attitudes.1 In attributing such an ambivalent attitude to a person, by the same token we

attribute opposed attitudes to them. Such a person is said to hold two antithetical judgements

at the same time: she judges that something or someone is of value V, and she also judges that

this same thing or person is not-V or that it is of a contrary value, W. When this pattern

depicts ambivalence of judgement, it is not the merely the case that the term “V” reappears in

the descriptions of both judgements, though not in the same sense. Rather, the very value that

* I wish to thank Eran Dorfman, Liran Razinsky, and Ben Young for their help and suggestions. An

earlier version of this paper has been discussed with my colleagues in the philosophy department of

Ben-Gurion. I thank them for their comments.

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: ‘Ambivalence of Value Judgment Cannot

be Deliberated Away’, The Philosophical Forum 44(4): 395–412, which has been published in final

form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phil.12020/full.

1 It might be more adequate to speak here of a certain important form of ambivalence of value

judgements.

2

is applied to the judgement at one pole appears at the other pole of the ambivalence (and

similarly for the version of the pattern framed in terms of “V” and “W”). Moreover the

judgements are conceived as opposed from the ambivalent person’s own point of view: she

holds each judgement as competing with the other.

We often express ambivalence of value judgement and see it in other people; and

such ambivalent attitudes are not mere confusions, and do not, in general, amount to paralysis

or vacillation. Yet ambivalence of value judgement – henceforth I shall freely omit the

“value” – is supposed to be impossible in more ways than one. One cluster of difficulties

arises from the relations of attitudes to behaviour. If judgements, qua mental attitudes, dispose

one to behaviour – or, under a different emphasis, if judgements are such dispositions to

behaviour – then, it may seem, ambivalence excludes action or at least significant action. This

worry might seem even more pressing with respect to attitudes in favour of enhancing a state

of affairs, such as ambivalence between a judgement that one ought to apologize and a

judgement that one ought to avoid an apology. For here the opposition of the judgements

capturing the agent’s dispositions is defined in terms of mutually exclusive required actions.

The difficulty of behaviour in light of ambivalence is not unique to ambivalence of

judgement. However, another cluster of problems, which is peculiar to such ambivalence,

here joins in. It appears that if Hannah judges that she ought to do X, she by definition does

not judge that she ought not to do X. It seems that in attributing the opposed judgements to

Samuel, we attribute to him a judgement that his mother is a good mother and that she is not;

and it seems that in accordance with this he accepts a contradiction, and thus does not in fact

judge anything. It appears that if David judged an example convincing and also judged it

unconvincing, these judgements would destroy one another, leaving him clueless as to the

character of the example. Underlying this second cluster of problems is what may be called

the objectivist character of ambivalence of value judgements.2 One thing that is held in

2 Davidson 1980 and Jackson 1985 analyse forms of ambivalence in light of both the conduct and the

objectivity problem, and their views amount to denying genuine ambivalence. Donald Davidson, “How

is Weakness of the Will Possible?” Essays on Actions and Events, ed. Donald Davidson (Oxford:

3

common by Kant, Mill, and various authors who take a naturalist attitudes to ethics, is that

judgements are, partly or wholly, objectivity-directed; and another is that if ambivalence is

possible, it cannot be objectivist (a third agreement will be suggested below).

II. OBJECTIVIST AMBIVALENCE OF VALUE JUDGEMENT

Ambivalence is objectivist if its poles contend with one another regarding some

objectivity. This implies, first, that each pole makes some objectivity-aiming claim: for

instance, that the value of being a good mother applies to Samuel’s mother. The definition

requires, secondly, that the very objectivity claimed at the one pole is disclaimed at the other

pole. Samuel’s judgements do not divide the value of being a good mother into two separate

values, of which only one applies to his mother; if they did, the opposed judgements would be

consistent in what they claim, and Samuel would not be ambivalent as to where the

objectivity lies.

In order to see what that second requirement involves, we should note that one’s

judgements may be ambivalent without comprising objectivist ambivalence, in a manner

similar to ambivalence of desire or of emotion. Thus, for example, Samuel’s brother can think

that his mother is a loving and caring mother and that she is, at the same time, too strict. Both

judgements, paradigmatically and in the imagined case, claim some objectivity, and moreover

holding both these claims together would typically comprise ambivalence on the part of

Samuel’s brother. However, it would not be objectivist ambivalence, in so far as the claims

are held as perfectly consistent.

The possibility of ambivalence which is not objectivist extends to phenomena in

which the agent’s ambivalence can be articulated in terms of only one value term.

Attributions of ambivalence that take the form “He judges that A is V while he also judges

that A is not V” need not be objectivist, if it is part of their point that V has “split”. In such

Clarendon Press, 1980), Frank Jackson, “Internal Conflicts in Desires and Morals,” American

4

“splitting” cases, one’s pair of judgements identifies two separate values within a broader

value concept; and one may still be ambivalent, not as to the objectivity of the matter, but

only in one’s own attitude. Let us, for instance, attribute to Samuel (of the Bible) an

ambivalence of judgement regarding Eli, the great priest in whose hands Samuel’s mother put

him in early childhood. Was Eli a good mentor to him? Samuel answers both in the negative

and in the positive, for Eli was too close to corruption to be a good mentor, but at the same

time Samuel acknowledges that Eli has trained him perfectly. Samuel thus judges Eli

ambivalently, with gratefulness and reservation, but he is not ambivalent as to where the

objectivity lies. The value of being a good mentor splits into two values, of which Samuel

deems one but not the other to apply to Eli.

Let us, however, consider a case of objectivist ambivalence, in which Samuel judges

his mother ambivalently as both a good mother and as a not-so-good one: the case is one in

which there is more to Samuel’s ambivalence than merely combining longing and love with

bitterness. Rather, by contrast with non-objectivist ambivalence, his mother’s being a good

mother denies for Samuel the judgement that she has not been not a good mother and vice

versa. Now, what could these denials consist of? Let us suppose, first, that the notion of a

good mother is sharpened in different directions in Samuel’s opposed judgements. Perhaps

one direction emphasizes the love of one’s child and doing what is best for him, while the

other direction lays stress on the intimacy of daily care.3 However, in so far as this part of the

description stands alone, it can suit cases of applying separate values to Samuel’s mother as

well. When the description concerns Samuel’s objectivist ambivalence as regard to his

mother, it must be complemented: the point is that both directions are directions for settling

the question of whether his mother is a good mother. Ambivalence that involves contention of

the opposed judgements with respect to objectivity typically involves contention over what

the value – e.g., a good mother – ought to be, in the case concerned.

Philosophical Quarterly 22 (1985): 105-14.

3 The mother of the biblical Samuel left him as child at the hands of Eli, the religious leader, to raise

him.

5

Some philosophers describe judgements as objectivist or “cognitive,” while others

analyse them as similar to desires and emotions (we may speak of judgements conceived

under the second outlook as judgemental engagements).4 I shall here briefly suggest that this

is a dispute in which all parties are right, and that value judgements typically have both

aspects. What is important is that these two aspects are mutually constitutive. When Samuel

deems his mother a good mother, he applies to her a value, rather than a dictionary entry;

moreover, the concept applied comprises a value from his own point of view, rather than

merely according to some public feeling or convention (e.g., he does not determine that “his

mother would be called by common opinion a good mother”). In other words, by the same

token that Samuel finds that his mother is good, his attitude “lays” goodness upon his mother:

to say that Samuel’s judgement, considered as objectivist, is directed at value, is already to

bring up the other dimension of a value judgement, namely that Samuel is judgementally

engaged with his mother as a good mother (and vice versa: in the typical cases, to regard

one’s mother as good mother involves holding that she is in truth a good mother).

Turning now to objectivist ambivalence of value judgement, let us remember that if it

focusses on the relations between objectivist judgements, it nonetheless concerns at once and

jointly the way one is judgementally engaged. In fact, while one’s ambivalence of value

judgement may happen not to be objectivist, the opposition between the poles cannot be only

from an objectivist point of view. For so far as one’s judgements do not engage one in

opposed directions, one does not maintain objectivist ambivalence about the application of a

value.

4 For the second approach, see Stevenson’s classic account. C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). Bernard Williams advocates this view precisely in order to

allow ambivalence. “Consistency and Realism,” Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-

1972 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) 204-5; however, as I elsewhere show, Williams’s

more subtle discussion of ambivalence of judgement, “Ethical Consistency” (chap. 11 in 1973)

undermines this view and acknowledges objectivist ambivalence. It may be worth noting that, unlike

Stevenson’s account, many anti-realist and non-cognitivist views reflect the objectivist structure of

value judgement in their accounts. When this is the case, they also tend to share with “officially”

objectivist views the denial of objectivist ambivalence.

6

Thus, the objectivist emphasis in what follows does not aim at any independent

objectivist dimension of the phenomena. Rather, it concerns ambivalence, which

judgementally engages the person by being about the objective application of a value.

Complementarily, the discussion that follows ought to support the analysis above: we shall

see that the objectivist dimension of value judgements is mutually constituted with a

dimension of judgemental engagement.

In any case, I shall argue in this paper that attributions such as in the cases of

Hannah’s and David’s judgements, or in the case of Samuel’s judgements in regard to his

mother, often suggest objectivist ambivalence in which the person’s opposed judgements

contend with one another, or in which, if you wish, the contents of the judgements contradict

each other. I say “If you wish” because the philosophical notion of contradiction belongs to

the logic of factual truth, which is not analogous to that of the objectivity of value. This

logical difference also affords an additional character to objectivist ambivalence of value. In

many cases, the opposed judgements which objectivist ambivalence combines may also be

said to judge one thing together, i.e., the poles jointly judge their object as “V and not V.”

However, V and not V, in cases of ambivalence, is a tension-fraught value, only ambivalently

applied to the object, since the application of any of its parts undermines the application of the

other.

I have already mentioned the philosophical position that denies that paradigmatic

value judgements make claims of objectivity. Rather than confronting this approach directly

or explicitly analysing the misconceptions in the supposition that ambivalence denies action

or significant action, I shall argue against the approach that reduces ambivalence to an aspect

of deliberation.

Indeed, objectivist ambivalence and deliberation are conceptually connected. In the

first place, the very acknowledgement of the objectivist dimension of value judgements is

supported by the role of deliberation – possible or actual deliberation, which need not be

explicit or comprehensive – about the value of something. Is the example convincing? Ought

I to apologize? (A concern bound up with, but different from, a concern about what to do).

7

What ought I to do? Let us deliberate.5 I shall thus make some points about the intricate

relations between objectivist ambivalence of value and deliberation, and, in so doing, the

objectivist dimension of value judgement and ambivalence, and the possibility of ambivalent

significant behaviour, will be revealed.

III. DELIBERATION AND AMBIVALENCE

In so far as the logic of truth is considered to be one and the same wherever in

language truth is at all relevant, the objectivist character of judgements encourages the

interpretation of conflicts in terms of pairs of prima facie judgements that seem opposed if

their prima facie character is ignored. In particular, this sort of analysis is often connected

with understanding conflict as an intermediary state on one’s way to resolution. Thus Kant

tells us:

Since, however, duty and obligation are in general concepts that express the

objective practical necessity of certain actions and because two mutually

opposing rules cannot be necessary at the same time, then, if it is a duty to act

according to one of them, then it is not only not a duty but contrary to duty to

act according to the other. It follows, therefore, that a conflict of duties and

obligations is inconceivable (obligationes non colliduntur). It may, however,

very well happen that two grounds of obligation (rationes obligandi), one or

the other of which is inadequate to bind as a duty (rationes obligandi non

5 Consider, for reference, any of the Socratic dialogues.

The objectivist character of judgements is not reducible to the possibility of deliberation, and claims of

objectivity sometimes entail that there is nothing to deliberate upon there (“She is thirsty. It is good to

bring her water”). Indeed, this is the point of departure for Moore’s objectivist view of value

judgements. G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903) chap. IV.

In addition, deliberation is also not only about objectivity. It belongs to our development and

examination of our attitudes and coming to act.

8

obligantes), are united in a subject and in the rule that he prescribes to

himself, because then one of the grounds is not a duty.6

And this is how Mill objects to the understanding of justice as an independent value:

Who shall decide between these appeals to conflicting principles of justice?

Justice has in this case two sides to it, which it is impossible to bring into

harmony, and the two disputants have chosen opposite sides; the one looks to

what it is just that the individual should receive, the other to what it is just

that the community should give. Each, from his own point of view, is

unanswerable; and any choice between them, on grounds of justice, must be

perfectly arbitrary. Social utility alone can decide the preference7.

There are many others in the respectable company of Kant and Mill. In general, according to

the stricter approaches,8 the person in conflict about A being V only judges that something

stands in favour of A being V and that something else stands against it. In such an account, a

person who is searching for a place to rent and is considering the suitability of a certain

apartment would only entertain judgements such as “considerations of air-circulation suggest

that that apartment is suitable,” but never absolute judgements such as “the apartment is

6 Immanuel Kant, “Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals,” Metaphysical Elements of Justice: The

Complete Text of the Metaphysics of Morals, Part I, 2nd

edition, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis: Hackett

Publishing Company, 1999) 17-18. My Italics. I use Ladd’s translation, except for the “because then”

[da dann in the original].

Even if Kant’s use of “conflict” concerns the objective level, ambivalence in which the tension is partly

taken as objective would mean that the conflict is conceivable. In any case, as the quotation continues,

Kant focusses on the judging subject. In addition, the present paper shows that value discourse is bound

up not only with legitimate ambivalence, but also with ambivalently acknowledged conflicts at the

objective level.

7 John S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Selected Writings of John Stuart Mill, ed. Maurice Cowling (New York:

Mentor Books, 1968) 298.

9

suitable.” The person is assumed to try to reach a value judgement on the basis of such

attitudes, which are conceived as factual beliefs. More moderate approaches permit the

reasoning to include value judgements which are mutually consistent – e.g., judgements on

what is suitable from different respects (the apartment is suitable with respect to air-

circulation).9 Holding such consistent judgements, the agent can actually want or care for

things for the time being, until she learns and decides whether the absolute value – the value

that is not from some respect or other – applies: whether the apartment is suitable, whether

mother is a good mother, etc. The idea then is to assimilate conflicts about value to

investigations regarding the unknown and undecided, which are intended for practical

conclusions. Could this work? The following points regarding the entanglement of objectivist

ambivalence of value with deliberation show that deliberation for the sake of a practical

univocal conclusion cannot be seen as an alternative model for objectivist (or any) practical

conflicts.

We shall also derive a secondary, and in a sense opposed, benefit from the discussion

that follows: the few philosophical explications of objectivist ambivalence of judgement that

do recognize genuine ambivalence tend to describe it as the end point of deliberation. The

poles of ambivalence are supposed to establish foreign, non-negotiable, points of view.10

It

will emerge, however, that in objectivist ambivalence the two poles mutually mould and

undermine both one another and the values that they respectively apply; hence, the opposed

points of view which together constitute objectivist ambivalence are necessarily not foreign.

8 See Davidson 1980 for an explicit analysis in these terms.

9 We may think of the value, or, in some cases, also of the object, as thus qualified.

For a moderate reduction of ambivalence to an aspect of deliberation, see Philippa Foot, “Moral

Realism and Moral Dilemma,” The Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 379–98, section I. Foot

differentiates there two senses of “ought,” in one of which it is consistent to judge that one ought to do

A and ought to do not-A, similarly to judging that it is dangerous both to do A and to avoid it.

According to Foot, such judgements, without necessarily being cancelled, play a role in judging what

one ought to do in another and decisive sense of the term.

10 See Foot 1983, Sect. II; Michael J. Zimmerman, “A Plea for Ambivalence,” Metaphilosophy, 24

(1993): 382-389.

10

We shall see in what follows just how far the ambivalently held value judgements in fact are

from being judgements that cannot be jointly deliberated upon. Rather, deliberation is a

central form through which ambivalence and its poles take their character.

IV. ATTEMPTS AT SOLVING AMBIVALENCE

When a person holds opposed value judgements, this would often include

deliberation intended to acquire a non-ambivalent value judgement. This is true even if we

think of narrowly conceived intentional acts of deliberation, and all the more so as regards “as

if” deliberation, construed perhaps as coming to view something on the basis of reasons.11

The first challenge to the reduction of ambivalence to deliberation derives from considering

states of affairs in which a person (actually, or “as if”) tries to reach univocal objectivity

while holding opposed actual judgements. Her opposed judgements then function also as

interim judgements, which are considered together in order to achieve a final judgement.

This is to say, first, that during her deliberation, the person keeps on living, and her

opposed judgements express themselves in various ways. Consider, for example, a film critic

who is excited about a film in which, however, she finds major faults. This person might well

pursue an all-things-considered judgement, but meanwhile watch it again since it is so good.

Second, working towards a conclusion may be significantly different in cases where

one’s actual judgements are opposed. In such a case, the ambivalently held judgements are

part of what the agent considers. They are her judgements on the issue, i.e., her attitudes, and

she may considers them as such (“It’s only because I’m so impressionable that I take the film

to be a piece of art”). She may also deliberate upon the objectivities she ambivalently accepts

(it is one thing to be prepared to reconsider the greatness of a movie and the explication of its

11

Since the technical use of “reasons” is perhaps misleading – much of that which is rational is not

done “for a reason” – the following alternative formulation might be welcome: One would manifest

extended deliberation in acquiring an attitude on the basis of a concern with finding the right (or an

appropriate) attitude.

11

greatness, as may be the case under ambivalence, and another to wonder, deliberating rather

than being ambivalent, whether greatness is there in the first place).

Moreover, the ambivalence of the agent who tries to come to a wholehearted final

judgement changes the character of the deliberation, and not merely its contents. Our film

critic’s ambivalence perhaps takes the form of thinking that she is being too hasty to find

greatness in a work whose potential is impaired by a careless performance. This view, which

both recommends deliberation and is a part of it, she may in turn subject to criticism, or may

pursue it and further penetrate into the greatness, and so on.12

Furthermore, note that while the present paper deals with cases of clear ambivalence

of judgement of the form “Hannah judges that A is V and that A is not V,” this fundamental

structure finds widespread and multifarious expression in more vague ambivalent attitudes.

For the language of value judgement is not content with allowing only full-fledged value

judgements: it often presents semi-judgements, which are not prima facie judgements, but

rather are “only half” genuine (objectivist and engaging) judgements. In particular, semi-

12

Aristotelian ethics, and in particular Aristotle himself (2000), are also of interest here, since, firstly,

this ethics presents ethical conduct and judgement in particular matters as normatively based on the

person’s prior attitudes, including her virtues. Secondly, the particular conduct and judgement do not

logically or actually follow, but rather it is a difficult matter of joint identification and pursuing of the

normative target. This makes the possibility of deliberation (and the use of phronesis in general) an

important element of ethical life, and one which, in light of the former point, is part and parcel of the

virtuous agent’s ongoing engagements (see Martha C. Nussbaum, “The discernment of perception,”

Love’s Knowledge: Essays of Philosophy and Literature, ed. M. C. Nussbaum (New York & Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1990). Thirdly, Aristotle himself is especially relevant, since, as I elsewhere

argue, for him the virtuous person has to be inherently ambivalent in aiming at her target. By contrast,

Nussbaum’s account conceives of deliberation in terms of a harmonic course of appreciating the

situation; an ambivalent agent takes up, according to Nussbaum, two parallel courses, which meet only

at the end when the agent selects (or sometimes fails to select) between them.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

For a recent treatment of ethical virtue, phronesis, and ambivalence, see Kristján Kristjánsson, “The

Trouble with Ambivalent Emotions,” Philosophy 85 (2010): 485-510.

Humean accounts of normative motivation can also be sensitive to the relevancy of the person’s mental

attitudes for rational deliberation. See Dalia Drai, “The Normative Significance of Desires,” Journal of

Value Inquiry 2013 (planned) for an illuminating discussion in this spirit.

12

judgements and pairs of opposed semi-judgements are far more central in the process of

pursuing an appropriate judgement than pure prima facie judgements. Thus suppose Hannah

begins to wonder whether she ought to apologize after people suggest to her that she should.

This may be a case in which ambivalence is not there to start with. At the outset, the idea that

she should apologize might be only the merest idea. However, more or less anything that

makes its way into her deliberations shall become a kind of judgement: she sees now that she

hurt Bob, and that an apology is not absurd. But at the same time all she did was speak

frankly; “Is that a crime?” she may protest to herself. Yet Hannah is uncomfortable. She could

have been more considerate, it’s not like there is nothing for her to apologize about… and so

on. It might be that we do not want to say that Hannah at any time judges that she ought to

apologize to Bob and that she ought not (or that it is not something that she ought to do).

However, we cannot really understand an ordinary case of deliberation of this kind without

appealing on the way to semi-judgements (alternatively conceivable as judgements in favour

of the ought-judgements), which are undermined by opposing (semi-) judgements.

V. AMBIVALENCE TO STAY

Another dimension of the relationship between deliberation and ambivalence of

judgement is that the agent will not always try to solve or cancel her ambivalence. She will

not always pursue an all-things-considered judgement. Our film critic may well cling to her

ambivalent judgement that the movie is and yet that it is not a piece of art. This aspect

belongs to factual beliefs (abbreviated to “beliefs” in what follows) as well as to value

judgements. In other words, I am here suggesting, first, that people hold ambivalent beliefs,

and second that they do not always try to resolve them. Indeed, people can even intentionally

hold fast to their ambivalence of judgement or of belief. Self-deception is a form of

ambivalence in which the person takes care to be ambivalent regarding objectivities on which

her judgement could be univocally settled. For example, a director who understands that his

new film is not good enough may try to undermine this better judgement of his, even if he

13

cannot abandon it as misconceived. He may, for instance, emphasize the film’s good points or

focus on reasons for lowering the criteria, while remaining aware that the good points do not

add up to much and that the criteria in fact ought not to be lowered.13

Self-deception is in important ways irrational; however, a person can be highly

rational in not trying to solve her ambivalence, whether of value judgement or of belief. The

grounds for ambivalence of our film critic can at the same time be grounds for her to keep her

ambivalence. The film critic judges that the movie’s flaws are significant and that because of

them the film is less than great, while at the same time she deems the film to be a piece of art

which transcends its flaws. The film critic sees that trying to adopt a univocal conclusion

would mean closing her eyes to one of these lines of thought. This is an appropriate response,

in which the ambivalence can even take the form of a joint judgement: the film is and is not a

piece of art, a judgement that is uncomfortably ambivalent while positing a value whose

internal tension does not make meaningless. Suppose our critic is forced to adopt a final

conclusion in terms of the “stars” rating system. In such a case she may balance stars with

words. Meanwhile, a film director who wishes to create a piece of art, and is ambivalent as to

whether he is capable of such a feat, may be highly rational in not trying to resolve his

ambivalence.14

His positive belief would induce him to make artistic efforts, and these efforts

could be all the more fruitful given that the fact that his belief in his powers is undermined by

doubts has made him wary of lousy films.

Still, the rationality pertaining to the judgemental ambivalence of the film critic is of

another character than the director’s – or anybody else’s – ambivalence of belief. Here the

differences between these two forms of objectivist ambivalence come into view. It is often

highly rational for us to maintain ambivalence of belief; yet, at the same time, such

ambivalence poses us serious problems. Consider ambivalence in which a person holds two

13

I explicate self-deception as intentional ambivalence of belief against Davidsonian and naturalist

views in “Rational Irrationality, Unitary Ambivalence – The Partition Approach to Self-deception

Reexamined,” in review.

14

positive beliefs (that creating a great work of art is within his power and that it is not). To

keep the ambivalent attitude is to knowingly keep an error, and in this respect not trying to

solve such an ambivalence of belief might be considered irrational.15

In other words, a

harmonic all-things-considered judgement that will resolve one’s ambivalence of belief can in

principle be pursued. Nothing similar could generally be said in regard to ambivalence of

value judgement. The character of the ambivalence may be such that any all-things-

considered judgement would be undermined and a resolution of the ambivalence may seem

entirely impossible or inappropriate. This is so since in the case of ambivalence of value

judgement, the contention of the judgements is relevant for the characterization of the value.

In particular, the way the judgements are opposed may not be ignored in cases in which the

judgements together apply a tension-fraught value on their object. Yet in pursuing a harmonic

solution, one has to disavow the relevance of the contention itself.

This brings us to another dimension of the relation between deliberation towards a

conclusion and ambivalence. Ambivalence can survive deliberation and the drawing of a

conclusion, as shown by Williams in “Ethical Consistency” (1973). In the cases in which the

agent judges “what is for the best”, in Williams’s terms, this need not cancel the contrary

judgement (172). Objectivity is settled in a sense: she judges that doing D is for the best,

rather than avoiding A (at least, there is a point of view that permits us to attribute to the

agent such a harmonic judgement). Yet the objectivity is not settled in every sense: in

Williams’s discussion the agent may regret doing D or seek to compensate for it. And we may

take Williams’s analysis further still: after all, nothing guarantees that the repudiated pole will

survive, univocally and irreversibly, only in the minor form of a “remainder”. The film critic

judges that the movie is not a genuine piece of art and she does not present it in her review as

one. On the other hand, it may guide the way she views films from now on. She has, in short,

an ambivalent value concept of great art.

14

In order to make it a clear case of ambivalence of belief, assume that it does not rely on ambivalence

on what a piece of art should consist in.

15 We might accordingly judge ambivalently the rationality of various ambivalent beliefs.

15

VI. DELIBERATION AND OBJECTIVIST AMBIVALENCE OF VALUE JUDGEMENT

ILLUMINATE EACH OTHER

What have we learned so far? Most basically, the previous sections have afforded us a

glimpse into the complex field of objectivist-ambivalence-of-value-judgement as it combines

with the phenomena of deliberation. We have seen that ambivalence regarding the value

shows itself in the very way in which deliberation proceeds: for when one actually judges

contrary things, one’s deliberation would (and should) often take the judgements and their

contention into account. Moreover, being part of one’s life, deliberation then expresses the

ambivalence, which, at the same time, deliberation shapes and changes. Even when

ambivalence is not the point of departure, ordinary deliberation often proceeds through

contrary semi-judgements which one adopts. We have also observed that deliberation does

not always focus on resolving one’s ambivalence, as well as that when deliberation aims at a

solution (or decision), the ambivalence and its validity would often survive the resolution.

Objectivist ambivalence hence cannot be reduced to deliberation of prima facie

judgements or mere options for action. Moreover, its interrelations with deliberation reveal

how ambivalence plays a part in rational discourse. The closing section aims at clarifying and

strengthening several of the implications of the earlier discussion for objectivist ambivalence

of value judgement.

The Details of Deliberation Reveal Objectivist Ambivalence

This paper has dealt with objectivist ambivalence, in which one finds (contrary)

objectivities but is ambivalent as to where the objectivity lies. In our central case, the

objectivity that one’s antithetical judgements contend for is a value, or, differently put, the

objectivity consists in that the value applies or does not apply to the object of the opposed

16

judgements.16

I began by showing that ambivalence is often objectivist, and yet that

objectivist ambivalence is generally unacknowledged even by those who acknowledge some

kind of ambivalence. However, the examination of deliberation in cases of ambivalence

regarding the value of something puts us in a position to see the misconception inherent in

such approaches, according to which only alien or incommensurable values allow one to be

ambivalent between them. We may thus exploit the discussion above to briefly characterize

and criticize two problematic lines of thought, both of which would make objectivist

ambivalence of value judgement impossible.

According to the first line of thought, accepting an objectivity – a truth or a value –

implies that we do not find it doubtful. The thought is that a judgement or belief, as long as it

stands, may be qualified by doubt, whereas it is not possible that the belief is held and yet is

also undermined. According to this conception, if one’s doubts do not amount to complete

rejection of belief, the standing doubts must qualify the absolute potential belief. The belief is

supposed to be necessarily weaker than it would be without the doubts – or, to put it another

way, one’s attitude is supposed to be a cognitive attitude that is weaker than belief. One way

or the other, objectivist ambivalence and its opposed poles are supposedly reducible to a

belief to some degree.

Yet such a reduction cannot hold. This is shown most clearly when we notice that

objectivist ambivalence implies that one doubts her belief-to-a-degree as well. Consider the

case of the potential director who is ambivalent regarding his abilities and prospects for

making a worthwhile film: it might be that he thinks that such an achievement is quite

possible for him, sufficiently so that he may devote himself to film-making, whereas this

belief-to-a-degree is precisely that which his contrary belief challenges. In probabilistic terms,

the “sum of probabilities” of the contending judgements would be greater than one.17

16

Or that a contrary value applies to it.

17 Objectivist ambivalence may thus be contrasted with a lottery paradox situation. In the lottery

paradox, while one reasonably believes of each ticket in a sufficiently big lottery that it will lose, one

nevertheless believes that some ticket will win. This may be explained by the fact that one actually

17

Thus, deliberative ambivalence reveals that it is misconceived to understand the

conceptual relations of belief and doubt in terms of mutual exclusion. While the analysis of

this misunderstanding, including the element of truth it undoubtedly contains, is beyond the

scope of this paper, we have seen that objectivist ambivalence consists partly in doubting one

judgement on the basis of the opposed judgement and vice versa. That which speaks for one

judgement invites us to reconsider the other judgement, and such reconsiderations may take

the form of unstable re-articulations of the pair of judgements that together display the agent’s

attitude rather than lead to the collapse of one or both of the judgements.

The Details of Deliberation Reveal Objectivist Ambivalence of Value Judgement

Against the first problematic line of thought, the former section summarizes the

judge-and-doubt structure binding the opposed attitudes in objectivist ambivalence. This

structure is an aspect of the rationality both of factual beliefs and of value judgements. The

character of the attitude at the one pole, be it a judgement or a belief, is not independent of the

other pole of the ambivalence. Rather, the fact that the judgement is held by the agent as

opposed to another judgement of her, and furthermore the concrete character of the contention

of these judgements, shapes both poles. However, contending value judgements have the

further element that the contention need not be only subjective: in addition to the attitudes, the

character of the object A being of value V is challenged and moulded by the judgement that A

is not V, and vice versa. This shows itself once we think of the target of deliberation under

typical objectivist ambivalence of value judgement. For the target of such deliberation is not

only to find which of the judgements should be dropped, but also, and at the same time, we

try to understand our object in terms of both evaluations together. Deliberation may even

believes about the tickets only that they have a very high chance of losing, and this is of course true of

each ticket but not of collections of them: one raises one’s chances by buying many tickets. (The above

description follows Christensen 2004, who infers that belief is a probabilistic idea in the first place.

David Christensen, Putting Logic in its Place: Formal Constraints on Rational Belief (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 2004).) Unlike the contradiction in the lottery paradox, the contradiction in objectivist

ambivalence cannot be explained away by probabilistic measures.

18

identify a tension-fraught value that objectively applies, and in so doing may re-articulate,

rather than solve, the ambivalence.

The former section treats one out of two origins of the mistaken philosophical

assumption that it is impossible to judge that a value applies to object A and yet to judge that

this same value does not apply to A. To see that the judgements in objectivist ambivalence of

value judgement typically contend on how the value should be characterized is to challenge

the second origin as well. This second thought takes deliberation of value as analogous to

deliberation of fact in the following sense: questions of fact are guided by an ideal of

examining the application of a concept without interfering with that concept. We sometimes

identify an uncertainty or ambivalence as “about fact pure and simple,” and this we may

express in statements such as: The concept standing as it is, there is still the question of the

truth of the matter.18

Now, by analogy, we may appeal to a notion of pre-determined value

concepts, and to the significance that such a notion would have for the structure of value

judgement; and such prejudice leads to inadequate ideas of measurability and

incommensurability. Supposedly, when there is a question of A (making an apology; a piece

of art) being V (due; great), we know what V (or the word “V”) means and the only thing to

deliberate on is whether V applies to A. Similarly, when there is a conflict between V and W

applying to A, then, supposedly, we know what V as well as W mean, and one of the

following is the case: (1) “V” and “not-W” mean the same (or one entails the other), and we

can try to settle whether V or W (or none of them) applies to A, but there is no question of

rational ambivalence between them; or, alternatively, (2) “V” and “not-W” mean different

things. In such a case perhaps V and W could be analysed into more basic values. Yet in the

end, so runs this line of thought, we shall either return to the option of sameness or be forced

to describe them as incommensurable. Of course, some incommensurability does not commit

us to ambivalence: take, for example, “Dan is handsome and friendly.” The idea I criticize

here, however, is that ambivalence of value judgement means only that the person admits two

19

values which engage him in opposite directions. Recall Samuel, who found his mentor

corrupted but also devoted to Samuel’s education. For him, the corruption of the mentor did

not raise questions about his devotion and vice versa. Such cases surely exist, but they cannot,

as we have seen, provide the key for ambivalence of value judgement in general.

Such framing, which sees the concept as pre-determined, or as something that is not

the business of a judgement, is misconceived: value judgements typically apply the value to

the object and, by the same token, they determine how the value applies, i.e., they

characterize the value. In deliberation we inquire how the value applies (or does not apply).

For example, we may ask ourselves what would make this piece of art great.19

Now suppose

that we indeed judge that it is great and (by the same token) that greatness should be inflected

such that the work would be found to be a great art. How does this bear on our judgement

(when there is one) to the contrary? Our earlier considerations of deliberation in concrete

cases has reminded us that it includes shaping and reshaping of the value concept, which in

unsolved ambivalence does not converge towards harmony

A consideration of Michael Stocker’s analysis of rational conflicts in terms of plural

values may help sharpen our conclusion20

. Stocker offers subtle observations regarding

conflicted human beings who are rationally engaged in situations in which both taking action

and avoiding it have some irremovable value. The values in such conflicts, he argues,

however, must be different from each other (chaps. 6 and 8). The assumption underlying his

position is that finding one common value in mutually exclusive states of affairs does not

leave any room for rational deliberation between them: to the extent that epistemic questions

have already been settled, one has, according to Stocker, to choose the option which has

“more of the value,” and if the two options are equal in this respect as well it simply does not

18

This should by no means be read as a claim that in factual contexts truth and belief come after the

character of pertaining concepts has been determined.

19 This aspect is often intertwined in intricate ways with factual questions in regard to the object, which

inform the value judgement.

20 Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990).

20

matter what one does. However, as we have seen, objectivist ambivalence requires21

a unitary

value, but this would not be a univocally determinate concept.

If the objectivist ambivalence requires a unity of value, let us not infer from this that

the plurality of values is unimportant. Deliberation and ambivalence often concern plural

values. Moreover, many real-life cases combine objectivist ambivalence regarding a

particular value with plural values. Furthermore, ambivalence regarding an object often

involves ambivalence as to whether the one judgement applies the same value that the other

denies, or whether they apply different values. But is it true, at least, that plural values are

irrelevant to objectivist ambivalence per se? Quite the contrary: plural (unstable) perspectives

belong to the unity of a value, though we must remember that they are not separate from each

other or from the value concerned.

The Details of Deliberation Reveal that Ambivalence Can Be Acted On

It may be worthwhile to examine Stocker 1990’s other main claim in view of the

discussion above. Stocker claims that rationally conflicted people need not aimlessly

vacillate. Their conflict may be expressed in the way in which they deal or live with it, in so

far their dealing with the conflict is understood in broad terms. Thus far, I agree; however,

Stocker supposes that this claim requires another claim: he argues that such conflicts are

harmonious in so far as one’s action or acting is concerned. To show that this is the case,

Stocker argues that half the judgements about what one ought to do could be reconstructed as

non-action guiding (see, esp., chap. 4).

Focussing on the objectivity-aspiring character of ambivalence of value judgement

rather than on its character as judgemental engagement, I have been only indirectly discussing

21

One may be also objectivistically ambivalent between different values, as may be the case when we

find a piece of art “impressive and yet insignificant.” Yet to say that these words may express

objectivist ambivalence is to refer to a situation in which insignificance threatens the impressive

character of the work. In other words, in such formulations of objectivist ambivalence, and in the

phenomena that they describe better than one-value formulations, the unity of value comprises the

hidden aspect.

21

the role of deliberation in deciding the required action under ambivalence as to something’s

value. However, since objectivity-directedness and judgemental engagement are two sides of

one coin, and since judgemental engagement is generally bound up with, and often consists

in, desire, it is not surprising that we may draw conclusions in this respect as well. In

particular, the opposed judgements in ambivalence, according to which something ought to be

done and yet ought not to be done, would often be action-guiding. The traces of Williams’s

thought that we followed earlier can now lead us in this direction: we have seen that action in

accord with one of the opposed judgements often forms part of a larger action or conduct,

which respects both judgements and their opposition. Consider, for example, the critic who

judges ambivalently that she ought and that she ought not rate a certain film as “five stars.”

Let us suppose that while, narrowly speaking, she acts on one pole and rates the film as only

four stars, her more general action includes such things as warm words of praise, expressions

of discomfort when somebody mentions the review, and a lower rating to other films in the

following weeks. Thus far Stocker might agree, except for distinguishing acting in accordance

with the action-guiding judgement from all sorts of other behaviour. This dispute could be

verbal if there was a way to distinguish the two levels of behaviour. We may, however, ask

whether the lower rating of films in the following weeks does not transform the “four stars”

given by the critic to the film into a “five stars of honour.” Moreover, we have had a glimpse

of the power of deliberation to aim at some narrow action, which ambivalently satisfies both

judgements in a way that is not arbitrary and which respects their particular tension. Consider,

in particular, such cases in which the object of ambivalence is a potential action under a

certain description A (e.g., apologizing), and in which the agent judges one – tense and

ambivalently held – thing regarding A-ing, namely that it ought and yet ought not be carried

out. In some such cases, this tension-fraught judgement may be fulfilled by, or reflect, action,

which comprises A-ing and not A-ing.22

Thus, let us consider my judgement that I ought and I

22

See Hili Razinsky, “An Outline for Ambivalence of Value Judgement,” in review. In particular, I

show there that it is central to the logic of action and desire, that some actions call for a tension-fraught

description of the form A-ing and not A-ing.

22

ought not to apologize for something unpleasant I said in response to an insult. I may say to

the person concerned something like, “I am really sorry, although I must also remark that you

have challenged my better attitudes,” where the idea is that the second part of this sentence is

sufficiently friendly not to annul the point in the first.

VII. IN GUISE OF CONCLUSION

Objectivist ambivalence, thus, is not an impossibility. It neither should nor can be

assimilated to deliberation over prima facie judgements in order to reach a final judgement.

Rather, both deliberation and objectivist ambivalence must be acknowledged if either is to be

understood. In particular, pursuing some of their interrelations enabled us to take note of three

elements of objectivist ambivalence of value judgement: mutual moulding and undermining

of the opposed judgements (VI, first subsection); ambivalence regarding how to inflect the

value; and the openness of the values themselves to inflection, and, in ambivalence, to the

tension-fraught mutual moulding of conflicting inflections (VII, second subsection).23

Finally, if objectivist ambivalence and its interrelationships with deliberation and

ambivalence are acknowledged, this may recommend certain philosophical course changes.

For one, the complex interrelationships between deliberation and ambivalence call for

opening up the field of study of deliberation.24

Thus, we should ask such questions as how

deliberation aims at action and at value under actual ambivalence as well as in other cases. In

particular, it cannot be generally supposed that deliberation aims at dissolving ambivalence.

Even when deliberation aims at harmony, the deliberation as well as its result cannot usually

be isolated from the ambivalence. More generally, the present investigation shows that we

should not be thinking of deliberation in terms of pre-given procedures, but rather be sensitive

23

I expound this tripartite structure in “An Outline for Ambivalence of Value Judgement,” in review.

24 For two studies of deliberation that treat it as part of the agent’s concrete and possibly conflictual

situation, see Amelie Rorty, “A Plea for Ambivalence,” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of

Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 425-44 and Adam Morton,

Disasters and Dilemmas: Strategies for Real-life Decision Making (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991)

esp. chaps. 3 and 4.

23

to how deliberation expresses, responds to, and reshapes one’s actual perspective, including

judgements and their objectivist ambivalence; to how deliberation maintains our attitudes and

transforms them; and to how it may both solve ambivalence and generate it. Such an approach

would afford a new appreciation of the rationality to which deliberations appeal.

At the same time, deliberation, when it is not excluded from life, is key to the analysis

of the structures of objectivity-identification and of action. We can, in particular, inquire into

diverse forms of ambivalence, and we can ask how ambivalence could or should intermingle

with indifference, uncertainty and wholeheartedness. In short, I hope to have shown that the

study of human life and value ought to take ambivalence seriously. If my argument is correct,

it has two broad consequences:

First, and meta-theoretically, it appears that theories of value and of ethics that cannot

allow for objectivist ambivalence are inappropriate and that ethical theories must be re-

thought jointly with objectivist ambivalence. I refer here in particular to the debate between

cognitivist and non-cognitivist views on the one hand, and to more substantial explications of

ethics on the other. As regards the latter theories, it could perhaps be objected that they are

spared this challenge if they are conceived as revisions of ordinary ethical discourse. The

present study suggests, however, that the notion of value requires that values (e.g., of utility,

of moral ought, of rationality, of desirability) invite ambivalence. In any case, these

difficulties also have a more positive aspect: the insights of ethical theory can be complicated

and sharpened once ambivalence is allowed into the frame. This brings us to the second

aspect of taking ambivalence seriously: that the concept of ambivalence (objectivist

ambivalence included) may now form part of the instruments of philosophical investigation.

Human possibilities are related to ambivalence in various ways, and once the concept of

ambivalence is at our disposal, a philosophical investigation can be concerned with particular

forms of ambivalence and their particular relations with other aspects of human life. Indeed, it

is also to the variety of life and rationality, and their ambivalence, that appeal must be made

in order to characterize, ambivalently or not, certain ways of dealing with things as better than

others.

24

Haifa University