The Practice of Value

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which honor the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, are presented annually at each of nine universities in the United States and Great Britain. They were established at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in the 2000/1 academic year. The Berkeley Tanner Lectures Series has been established in the belief that these distinguished lectures, together with the lively debates stimulated by their presentation in Berkeley, deserve to be made available to a wider audience.

The Practice of Value is an exploration of a pervasive but puzzling aspect of our world: value. At the core of the book are the Tanner Lectures delivered at Berkeley in 2001 by Joseph Raz, who has been one of the leading figures in moral and legal philosophy since the 1970s. His aim is to make sense of the dependence of value on social practice, without falling back on cultural relativism. In response, three eminent philosophers, Christine Korsgaard, Robert Pippin, and Bernard Williams, offer interestingly different approaches to the subject. The book begins with an introduction by Jay Wallace, setting the scene for what follows, and ends with a response from Raz to his commentators. The result is a fascinating debate, accessible to readers throughout and beyond philosophy, about the relations between human values and human life.