What Are Judgments of Value?
Sku: 69500A0E070
Archival Number: CD/mp3 695
Author: Lonergan, B.
Language(s): English
Decade: 1970
Description:
CD/mp3 695, lecture at MIT entitled 'What Are Judgments of Value?' Sponsored by David Aiken. The lecture treats the principal topics of chapter 2 of Method in Theology. It begins with feelings and their role in the fourth level of consciousness. Next, the transcendental notion of value is the capacity to ask the question, Is it worth while? It releases one as a principle of benevolence and beneficence, capable of truly loving and collaborating. Judgments of value are objective or subjective according as they proceed from the self-transcending subject. They differ in content but not in structure from judgments of fact. But the fullness of moral self-transcendence is not knowing what is right, but doing it. Lonergan next runs through the logic of believing. Then he presents the structure of the human good as this is worked out in Method of Theology. And he finishes the lecture with a brief presentation of the dynamics of progress, decline, and redemption. The questions follow, treating knowledge and virtue, feelings, their development, differentiation, and their interpenetration with knowledge, the concreteness of the transcendental notion of value, the similarities and differences between evaluation and cognitive judgments, how the process of evaluation can be both creative and true, and the difference between Lonergan's position and relativism. He responds that he is not saying there is no true proposition; and you can have a systematic critique in terms of bias. (There is some voice-over toward the end of the recording.)