The main object of this lecture will be to explore the possibility of providing some kind of metaphysical account of, and positive backing for, the notion of value; and to begin it, I think it would be appropriate for me to voice one or two methodological reflections. But George Myro has told you a story about me, which has indeed the ring of truth; so I shall pause to tell you another story which I hope will ring equally true. When I was still quite a little nipper, my mother gave me a china beer-mug, which 1 liked enormously; in fact I used it not only to drink beer from, but for a whole lot of other purposes, like carrying gasoline (or as we used to call it, 'petrol') to a neighbour's house when I wanted to set the place on fire. One day I dropped it, and there it lay in fragments. Just at that point my mother appeared on the scene, and reproached me for destroying the mug which she had given me and which I so dearly loved. I said to her, 'Mother [in my family we used to address one another in somewhat formal style], mother, I haven't destroyed anything; I have only rearranged it a little. She, being too wise, and insufficiently nimble, to take me on in dialectical jousting, looked at me sadly and said,

'You will have to learn as you grow older.' Thisencounter, it now seems to me, shaped my later philosophical life; it seems that I did, indeed, learn in the end.

For first, the metaphysical programme which I shall be seeking to follow will be a constructivist programme and not a reductionist programme. The procedure which I envisage, if carried out in full, would involve beginning with certain elements which would have a claim to be thought of as metaphysically primary, and then to build up from these starting-points, stage by stage, a systematic metaphysical theory or concatenation of theories. It would be no part of my plan to contend that what we end up with is really only such and suches, or that talking about what my enterprises produce is really only a compressed way of talking about the primary materials, or indeed to make any other claim of that relatively familiar kind. I suspect that many of those who have thought of themselves, like Carnap, as engaged in a programme of construction are really reductionists in spirit and at heart; they would like to be able to show that the multifarious world to which we belong reduces in the end to a host of complexes of simple ingredients. That is not my programme at all; I do not want to make the elaborate furniture of the world dissolve into a number of simple pieces of kitchenware; I hope to preserve it in all its richness. I would seek, rather, to understand the metaphysical processes by which one arrives at such richness from relatively simple points of departure. I would not seek to exhibit anything as 'boiling down' to any complex of fundamental atoms.

In order to pursue a constructivist programme of the kind which I have in mind, I will need three things: first, a set of metaphysical starting-points, things which are metaphysically primary; second, a set of recognized construction routines or procedures, by means of which non-primary items are built up on the basis of more primary items; and third, a theoretical motivation for proceeding from any given stage to a further stage, so that the mere possibility of applying the routines would not beitself enough to give one a new metaphysical layer; one would have to have a justification for making that move; it would have to serve some purpose.

The way I imagine myself carrying out this programme in detail (on some day quite a bit longer than today) is roughly as follows. First, I would start by trying to reach a full-dress characterization of what a theory is (an exercise in what I think of as theory-theory); I would be hoping that the specification of what theorizing is would lead in a non-arbitrary way to the identification of some particular kind of theorizing (or theory) as being, relative to all other kinds of theorizing, primary and so deserving of the title of First Theory (or First Philosophy). I would expect this primary theorizing to be recognizable as metaphysical theorizing, with the result that a specification of the character and content of metaphysics would be reached in a more systematic way than by just considering whether some suggested account of metaphysics succeeds in fitting our intuitive conception of that discipline. The implementation of this kind of metaphysical programme would, I hope, lead one successively through a series of entities (entity-types), such as a series containing at one stage particulars, followed by continuants, followed by a specially privileged kind of continuants, namely substances, and so on. Each newly introduced entity-type would carry with it a segment of theory which would supplement the body of theory already arrived at, and which would serve to exhibit the central character of the type or types of entity associated with it.

The application of these programmatic ideas to the determination of the conception of value would be achieved in the following way. The notion of value, or of some specially important or fundamental kind of value, like absolute value, would be shown as occupying some indispensable position in the specification of some stage in this process of metaphysical evolution. Such a metaphysical justification of the notion of value might perhapsbe comparable to the result of appending, in a suitably integrated way, the Nicomachean Ethics as a concluding stage to the De Anima. One would first set up a specification of a series of increasingly complex creatures; and one would then exhibit the notion of value as entering essentially into the theory attending the last and most complex type of creature appearing in that series. The un-Carnapian character of my constructivism would perhaps be evidenced by my idea that to insist with respect to each stage in metaphysical development upon the need for theoretical justification might carry with it the thought that to omit such a stage would be to fail to do justice to some legitimate metaphysical demand

I propose to start today's extract from this metaphysical story at a point at which, to a previously generated stock of particulars which would include things which some, though not all, would be prepared to count as individual substances, there is added a sequence of increasingly complex items, which (as living things) would be thought of by some (perhaps by Aristotle) as the earliest items on the ascending metaphysical ladder to merit the title of substances proper. My first metaphysical objective, at this stage of my unfolding story, would be to suggest a consideration of the not unappealing idea that the notion of living things presupposes, and cannot be understood without an understanding of, the notion(s) of purpose, finality, and final cause. In my view this idea is not only appealing but correct; I recognize, however, that there are persons with regrettable deflationary tendencies who would insist that while reference to the notions of finality or final cause may provide in many contexts a useful and illuminating manner of talking about living things, these notions are not to be taken seriously in the metaphysics of biology and are not required in a theoretical account of the nature of life and of living things. A finalistic (or

"vitalistic" account of the nature of living things might take as a ruling idea (perhaps open to non-vitalists as well)that life consists (very roughly) in the possession of a no doubt interwoven set of capacities the fulfilment, in some degree, of each of which is required for the set of capacities, as a whole, to be retained; a sufficiently serious failure in respect of any one capacity will result in the currently irreversible loss of all the rest; and that would be, as one might say, death. The notion of finality might be thought to be unavoidably embedded in the notion of life for more than one reason. One reason would be that if it is in one way or another of the essence of living creatures that one has, instead of an indefinitely extended individual thing, an indefinitely long sequence of living things, each individual being produced by, and out of, predecessors in the sequence, then to avoid having individuals which are of outrageous bulk because they contain within themselves the actual bodies of all their descendants, it will be necessary to introduce the institutions of growth and maturity; and with these institutions will come finality, since the states reached in the course of growth and maturity will have to be states to which the creatures aspire and strive, though not necessarily in any conscious way. Another way in which it might be suggested that the notion of finality has to enter will be that at least in a creature of any degree of complexity, the discharge of its vital functions will have to be effected by the operations of various organs or parts, or combinations of such; and each of these organs or parts will have, so to speak, its job to do, and indeed its status as a part (a working functional part, that is to say, and not merely a spatial piece) is determined by its being something which has such-and-such a job or function (eyes are things to see with, feet to walk on, and so forth); and these jobs or functions have to be distinguished by their relation to some feature of the organism as a whole, most obviously to such things as its continued existence. The organism's continuance, though not ordin-arily, perhaps, called a function of the organism, will nevertheless be required as something which the organismstrives for, in order that we should be able to account for the nature of the parts as parts; it will be that thing, or one of the things, to which in their characteristic ways the parts are supposed to contribute. It is worth noting, with regard to the first of these reasons for the appearance of finality on the scene, that for the idea of actual containment of a creature within its forebears there is substituted the idea of potential containment, an idea which can be extended backwards (so to speak) without any attendant inflation of the bodies of ancestral creatures.

Perhaps I might at this point make two marginal comments on the scheme which I am proposing. First, if I allow myself in discussing the notion of life to ascribe purpose or finality to creatures, parts of creatures, or operations of creatures, such purposes or finalities are to be thought of as detached from any purposers, from any creature or being, mundane or celestial, which consciously or unconsciously harbours that purpose or finality. If the walrus or the walrus's moustache has a purpose, that purpose, though it would be the purpose of the walrus, or of its moustache, would not be the walrus's purpose, its moustache's purpose, or even God's purpose. A failure to appreciate this point has been, I think, responsible for some of the disrepute into which serious application, within the philosophy of biology, of the concept of finality has fallen. Second, if one relies on finality as a source of explanation (if one does not, what is the point of appealing to it?), if indeed one wishes to use as modes of explanation all, or even more than one, of Aristotle's "Four Causes", one should not be taken to be supposing that there is a single form of request for explanation, a proper response to which will, from occasion to occasion, be now of this type and now of that type, and maybe sometimes of more than one type. It is not that there would be just one kind of

"Why?" question with alternative and possibly at times even rival kinds of answer; there would be several kinds of

"Why?" question, different kinds of question being perhapslinked to categorially different kinds of candidates for explanation, and each kind calling for its own kind of

'cause', its own type of explanation. And it might even be that, so far from being rivals, different types of 'cause' worked together, or one through another; it might be, for example, that the operation of final causes demanded and was only made possible by the operation, say, of efficient or material causes with respect to a suitably linked explicandum; the success of a "finality" explanation to a question asking why a certain organ is present in a certain kind of organism might depend upon the availability of a suitable "efficient cause" explanation of how that organ came to be present.

Nevertheless, these assuaging and anodyne representations are,

, I fear, unlikely to appease a dyed-in-the-wool

mechanist. Such a one would be able to elicit from any moderately sensible vitalist an admission that the mere fact that the presence of a certain sort of feature or capacity would be advantageous to a certain type of creature offers no guarantee that the operation of efficient causes would in fact provide for the presence of that feature or capacity in that type of creature. So a vitalist would have to admit that a "finality" explanation would be non-predictive in character; and at this point the mechanist can be more or less counted on to respond that a non-predictive explanation is not really an explanation at all. While a mechanist might be prepared to allow that survival is a consequence (in part) of those features which, as one might say, render a type of creature fit to survive, and perhaps also allow that this consequence is a beneficial consequence, or pay-off, arising from the presence of those features, he would not be ready to concede that the creature comes to have those features in order that it should survive. To refine the terms of this discussion a little: one might try to distinguish between the question why a certain teature is present, and the question why (or how) that feature comes to be present; the mechanistically minded philosopher might berepresented as doubting whether the first question is intelligible if it is supposed to be distinct from the second, and as being ready to maintain that if, atter all, the two questions are distinct and are both legitimate, the provision of an answer to the first cannot be held to require the existence of an answer to the second, and indeed is possible at all only given independent information that that feature has come to be present.

Furthermore, in respect of other areas where a vitalist (or finalist) is liable to invoke finality as a tool for explanation, the mechanist will say that one can quite adequately explain the phenomena which lead the vitalist to appeal to finality, without having recourse to such an appeal; one will use a particular kind of explanation by efficient causes, one which deploys such cybernetic notions as negative feedback and homoeostasis; as one mechanistic philosopher, David Armstrong, has suggested, people will be like guided missiles.

At this the vitalist might argue that to demand the presence of biological explanation as embodying finalistic apparatus casts no disrespect on the capacity of "prior" sciences (such as physics and chemistry) in a certain sense to explain everything. In a certain sense I can explain why there are seventeen people in the market-place, if in respect of each person who is in the market-place I can explain why he is there, and I can also explain why anyone else who might have been in the market-place is in fact somewhere else. But there is an understandable sense in which to do all that does not explain, or at least does not explain directly, why there are seventeen people in the market-place. To fill the "explanation-gap", to explain not just indirectly but directly the presence of seventeen people in the market-place, to explain it qua being the presence of seventeen people in the market-place, I might have to introduce a new theory, perhaps some highly dubitable branch of social psychology; and I suspect that some scientific theories, like perhaps catastrophe-theory, havearisen in much this kind of way on the backs (so to speak) of perfectly adequate, though not omnipotent, pre-existing theories, in order to explain, in a stronger sense of

"explain"

", things which are already explained in some

sense by existing theory.

To this, the mechanist might reply that there is (was) indeed good reason for us to strengthen our explanatory potentialities by adding to the science(s) of physics and chemistry the explanatory apparatus of biology, thus giving ourselves the power to explain directly rather than merely indirectly such phenomena as those of animal behaviour; but it does not follow from that that the apparatus brought to bear by biology should include any finalistic concepts or explanations; explanations given in biological terms are perfectly capable of being understood in cybernetic terms, without any appeal to concepts whose respectability is suspect or in question.

In response to this latest tiresome intervention by the mechanist, I now introduce a reference to something which is, I think, a central feature of the procedures leading to the development of a cumulative succession of theories or theory-stages, each of which is to contain its predecessor.

This is the appearance of what I will call overlaps. In setting out some theory or theory-stage B, which is to succeed and include theory or theory-stage A, it may be that one introduces some theoretical apparatus which provides one with a redescription of a certain part of theory A. I may, for instance, in developing arithmetic, introduce the concept of positive and negative integers; and if I were to restrict myself to that part of the domain of this 'new' concept which involves solely positive integers, I would have a class of formula each of which provides a redescription of what is said by a formula relating to natural numbers; and since the older way of talking (or writing) would be that much more economical, if it came to a fight the natural numbers would win; the innovation would be otiose, since theorems relating solely to positiveintegers would precisely mirror already available theorems about natural numbers. But of course, to attend in a myopic or blinkered way only to positive integers would be to ignore the whole point of the introduction of the

'new' class of positive and negative integers, which as a whole provides for a larger domain than the domain of natural numbers for a single battery of arithmetical operations, and so for a larger range of specific arithmetical laws. That is the ratio essendi of the newly introduced integers, to extend the range of these arithmetical opera-tions. Somewhat similarly, if one paid attention only to examples of universal statements which related to finite classes of objects, one might reasonably suppose the expressions of universal statements to be equivalent to a conjunction of, or to be a 'compendium' of, a set of singular statements; and indeed, at times philosophers have been led by this idea, notably in the case of Mill. But of course, at least part of the point of introducing universal statements is to get beyond the stage at which one is restricted to finite classes, and therefore beyond a stage at which one can regard universal statements as being simply compendia of singular statements.

In the present connection, one might suggest that discourse about detached finality might be regarded as belonging to a system which is an extension or enlargement of a system which confines itself to a discussion of causal connections (efficient or material), including the special kind of causal connections with which cybernetics is concerned; and that this being so, not only is it not surprising but it is positively required, for the extension to be successfully instituted, that finality should enjoy an overlap with some special form of causal connection, like that which is the stock-in-trade of cybernetics. To test the relation between these two conceptual forms (finality and

"cybernetical" causal connection), it will be necessary to see whether there is an area beyond the overlap, in which talk about finality is no longer mappable onto talk aboutcaual connection; and the place where it seems to me that it would be natural to look for this divorce to occur, if it occurs at all, would be in the area to which attributions of absolute value belong, and in which talk about finality goes along with attributions of absolute value. If one then denies, as Foot and others have done, that there is any metaphysical region in which absolute value is a lawful resident, one seems to be cutting oneself off, maybe not without good reason, from just that testing-ground which is needed to determine the conceptual relationship between finality and causal connection. To this point I shall return.

As I am talking, in this lecture, about finality, I am always referring to what I am calling detached finality, that is, to purposes which are detached from any purposer, purposes which can exist without there being any conscious being who has, as his purpose, whatever the content of those purposes may be. Now there are some distinctions in relation to finality which I want to make. First, it may be either an essential property of something or an accidental property of it that it has a certain finality. My conception of essential property is of properties which are defining properties of a certain sort or kind and also, at one and the same time, intimately bound up with the identity conditions for entities which belong to that kind. [It might indeed be taken as a criterion of a kind's being a substantial kind that its defining properties should enter into the identity conditions for its members.] The essential properties of a thing are properties which that thing cannot lose without ceasing to exist (if you like, ceasing to be identical with itself).

It is clear that the essential properties of a sort are not to be identified with the necessary properties of that sort, the properties which things of that sort must have; for those properties whose presence is guaranteed by logical or metaphysical necessity, given the presence of the essential properties, would not thereby be constituted as essential properties of the sort, that is, as properties which areconstitutive of the sort. Moreover, attention to the words of Terry Irwin and Alan Code leads me to suspect that in the case of sorts of living things, properties which are essential to a sort might not be invariably present in instances of the sort, and so might fail to be necessary properties of that sort. This possibility, if it is realized, would arise from the fact that membership in a vital sort may be conferred not (or not merely) by character but by ancestry; so a freakish or degenerate instance of such a sort might even lack some essential feature of the sort, provided that its parents or suitably proximate ancestors exhibited that feature.

The link between the two strands in the idea of essential property, that of being definitive of a kind and that of constituting an identity condition for members of that kind, becomes eminently intelligible if one takes Aristotle's view that to exist and to be a member of a certain kind are one and the same thing (with appropriate consequences about the multiplicity contained within the notion of being). Now my idea, and I think also the idea of Aristotle, is that the range of essential properties of this or that kind of thing would sometimes, or perhaps even always, include what I might call finality properties, that is, properties which consist in the possession of a certain detached finality.

A second distinction which I want to make is between active and passive finality, a distinction between what it is that, as it were, certain things are supposed to do, and (on the other hand) what it is that certain things are supposed to suffer, have done to them, have done with them, and such-like, including particularly uses to which they are supposed to be put. One might, as a bit of jargon, label the active kind of finality property as métiers or roles. It would of course be possible, within the area of active finality, to allow for different versions of activity: the activity of a tiger, for example, while legitimately so-called, might be, as one would be inclined to say, activity in a different"sense of the word' from the activity of a scholar. My idea would be that every sort of creature, and every individual belonging to any such sort, must, in virtue of the fact that it is a sort of living creatures, or a sort of living creature, possess as an essential property an active finality. To be a tiger or to be a human being is to possess as an essential roperty the capacity to tigerize or the capacity to umanize, in whatever those things may be thought to consist.

I will now try to connect up the material which I have been very sketchily presenting, with the range or corpus of metaphysical routines or operations which it will be proper for a metaphysician to deploy in the course of what I would call the metaphysical evolution of entities or types of entity. One of these manoeuvres will be, I think, a manoeuvre which I call Metaphysical Transubstantiation.

There might well be specifically variant forms which this operation might take, but the central idea would be that you might have two entity-types (secondary substances) such that it is perfectly possible for a particular instance of one type to have exactly the same properties as a particular instance of another, for them to be in fact indiscernible; the selection of properties, however, from that total set which would be essential to an individual entity qua member of one substantial type would not be the same selection as the selection which would be essential to it qua member of the second type. Therefore it would be a possibility that something which at one time exhibited the essential properties of both types should at another, later time exhibit the essential properties of only one of these types. There will be an S, which existed both at time t, and at time tz, and an S, which existed at time t, when it was identical with the aforementioned S,; but at time t2 the S2 no longer exists and so of course is not then identical with the Sy. It is this kind of mind-twister which lies at the heart of Hobbes's problem about the ship and the timber, and also lies at the centre of what I might call the Grice-Myrotheory of identity, which would allow a thing x and a thing y to be identical at a certain time but to be not identical at a different time, when indeed one of the things may have ceased to exist. Execution of the manoeuvre of Metaphysical Transubstantiation would consist in taking a certain sort of substance Si, to which a certain property or set of properties P would be essential, and then introducing a type of substance S2, an instance of which may indeed possess property or properties P, but if it does, does not possess them essentially. What will be essential to S will be some other set of properties P', properties which even might attach, though not essentially, to some, or even to all, instances of S,. I am not sure what examples of this manoeuvre are to be found, but the one which I have it in mind to make use of is one in which the manoeuvre is employed to erect, on the basis of the substance-type human being, a further substance-type person. It is imperative at this point to remember that the general principles of entity-construction, which I adumbrated at the start of this lecture, will dictate that if we are to suppose the manoeuvre to be executed in order to generate, in this way, the substance-type person, we must be able to specify an adequate theoretical motivation for the enterprise in which the manoeuvre is employed The time has now come to consider the introduction, into a sequence of substantial types being designed by a metaphysician, of the attribute of rationality, which I shall take, when I come to it, as consisting, in the first instance, of a concern on the part of the creature which has it that its acceptances and perhaps (more generally) its attitudes which belong to some specifiable particular class should be well grounded, based on reasons, or (getting closer to the notion of value) validated; a concern, that is, on the part of the reason-seeker that the attitudes, positions, and acceptances which he (voluntarily) takes up should have attached to them certificates of value of some appropriate kind. The creature's rationality will consist in the having of thisconcern together with a capacity, to this or that degree, to give effect to that concern. It will be convenient to consider the introduction of this rationality into a metaphysical scheme in terms of the idea of "construction by a genitor" which I used in an earlier paper? I will ask first why the genitor should be drawn at all towards the idea of adding rationality to any of his sequence of constructed creatures.

The answer to that question might be that what he is engaged in constructing are the essential and non-essential features of a sequence of biological types which have to cope with the world and maintain themselves in being, and that a certain range of the exercises of rationality would have biological utility, would improve the chances of a creature which possessed it. One would have to be careful at this point not to go too far, and suppose, for example, that any kind of creature in any kind of circumstances would be biologically improved by the admixture of a dose of rationality: gnats and mosquitoes, for example, might be hindered rather than helped by being rationalized. But rationality might be a biological boon to creatures whose biological needs are complex and whose environment is subject to considerable variation, either because the world is unstable, or because the world though stable combines a high degree of complexity with a reluctance to make easy provisions for its denizens. If a creature's survival depends on the ability to produce differing responses to a vast and varied range of stimuli, then it will become more and more difficult and 'expensive' to equip the creature with a suitably enormous battery of instincts, and the substitution of a measure of rationality will be called for.

Two questions now confront us with regard to the genitor's introduction of rationality. First, is he to be thought of as introducing a relatively unlimited, unrestricted capacity, a capacity perhaps for being concerned about and for handling a general range of "Why?"questions, or, indeed, simply of questions; where the capacity itself is unlimited, though the genitor's interest in it is restricted to certain applications of it? Or is he rather to be thought of as introducing a limited capacity, a capacity (perhaps) for being concerned about and handling just a small, potentially useful range of questions (just those which are biologically relevant)?

The second question is, is the genitor to be thought of as introducing whatever kind or degree of rationality he does introduce as an essential characteristic of the substantial types) which he is designing and endowing with it, which we will think of as Homo sapiens, or as an accidental (non-essential) feature of that type?

To answer these questions in the reverse order, I conjecture, though I cannot establish, that the right procedure is to think of him as introducing rationality as a non-essential feature of Homo sapiens, though perhaps as a feature which, despite its being non-essential, one can be reasonably assured that instances of Homo sapiens will possess. My characteristic candour forces me to admit that I should like to be able to find that the genitor would install rationality as an accidental feature, because then there would be scope for a profitable deployment of my new toy, Metaphysical Transubstantiation, the application of which by the genitor would deliver as a constructed substantial type the type person, to which rationality could be supposed to belong as an essential property; a result which to my mind would be intuitively congenial. But wishful thinking is not an argument. Perhaps an argument could be found for attributing to the genitor the seemingly circuitous manoeuvre of first instituting a new biological type (Homo sapiens) to which rationality attaches non-essentially though predictably, and then converting this new biological type into a further non-biological type (person) by a subsequent metaphysical operation which installs rationality as, in this case, an essential feature, by reflecting that the programme which in the first instance isengaging the genitor's attention is that of constructing a sequence, or kingdom, of biological substantial types, and that rationality is not a feature of the right kind to be a differentiating essential feature in any type falling under that programme. If a substantial type is needed to which rationality attaches essentially, that type must be generated by a further step.

With regard to the first question, whether the rationality being introduced by the genitor is to be thought of as an unlimited or as a limited capacity, while I think it would be an acceptable general principle that when the genitor wants to achieve a certain objective, of two capacities which would achieve that objective he would (or should) install the weaker capacity on grounds of economy, or so that nothing which he does should be lacking in motivation or deficient with respect to Sufficient Reason, this general principle should not apply to cases in which the weaker capacity could only be generated by initially building a stronger capacity and then subsequently fitting in curbs to restrict the initially installed stronger capacity.

Then the suggestion would be that the installation of a limited rationality would be a case of the second kind, achievable only by building in additional special restric-tions, and so would be exempted from the scope of the proposed general principle. I think that reaching a decision on this issue would be both rewarding and arduous; and I must regretfully allow the matter to wait.

The way has now been more or less cleared for me to begin to unveil the main idea lying behind this prolonged build-up. This idea is that, given the foregoing assump-tions, when the genitor installs rationality into his new substantial type Homo sapiens in order to further a biological end, he gets more than he bargained for, in that the newly installed rationality is capable of raising more questions than that limited range of questions in the answering of which the biological utility of that rationality at least initially consists. The creature which the genitorcreates will not merely be capable of raising and answering a range of questions about how certain ends are to be achieved, of exhibiting, that is, what Aristotle called SEvotns, but will also have both the ability and the requisite concern to raise questions about the desirability or propriety of the ends or results which his rationality enables him to realize. That is to say, the genitor has designed a creature which is capable of asking questions about the value of ends, and so of enquiring about the possible availability of categorical imperatives over and above the hypothetical imperatives which the creature was initially scheduled to deliver. Of course, to say that the creature has the capacity and the concern needed to raise, and desire answers to, certain questions is not to say that the creature is in a position to answer those questions; indeed, we can be sure that initially he will not be in a position to answer those questions, since the procedures for getting answers to them have not been designed and installed in advance, and so will have to be evolved or constructed, presumably by Homo sapiens himself. But given that such a creature is equipped to formulate a legitimate demand for solutions to these questions, then any set of procedures which it could devise which are such that there is no objection to them, and which if they were accepted as proper procedures could then be used to deliver answers to these questions, will be procedures which it will be reasonable for the creature to accept as proper, provided that there are no other equally unobjectionable candidates with equally good prospects of delivering answers to the same ques-tions.

Should there indeed be two or more sets of procedures, where each set could be put to work, with full success, to provide an answer to a rational demand, and should it be required, for some reason or other, that one and only one such set should be left in the field, and should there be no non-arbitrary way of deciding between the survivingcandidates, then I would allow it as rational to decide by the toss of a coin. But I hope to avoid being faced with having to accept so hilarious a mode of decision. I might dub the principle which allows credence to a set of procedures the adoption and use of which will most satisfactorily meet a rational need, "The Metaphysical Principle of Supply and Demand".

The second part of my leading idea would be that, for reasons which have not yet been specified, the newly

"generated" creature Homo sapiens finds it metaphysically suitable/fitting to perform the operation of Metaphysical Transubstantiation on, so to speak, himself, and to set it up so that the attribution of rationality, which originally (thanks to the genitor) attaches non-essentially to one substantial type, namely, Homo sapiens, now attaches essentially to a different but standardly coincident substantial type, to himself as a person; and that when we come to consider the application of such notions as value and finality to persons, where the notions of value in question are not questions of relative value but rather of absolute value, then we find that a 'paraphrase'

'translation' of whatever it is we have to say concerning these notions into some rigmarole or other couched in terms of causal connections of a cybernetic kind is no longer available; and this would be where the end of the overlap is located; when it comes to questions of absolute value and about persons, the overlap has now ceased. The reasons why the overlap should end at this point might, I suspect, turn on the propriety of supposing persons (essentially rational beings) to be necessarily, and perhaps for that reason, free.

Before I fill out the attempted justification for the application of the notion of absolute value on which I have started, I would like to do two things. I would like first to introduce a piece of abbreviatory jargon; and second, I would like to introduce, or reintroduce, a metaphysical construction routine which I referred to in a previouspaper, which I called "Humean Projection". The bit of abbreviatory jargon is the phrase "Mechanistically Substi-tutable"; I shall call an idea or concept "Mechanistically Substitutable" when it is one which initially appears not to be amenable to interpretation in terms agreeable to a mechanist, but which is found to be, after all, so amenable.

So for an idea or concept to be not mechanistically substitutable would be for it to resist reinterpretation by a mechanist.

As regards "Humean Projection", its title is perhaps somewhat misleading, since though some such operation does seem to be described by Hume, he seemingly regards it as a way of accounting for certain mistakes which we make, of a deep-seated variety, rather than as a way of validating some of the things which we should like to be able to say. In this respect I think we find Mackie going along with Hume. As I see it, this operation consists in taking something which starts life, so to speak, as a specific mode of thinking, and then transforming it into an attribute which is ascribed not to thinking but to the thing thought about and indeed is, in a given case, attributed either correctly or incorrectly. To take an example with which I am presently concerned, we might start with a notion of valuing, or of (hyphenatedly, so to speak) thinking-of-as-valuable some item x; and, subject to the presence of certain qualifying conditions, we should end up with the simple thought, or belief, that the item x is valuable; and in thinking of it as valuable, we should now be thinking, correctly or incorrectly, that the item x has the attribute of being valuable.

I shall now proceed to the amplification of the idea, which I introduced a few minutes ago, of seeking to legitimize, and to secure truth or falsity for, attributions of absolute value by representing such attribution as needed in order to fulfil a rational demandI shall present this amplified version in two parts. The first part is designed to exhibit the structure of the suggestion which is being made and will refer to, without specifying, a certain system of hypotheses, or story, to be called "Story S", which is to play a central role in the satisfaction of the aforementioned rational demand. The second part will specify, in outline, Story S.

1. The genitor, in legitimately constructing Homo sapiens (an operation to which, as genitor, he is properly motivated by a concern to optimize the spread of biological efficiency and so of biological value), will have constructed a creature which will fulfil five conditions:

(a) it will legitimately demand justification, ultimately in terms of absolute and not relative value, for whatever attitudes, purposes, or acceptances

(whether alethic or practical) it freely adopts or maintains.

1. it will regard any system of hypotheses, or story, which fulfils the condition of satisfying the aforementioned demand ("Demand D") without being itself open to objection, as being a story which is worthy of acceptance unless this condition is met by more than one story. (That is, it will regard such a story as a story which is an admissible candidate for acceptance.)
2. it will hold that if there is a plurality of admissible candidates all of which involve a certain supposi-tion, then that supposition is worthy of acceptance.
3. it will allow that Story S is an admissible candidate which meets Demand D and that the supposition of the applicability to the world of the notion of absolute value which is embodied in Story S would also be embodied in any other story which would satisfy Demand D, with the consequence that this supposition is worthy of acceptance.
4. that the notions of absolute value and of finality,which appear within Story S, are not mechanistically substitutable, and so are authentic and

   non-

   Pickwickian concepts.

   2. I shall present Story S in the manner of one of those cosy and comforting question-and-answer sequences which telephone companies, public utilities, or insurance companies are liable to give us when they are hoping to unload on us some new gimmick.

   Q. How can we satisfy Demand D, and get non-relative justification for our purposes, attitudes, and so forth?

   Ay. By setting up conditions for the successful application to those purposes, attitudes (etc.) of concepts) of absolute value.

   Q2. How do we do that?

   Az. By setting it up so that certain sorts of attitudes (etc.) have absolute value inasmuch as they are (or would be) valued by (seem valuable to) a certified value-fixer, whose valuations are (therefore) eligible for the benefits provided by Humean Projection.

   Q3. How do we find one of them?

   A3. We find a being whose essence (indeed whose métier) it is to establish and to apply forms of absolute value.

   Q4. How do we get such a being?

   At. By Metaphysical Transubstantiation from the biological substantial type Homo sapiens, which produces for us the non-biological substantial type person. We are now seen to be (qua persons) accredited value-fixers, at least in relation to ourselves, and (qua creatures which are both persons and specimens of Homo sapiens) subjects whose voluntary operations are supposed to conform to the values we fix for ourselves.

   Qs. Can we be secured against the risk that the notions of absolute value and of finality, which appear in Story S, might turn out to be mechanistically substitutable (in which case the vitalistic-mechanistic overlap would not after all have been terminated, and the notions inquestion would after all be 'Pickwickian', not authentic)?

   As. Yes, we can attain this security, provided we can show that being an accredited value-fixer (in relation to oneself) requires being free, in something like Kant's sense of positive freedom; and that if the dovetailed concepts of absolute value and finality were mechan-istically substitutable, this fact would import into the genesis of our self-originated attitudes (etc.) a 'foreign cause' (that is, a cause external to the legislator-cum-agent) which would constitute a barrier to the presence of freedom, and which would for that reason fatally undermine the prospects for success for Story S.

   I am only too well aware that today's lecture, particularly in its terminal convulsions, contains much that is obscure, fragmentary, and ill defended (where indeed it is defended at all). I am also conscious of the likelihood that, were I (Heaven forbid) after a breather to return to the fray, I should find myself inclined to produce quite different, though maybe equally problematic, reflections. But I have some hope that today's offering might provide an adequate starting-point for one of those interminable sequences of revisions of which serious theoretical thought seems so largely to consist. H. P. Grice.