reviewed by Karl Ekendahl, doctoral student, Uppsala University IN THIS WORK IN FORMAL AXIOLOGY, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen presents and explores a novel way of analysing the notion of what he refers to as "personal value" or "value-for". By doing this Rønnow-Rasmussen enters into and makes thought-provoking contributions to several general and important discussions in formal axiology, making the book recommendable not only for those interested in person-relative value, but for everyone in the business of value analysis.Roughly the book consists of three parts, the first of which aims at situating personal value in the axiological landscape. Rønnow-Rasmussen makes a number of distinctions, the first being that between personal and impersonal value, or value-for and value, simpliciter. The distinction can be illustrated by considering, as the author does, a (perhaps not very sophisticated) poem that your daughter wrote when she was young and a sonnet by Shakespeare (p. 1). They both seem to have value, but in different ways. Whereas the poem carries value for you, the sonnet seems to be valuable in an impersonal way, without an eye to anyone special, even though it might also carry personal value. Like impersonal value, personal value is either final or instrumental. To have final value is in Rønnow-Rasmussen's terms to be "valuable for its own sake" (p. 3). However, he distances himself from the Moorean idea of intrinsic value being the only kind of final value. Some objects, Rønnow-Rasmussen contends, are valuable for their own sake in virtue of some extrinsic properties of the object, such as being unique or original. The aforementioned poem seems to be exactly of this kind; it is valuable to you not as a means to something else and not necessarily because of any of its internal features, but because of its having been written by your daughter at a young age.Nor is intrinsic value something exclusively for the objectivist about value. A large portion of the first part is occupied with the demarcational question of subjectivism and objectivism. Rønnow-Rasmussen argues that this distinction should be understood in terms of yet another distinction, namely that between supervenience and constitution. Whether the value of an object is intrinsic or extrinsic depends on whether the properties that compose the supervenience base are internal or external to the object. However, this does not imply, according to bs_bs_banner THEORIA, 2012, 78, 268-272

In a recent article in this journal, Anna Christensen raises an ‘Epicurean challenge’ to Don Marquis’ much-discussed argument for the immorality of abortion. According to Marquis’ argument, abortion is pro tanto morally wrong because it deprives the fetus of ‘a future like ours’. Drawing on the Epicurean idea that death cannot harm its victim because there is no subject to be harmed, Christensen argues that neither fetuses nor anyone else can be deprived of a future like ours by dying. Thus, Christensen suggests, the moral wrongness of abortion (and other killings) cannot be grounded in the relevant individual’s being deprived of a future like ours. In this reply, I argue that on no interpretation of Christensen’s Epicurean challenge does it succeed.

In a recent article, Joyce L. Jenkins challenges the common belief that desire satisfactionists are committed to the view that a person's welfare can be affected by posthumous events. Jenkins argues that desire satisfactionists can and should say that posthumous events only play an epistemic role: though such events cannot harm me, they can reveal that I have already been harmed by something else. In this response, however, we show that Jenkins's approach collapses into the view she aims to avoid.

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According to the Timing Argument, death is not bad for the individual who dies, because there is no time at which it could be bad for her. Defenders of the badness of death have objected to this influential argument, typically by arguing that there are times at which death is bad for its victim. In this paper, I argue that a number of these writers have been concerned with quite different formulations of the Timing Argument. Further, and more importantly, I show that their objections to the Timing Argument fail as attempts to refute the argument in its most challenging form.