Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the philosophy of value by David Wiggins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).1

Abstract

David Wiggins was Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy at University College, Oxford, from 1981 to 1989. Needs, Values, Truth (NVT) was his third book. It collects three previously unpublished essays on broadly ethical and metaethical matters, with revised versions of six essays on the same kind of topics published over the years since 1973. (Though some go back a good deal further than 1973: a footnote on the first page of Essay VI reveals, slightly coyly, that at least its first three sections originated in the early 1960s.) Essay I is the longest, at 58 pages; it explores what is logically and ethically distinctive about claims of need. Essays II-V are all in different ways about truth in ethics, as contrasted with truth in other areas: how much there can be, and why, in ethics unlike some other domains, there is some determinacy but not complete determinacy. Essays VI-VII consider and refine an Aristotelian understanding of practical reason (and un-reason). Essay VIII is about free will. Essay IX addresses personal identity, the value of survival, and so in a way the meaning of life, which is also a central theme of Essay III. A tenth chapter, 37 pages long and divided into 4 main sections, does not deserve the relative neglect that is risked by its being titled ‘Postscript’. This characteristically self-critical closing chapter adds reflections and qualifications to Essays I-IX: its section 1 draws some threads together about ‘intuitionism’ in ethics, section 2 adds some further thoughts about needs, and sections 3–4 have more to say about truth, both as to its philosophical logic and as to its applicability (or otherwise) in ethics. Between Professor Wiggins’ first two books, Identity and SpatioTemporal Continuity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967) and Sameness and Substance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1980) there was (if I may) a certain continuity, to the extent that the second is almost an