Touching the Good: Special Relationships as Contact with Value

Abstract

It seems appropriate for you to care more about your friends than about strangers, more about your keepsakes and projects than about the keepsakes and projects of others. Some things are personally significant to you. But when is something significant to you? In this paper, we advance the contact account of significance. You are in contact with a value when it is manifest in your life or when your life is manifest in it. And it is this contact with a value that makes it significant to you. We argue that this captures standard cases of personal relationships to people, objects, and projects. We then suggest that it explains various other normative phenomena too: our reasons of gratitude and compensation, as well as how we discount for temporal and modal distance. In light of its theoretical virtues and explanatory power, we conclude, the contact account is worth taking seriously indeed.