In Ethics 3, Spinoza makes two important claims about the relationship between desires and value judgments. The standard view in his time, inherited from the Scholastic tradition, is that our desires and other conative states always follow a judgment of value. For Aquinas, “The intellectual appetite […] desires something because it is good” (ST 1a 80.2 ad2, 125). Similarly, Descartes argues that the origin of all the passions lies in a belief that something is good or evil: “When we think of something as good with regard to us, i.e. as beneficial to us, this makes us have love for it; and when we think of it as evil or harmful, this arouses hatred in us […] This same consideration of good and evil is the origin of all the other passions” (AT IX 374 | CSM I 350).7 Against this, Spinoza affirms that it is our value judgments that depend on our desires, not the other way around, and that we should understand good and evil themselves in terms of joy and sadness (3p9s, 3p39s).8

At first glance, these claims appear to support an antirealist theory of value. If we judge something to be good because we desire it, as Spinoza claims in 3p9s, it seems that its goodness must somehow depend on our desire. The fact that Spinoza infers from this claim that “good” refers to all kinds of joy, in 3p39s, seems to confirm the antirealist interpretation. The value of joy is explained by our desire for it – it consists in the fact that it is desired.

But as we saw, the Objectivist Interpretation resists this view by arguing that 3p9s and 3p39s do not express a theory of value at all, but only a theory of evaluative judgment. In other words, the passages concern not what makes things good or evil but only why we regard things as such. This would follow from a literal reading of Spinoza’s remarks: “[W]e judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (3p9s | G II/148, p. 500, emphasis added). And it seems even clearer in his later statements: “Because each one judges from his own affect what is good and what is bad, what is better and what is worse (see 3p39s) it follows that men can vary as much in judgment as in affect” (3p51s | G II/178–9, p. 522).

In addition, the Objectivist Interpretation claims that, despite initial appearances, 3p9s and 3p39s actually rely on the existence of objective value properties. This would be the case if, for Spinoza, our desires determine our value judgments by providing epistemic justification for them—the Epistemic Reading (ER). 3p9s claims that we judge something good because we desire it. This is consistent with the claim that desires simply serve as evidence of value. 3p39s may initially seem less amenable to ER since it infers from 3p9s a claim about what is valuable (joy and sadness). But Spinoza also identifies joy and sadness with increases and decreases in our power of acting (3p11s). If he accepted a realist theory of value, then his claim in 3p39s could be that joy and sadness constitute the experience of good and evil.9

ER has a long history in Spinoza scholarship. In his classic 1930 Five Types of Ethical Theory, C.D. Broad cautions against reading Spinoza as a kind of hedonist. On Broad’s view, joy and sadness are not themselves good and evil, but only signs of value: “pleasure and pain, though they are thus not the ratio essendi of good and evil, are the ratio cognoscendi thereof. Pleasure is the infallible sign of heightened vitality, pain is the infallible sign of lowered vitality, and these are the only ultimate good and evil” (Broad 1930, pp. 51–2). Writing almost thirty years later, Frankena claims that, for Spinoza, joy and sadness are perceptions of good and evil states of affairs: “On Spinoza’s view, a joy or pleasure is or includes a kind of perception of good, since it is or includes a perception […] of an affection of the body in which its power of acting, etc., are increased or helped, i.e. it is a kind of knowledge of good” (Frankena 1977, p. 24). For both scholars, Spinoza holds not that joy and sadness are good and evil but that they allow us to know that things are good or evil.

In this sense, ER would seem to make out Spinoza as a faithful Cartesian. For Descartes, the passions serve to alert us to the presence of good and bad things and ensure that we remain motivated in their pursuit: “Joy is a pleasant emotion which the soul has when it enjoys a good which impressions in the brain represent to it as its own. I say the soul has this emotion when it enjoys a good, for in fact the soul receives no other benefit from all the good it possesses” (Passions 91 | 396 p. 360).10 Malebranche is even more explicit: “pleasure and pain are the natural and indubitable characteristics of good and evil’ (Search, p. 21), the “natural marks of good and evil” (Search p. 66), and “the soul’s natural signs for distinguishing good from evil” (Search, p. 348). The passion of joy signals the presence of something good and so functions as evidence of goodness.11

But what is the argument for ER? Why should we think that, for Spinoza, our affects play an evidentiary role for our value judgments? We can start with his definition of “affect,” which analyzes affect in terms of our power of acting: “By affect I understand affections of the Body by which the Body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections” (3D3 | G II/139, p. 493). Recall that Spinoza identifies our power of acting with our perfection.12 It follows that affects are constituted by increases or decreases in our perfection. And, indeed, this is exactly how Spinoza defines joy and sadness: “By Joy, therefore, I shall understand in what follows that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection. And by Sadness, that passion by which it passes to a lesser perfection” (3p11s | G II/149, pp. 500–1).13 Desire, in turn, is our essence insofar as it is determined by an affection of joy or sadness: “Desire is man’s very essence, insofar as it is conceived to be determined, from any given affection of it, to do something” (3DA | G II/190, p. 531).14 Finally, Spinoza argues that we always desire or strive to promote or avoid what we associate with joy or sadness: “We strive to further the occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to Joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary to it, or will lead to Sadness” (3p11s | G II/161, p. 509).15

Spinoza’s theory of the affects can be taken to support ER in two distinct ways, which yield two distinct versions of ER. I will treat each version separately in what follows. The first is based on the nature of desire. As we have seen, Spinoza holds that we desire to promote whatever we represent as a cause of joy and to avoid whatever we represent as a cause of sadness. Joy and sadness, in turn, are transitions in our power of acting, or perfection. Now, when we add to this the claim—maintained by the Objectivist Interpretation—that the properties of good and evil are grounded in increases and decreases in our perfection, it follows that desire will invariably accompany the experience of something good or evil. As Steven Nadler puts it, desire functions as a “reliable indicator” of value (Nadler 2019, p. 193). He goes on to explain:

Nadler argues that our desires determine our value judgments for Spinoza because they necessarily co-occur with good things. We may justifiably infer that something is good (or evil) from the fact that we desire to promote it (or to avoid it), and this is because we necessarily desire to promote (or avoid) anything that affects us so as to increase (or decrease) our power of acting—i.e., anything that is thereby good (or evil). Because of the key role that inference plays here, I will call this view the inferential version of ER.

The second way ER may be supported by Spinoza’s theory of the affects focuses not on desire but on joy and sadness. In the definition we saw above, Spinoza specifies that affects involve ideas. He stresses this point in a second analysis of affect: “An Affect that is called a Passion of the mind is a confused idea, by which the Mind affirms of its Body, or of some part of it, a greater or lesser force of existing than before” (3GDA | G II/203, p. 542). For Spinoza, each idea affirms whatever representational content it has (2p49). So, each affect is not only constituted by but also represents a transition in the body’s power of acting or perfection. Joy represents an increased level of perfection of the body; sadness a decreased level. If the properties of good and evil are grounded in such increases and decreases in perfection—per the Objectivist Interpretation—it follows that joy and sadness are representations of good and evil. In the words of Andrew Youpa, joy and sadness offer “axiological information” (Youpa 2020, p. 34). He explains:

According to Youpa, our desires give rise to value judgments precisely because they are identical to affects of joy or sadness, which themselves directly represent a thing as good or evil. I will call this the perceptual version of ER.16

In sum, ER holds that the affects ground our judgments of value because they provide evidence for them. This justification may involve an inference—leading to the inferential version of ER—or direct perception of value—leading to the perceptual version. Either way, the link between the affects and value properties is epistemic rather than metaphysical. According to ER, it is in virtue of increasing or decreasing our power of acting that something is good or evil for Spinoza, and it is in virtue of desire, joy, and sadness that we know it to be such.

Thus far, we reviewed the basis for the Objectivist Interpretation, which claims that, for Spinoza, good and evil are objective properties grounded in the perfection of our essence. We then saw that this interpretation is threatened by some parts of Spinoza’s moral psychology, particularly as expressed in 3p9s and 3p39s, which initially seem to support value antirealism. Lastly, we noted how defenders of the Objectivist Interpretation employ the Epistemic Reading (ER) to defuse this threat by treating the connection between desire and value for Spinoza as merely epistemic.

Yet I will argue that ER fails. More specifically, I will argue that it fails to offer an adequate account of 3p9s and 3p39s. To see why, we can begin by bringing the passages into greater focus. 3p9s will be particularly important in this effort and is worth restating here: “From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (3p9s | G II/148, p. 500). I contend that 3p9s states the following claim: All value judgments metaphysically depend on some desire, and no desire metaphysically depends on any value judgment. In this section, I elucidate three parts of this claim, each of which represents a distinct explanandum of the passage. As we will see, proponents of ER also accept these points. In a nutshell, my argument against ER is that, however one interprets it, it cannot account for all three parts of the claim at once. I explain why in the next two sections, where I address ER both in its inferential version and in its perceptual version, as described above.

The first important part of 3p9s and 3p39s is their claim of explanatory priority. Spinoza does not just say that our value judgments and desires co-occur; he says that our value judgments depend on our desires, and that our desires do not depend on our value judgments. After stating in 3p39s that by “good,” he understands all kinds of joy (citing 3p9s), Spinoza adds: “So each one, from his own affect, judges, or evaluates [unusquisque ex suo affectu judicat seu æstimat], what is good and what is bad, what is better and what is worse, and finally, what is best and what is worst” (3p39s | G II/170, p. 516). Our affects explain the occurrence of value judgments, but our value judgments do not explain the occurrence of our affects.17

Second, this explanatory relation is a matter of metaphysical dependence. By this, I mean simply that, for Spinoza, a desire explains the existence of a value judgment, and not merely its aptness. This is clear not only from 3p9s but also from examples that illustrate 3p39s: “So the Greedy man judges an abundance of money best, and poverty worst. The Ambitious man desires nothing so much as Esteem and dreads nothing so much as Shame” (3p39s | G II/170, p. 516). For Spinoza, greed is simply an immoderate desire and love of wealth (3DAXLVII). The greedy man’s desires lead him to regard wealth as the greatest good. His desire produces his judgment of value.

The crucial point here is that the metaphysical dependence claim differs from ER’s epistemic justification claim. The claim that desires provide evidence of something’s value is not the same as, nor does it imply, the claim that they cause us to judge that thing as good.18 Of course, there is no contradiction between the two claims, but I want to note that, even if ER embraces the second claim, as its defenders argue, 3p9s and 3p39s also make the first one. When we desire to promote or avoid something, associating it with an affect of joy or sadness, we in fact judge it to be good or evil. The judgment does not and cannot come apart from the desire, as the examples of the greedy man and the ambitious man make clear.19

Proponents of ER themselves accept this point. Nadler argues that, for Spinoza, when “a person desires something [she] thus judges the thing to be good” (Nadler 2019, p. 195fn). Youpa is even more explicit: “an occurrent evaluative judgment follows necessarily from an occurrent episode of joy. An individual X occurrently judges ‘This orange is good’ as a result of an occurrent episode of the qualitative joy that the orange causes when it increases X’s power” (Youpa 2020, p. 21). According to both, Spinoza maintains that the relationship between our affects and our value judgments is not limited to epistemic justification—a relation that a body of evidence bears to a particular proposition it warrants. Rather, the affect itself necessitates the existence of the value judgment—our desire for something in fact elicits the judgment that it is good.

The third relevant aspect of 3p9s is its unlimited scope. According to Spinoza, all our value judgments depend metaphysically on our desires, and no desires depend metaphysically on our value judgments. We cannot have knowledge of value other than by experiencing joy (or sadness) and a related desire.20 Again, this is a claim that proponents of ER accept. Nadler writes that, for Spinoza, “when ‘we judge something to be good’ or when we ‘evaluate what is good,’ it is on the basis of some affect or desire, of some pro-attitude toward the thing that we experience” (Nadler 2019, p. 192). And Youpa agrees: “For Spinoza, it is not necessary presently to undergo an episode of joy or sadness to make an evaluative judgment, although all evaluative judgments and thus all knowledge of good and evil presuppose prior changes in power” (Youpa 2020, p. 22).

Some may object to this scope claim. Perhaps value judgments whose content is general —such as the statement that “what we certainly know to be useful to us” is good (4D1 | G II/209, p. 546) —do not, for Spinoza, depend on our desires. In fact, Spinoza distinguishes between value judgments about particulars and those about universals: “[T]he true knowledge we have of good and evil is only abstract, or universal, and the judgment we make concerning the order of things and the connection of causes, so that we may be able to determine what in the present is good or evil for us, is imaginary, rather than real” (4p62s | G II/257, p. 582). If this is right, then Spinoza may recognize two kinds of value judgments – one that depends on our affects and one that is independent of them. While the greedy man judges the good from his affects, we need not do the same.

Yet for Spinoza, universal ideas arise from abstraction rooted in particular ideas. More specifically, we form universal ideas either “from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses,” “from signs,” or, finally, “from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things” (2p40s2 | G II/122, pp. 477–78). Ideas about particulars thus precede universal ideas and provide a basis for them. So, universal value judgments must be abstracted from particular value judgments, which depend on desires. The claims that the good is “what we certainly know to be useful to us” and that we can have “true knowledge” of good and evil are no different. Indeed, Spinoza identifies the true knowledge of good and evil with an affect (4p14). This makes sense because, as I explain at greater length in the next section, he holds that the affects give rise to the very notions of good and evil—concepts without which universal value judgments would be impossible (cf. 4p64, 4p68). We should therefore continue to read the scope of 3p9s as unrestricted.

With this better understanding of 3p9s and 3p39s, we can now turn to ER itself. According to ER, our affects give rise to value judgments because they offer epistemic justification for them. As we have seen, Spinoza’s theory of the affects suggests two possible paths for this justification. First, in the inferential version, desire acts as a reliable indicator of value: because we necessarily desire what increases our power, we may infer that an object increases our power (and is thus good) from the fact that we desire it. Second, in the perceptual version, the feelings of joy and sadness offer axiological information. Joy represents an increase in power, and so leads us to represent its cause as good.

Yet in what follows, I will argue that both versions of ER fail. Neither offers a satisfying explanation of 3p9s and 3p39s because each contradicts at least one of the three parts of the claim I outlined above. I address the first version in the remainder of this section and then turn to the second in the following one.

Let’s begin. As we saw above, the first version of ER focuses on the connection between our desires and increases in our power of acting. As Nadler explains, “desire is both a necessary and constitutive part of the objective state of affairs that is something’s presently being good for a person and the ground for that person’s judgments about the thing’s goodness” (Nadler 2019, p. 193). According to Nadler, desires act as reliable indicators of value because they necessarily co-occur with transitions in power, which ER takes Spinoza to regard as objectively good or evil.

Now, there is nothing inherently mistaken in Nadler’s inference here. If we grant that increases and decreases in power are intrinsically good and evil, and also grant that desires necessarily co-occur with such transitions, it follows that desires do indeed signal or indicate the presence of something good or evil. But problems arise if we consider this account specifically as a reading of 3p9s and 3p39s—namely, this account fails to address the scope claim (iii).

To begin, note that construing desire as a reliable indicator of value does not, by itself, explain the passages. If there is a relation of metaphysical dependence between our desires and our value judgments, then our desire for some object in fact determines us to judge that it is good, rather than simply supporting this inference. But the claim that desire is a reliable indicator of value only accounts for the latter. Even if our desires are reliable indicators of value, we might fail to treat them as such. Thus, the inferential version of ER must make a stronger claim—that we in fact treat our desires as reliable indicators of value.

Yet if we do treat our desires as reliable indicators of value, then we must be aware of this fact. For we can only treat something as an indicator of a given state of affairs if we believe that it is reliably connected to that state of affairs. We might think of this as a “meta-level” judgment about the relationship between our desires and the properties of their objects.21 One we have this meta-level judgment, we can treat our desires as evidence that certain value properties are instantiated in their objects. Consider, by analogy, the advice to “trust your gut.” Here, our vague sense of unease is taken as a reliable indicator of danger. Equipped with the meta-level judgment that our unease tracks danger, we can infer, from our sense of unease, the judgment that danger is present. In the same way, 3p9s and 3p39s might suggest that we infer the judgment “this is good” from our desire for it.

But relying on a meta-level judgment of this kind to explain the dependence of our value judgments on our desires—and specifically to capture its universal scope—faces two problems. First, it would have to apply to all individuals. Yet it seems highly implausible that everyone makes meta-level judgments about the link between desire and value. Indeed, in one case, Spinoza suggests that some make opposite judgments: “Superstition, on the other hand, seems to maintain that the good is what brings Sadness, and the evil, what brings Joy” (4appXXXI | G II/275, 593). Recall that for Spinoza, joy and sadness are identical with desire. The superstitious believe that joy and desire for some object reliably indicate its disvalue. So, not all individuals can be making the meta-level judgment that systematically connects our desires to value in the way ER suggests. And if such judgments are necessary to explain the dependence of value judgments on desires, it would follow that 3p9s and 3p39s cannot be universal in scope—contrary to (iii).22

The second problem has to do with Spinoza’s views on the origin of value concepts. For Spinoza, the affects do not merely determine particular judgments of value; they give rise to the notions of good and evil themselves. Spinoza makes this claim in 4p8: “The knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an affect of Joy or Sadness insofar as we are conscious of it” (4p8 | G II/215, p. 550). Sadness, he then notes, arises only from inadequate ideas: “Knowledge of evil (by 4p8) is Sadness itself, insofar as we are conscious of it. But sadness […] is a passion, which (by 3p3) depends on inadequate ideas” (4p64 | G II/259, 583). Since knowledge of evil depends on sadness, and sadness depends on inadequate ideas, a mind with only adequate ideas would form no notion of evil: “if the human Mind had only adequate ideas, it would form no notion of evil [nullam formaret mali notionem]” (4p64c | G II/259, 583). Finally, Spinoza draws a parallel conclusion about goodness and joy: “[he who] has only adequate ideas […] has no concept of evil [mali conceptum habet nullum] (4p64c). And since good and evil are correlates, he also has no concept of good” (4p68d | G II/261, 584).23

The problem here is that, on the inferential version of ER, value notions must already be available to form the meta-level judgments linking desires to good and evil. Desire is a reliable indicator of goodness. If, however, Spinoza insists we acquire the very concepts of good and evil by experiencing the affects, then he cannot appeal to meta-level judgments to explain how those concepts originate—for the process of acquisition of value concepts would rely on our making a judgment that already employs them. We could not come to know good and evil unless we already knew what good and evil are! One might reply that 3p9s and 3p39s are not meant to apply to the acquisition of value concepts themselves—that it is only describes what occurs once we have these concepts. But, of course, this would imply that the passages make a claim that is limited in scope—again, contra (iii)—and this cannot be right.

Some might object that making a meta-level judgment is unnecessary for treating our desires as reliable indicators of value. Perhaps we can take an emotion or other mental state as evidence for some claim without forming any beliefs about the evidential connection. For example, children might treat their desire for candy as evidence that candy is good, or their fear of jumping in a pool as evidence that its deep water is dangerous, without also forming the belief that desire and fear are generally reliable indicators of goodness and danger.

In reply, I do not deny the plausibility of such examples. But I do deny that they are genuine cases of using a reliable indicator in judgment formation. If fear leads a young child to believe that danger is present, is she really treating her fear as evidence of danger? Does she go through this intermediate step before backing away? It seems more plausible to say that her fear is directly connected with the idea of danger in a way that does not involve any evidential reasoning. How would Spinoza explain this direct relation? On the one hand, he might say that the idea of danger simply follows from fear as a brute fact. But many scholars regard such brute facts as anathema to Spinoza’s metaphysical rationalism. A more plausible explanation would be to say that the emotion of fear itself involves a representation of danger—which is precisely the claim of the perceptual version of ER. In that case, the value judgment based on fear would rely on a representation of value internal to the affect itself. I now turn to this version.

I have argued that the inferential version of ER fails. According to my argument, Spinoza’s desires determine our value judgments not because we regard them as evidence of value. What about the perceptual version? As we saw earlier, joy and sadness are also representational states in Spinoza’s framework: they involve ideas that represent states of the body through which our power of acting increases or decreases. So, joy and sadness offer information of transitions in power. And if we suppose that transitions are themselves good or evil, it follows that joy and sadness provide axiological information: joy indicates that something good is occurring, while sadness indicates that something evil is occurring. According to the perceptual version of ER, we then judge things good or evil based on these representations.

Spinoza might appear to endorse this view in 4p8d: “We call good, or evil, what is useful to, or harmful to, preserving our being (by 4D1 and 4D2), i.e. (by 3p7), what increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, our power of acting. Therefore (by the Definitions of Joy and Sadness in 3p11s), insofar as we perceive that a thing affects us with Joy or Sadness, we call it good or evil” (4p8d | G II/215, pp. 550–51). To start, what increases or diminishes our power of acting—what is useful or harmful—by definition qualifies as good and evil. Next, Spinoza identifies these transitions in power with the affects of joy and sadness. From this, he seems to conclude that we call things good or evil insofar as we believe that they bring us joy or sadness, which themselves are representations of increases or decreases in power. As Youpa writes: “The qualitative character of joy and the qualitative character of species of joy track and reveal enhancements to our nature while the qualitative character of sadness and species of sadness track and reveal impairments. Emotions are therefore axiological information” (Youpa 2020, p. 72).

Based on passages like 4p8d, the perceptual version of ER seems initially to be on strong footing. Nonetheless, I believe it fails as well. In what follows, I will argue that it faces a dilemma about the representational content of joy and sadness. In short, this representational content either involves the concepts of good and evil or does not. If it does not, then Spinoza could provide no reason for treating affects as axiological information; while joy and sadness might involve representations of things that are (by hypothesis) good or evil, they would not represent these things as good or evil. As with someone who sees Clark Kent only as Clark Kent, and thus has no reason to believe he is seeing Superman, merely having an affect would not suffice to form a value judgment.24

Alternatively, if the perceptual version of ER claims that the representational contents of joy and sadness do involve value concepts—that is, that joy and sadness represent increases and decreases in power as good and evil—then it would imply that, for Spinoza, value judgments determine our desires. This contradicts 3p9s. I will argue that it does so because Spinoza also contends (a) that the representational content of joy and sadness involves a judgment, and (b) that the affects of joy and sadness determine our desires. So, if joy represents an increase in power as good, then joy would be a judgment of goodness that determines us to desire whatever we represent as its cause.

Ultimately, then, while the inferential version of ER holds that some value judgments are independent of the affects—contradicting (iii)’s claim that all value judgments depend on our desires—the perceptual version holds that desires are determined by value judgments, contradicting (i)’s claim of explanatory priority.

The dilemma for the perceptual version of ER rests, as I have said, on two further claims that I believe Spinoza accepts. We find strong evidence that he does so in the General Definition of the Affects. As shown, Spinoza defines affects as ideas that affirm something about the body: “An Affect that is called a Passion of the mind is a confused idea, by which the mind affirms of its body or of some part of it a greater or lesser force of existing than before, which, when it is given, determines the Mind to think of this rather than that” (GDA | G II/203, p. 542). These affirmations correspond to joy and sadness, while the mind’s determination to think of one thing rather than another is desire: “I added which determines the Mind to think of this rather than that in order to express also, in addition to the nature of Joy and Sadness (which the first part of the definition explains), the nature of Desire” (GDA | G II/204, p. 543). So, Spinoza makes two points in this definition. First, the mental component of joy and sadness is an affirmation of a bodily state. Second, these affirmations determine us to desire one thing rather than another.

These points correspond to the two claims outlined above. To begin, there is good evidence that Spinoza regards the affirmations involved in our ideas as judgments. For Spinoza, a judgment is a mental attitude that involves propositional content—a claim that can be evaluated for truth and other epistemic norms. Spinoza takes affirmations themselves to be truth-evaluable as well. We see this in his account of volition, which he defines as a faculty “by which the Mind affirms or denies something as true or false” (2p48s | G II/129–30, p. 484, my emphasis). When an idea affirms something, it presents that thing as true or false. Crucially, Spinoza holds that nothing more is required for a judgment than such an affirmation. So, affirmations are judgments.25

Furthermore, for Spinoza, every idea involves an affirmation of whatever it represents: “In the Mind there is no volition, or affirmation and negation, except that which the idea involves insofar as it is an idea” (2p49 | G II/130, p. 484). Affirmations are built into the very structure of ideas. We cannot represent something without also affirming it as true: “I deny that a man affirms nothing insofar as he perceives. For what is perceiving a winged horse other than affirming wings of the horse? For if the Mind perceived nothing else except the winged horse, it would regard it as present to itself, and would not have any cause of doubting its existence” (2p49s | G II/134, p. 489). To affirm something, and judge it as true, simply involves having an idea that represents it.26

Crucially, joy and sadness also involve affirmations—and therefore judgments. They include affirmed propositional content.27 More specifically, they involve a judgment that some affection in the body leads it to a greater or lesser power of acting. But if, in addition, the representational content of the affects is normative, as the perceptual version of ER holds, then joy and sadness must include judgments that an increase or decrease in power is good or evil. That is, they must involve judgments of value. This is the first point.

I now move on to the second point. As we have seen, the second claim of GDA is that desire is determined by the affirmations involved in joy or sadness. The objects of our desires are always determined by the affections in which our essence’s power is increased or decreased. So, what we desire follows entirely from the affects of joy or sadness which we have experienced:

For Spinoza, there is an explanatory relation within every affect between (i) joy or sadness and (ii) desire. We desire certain things because we associate them with joy, and we avoid other things because we associate them with sadness: “The Mind, as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the Body’s power of acting” (3p12 | G II/150, p. 502); “We strive to further the occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to Joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary to it, or will lead to Sadness” (3p28 | G II/161, p. 509). For instance, the greedy man’s desire for wealth is determined by the species of joy he has experienced most strongly—joy associated with money. In other words, joy and sadness determine desire. This is the second point.

We can now see why the perceptual version of ER fails as an account of 3p9s and 3p39s. For Spinoza, our desires are determined by particular affections of our essence—joy and sadness—that involve a particular judgment about the state of our bodies. To characterize joy and sadness as axiological information, ER must treat them as judgments of value. But this cannot be right, for it would imply that our desires are determined by judgments of value—namely, the judgment that the body’s power of acting has increased or decreased, and that this is good or evil. And this contradicts the explanatory priority Spinoza asserts in 3p9s.28

One possible reply is to deny that my two points above accurately reflect Spinoza’s views —especially the first. For even if joy and sadness involve affirmations of normative content, perhaps these affirmations fall short of constituting full-fledged judgments. If this is right, then Spinoza could distinguish between (a) the representations of value in joy and sadness and (b) the value judgments that, per 3p9s and 3p39s, do not determine but are determined by our desires. This distinction might allow him to preserve the dependence claim even as he insists that joy and sadness are representations of value—exactly what the perceptual version of ER maintains.

What difference might Spinoza see between mental affirmations and judgments? We can consider two possibilities. First, he might regard affirmations and judgments as different kinds of doxastic attitudes. Affirmations—at least those the affects involve—could represent an increase in the body’s power of acting without involving any propositional content, whereas judgments would add propositional content to affirmations. Second, he might regard judgments as a subspecies of affirmation. For instance, he could claim that affirmations and judgments both involve propositional content, but judgments, unlike affirmations, rise to the level of full belief. If either possibility is correct, Spinoza could say that joy and sadness involve affirmations of value while insisting that full value judgments occur only as a result of desire.

Youpa pursues the first option. According to Youpa, joy and sadness represent transitions in power for Spinoza not because they involve judgments with propositional content but because they function as natural signs of those transitions. On this reading, the affects would represent good and evil in the way that smoke represents fire, or a symptom represents a disease: “an episode of the qualitative feeling of joy is symptomatic of an increase in the power of the joyous subject’s body like an episode of the qualitative feeling of an abnormally high body temperature is, in some cases, symptomatic of an infection” (Youpa 2020, p. 13). If this is right, then the representations involved in joy and sadness would differ in kind from the value judgments of 3p9s.

But construing joy and sadness as natural signs of value does not help ER. ER must explain why, for Spinoza, our affects in fact determine us to judge things good or evil. And just like reliable indicators, natural signs could determine our judgments only if we interpret them as such—i.e., only if we have made a meta-level judgment that our affects are natural signs of value. We treat fevers as symptoms of infections only when we have prior knowledge that the two are reliably connected. Thus, in arguing that joy and sadness are natural signs, Youpa simply offers a variant of the inferential version of ER and faces the same problems I listed in Section 3.

Matthew Kisner pursues the second option when he argues that, for Spinoza, judgments are a subspecies of affirmation (what Kisner calls “volition”). According to Kisner, Spinoza regards affirmation as a truth-apt mental representation involving propositional content, while judgment is a fuller doxastic attitude. In a word, affirmations are belief-like, whereas judgments are fully developed beliefs. Such a distinction is critical to Spinoza’s epistemology because, as we have seen, Spinoza denies that representation and judgment are distinct mental powers; rather, when we represent an object, we also affirm it as true. We do not believe that our idea of a winged horse is true only because we also possess other ideas that are incompatible with it. In such cases, the idea whose power is greatest determines what we believe. For Kisner, then, when Spinoza speaks of “judgment”, he is referring only to the affirmations that are beliefs:

With this distinction in hand, we can read 3p9s in a way more amenable to ER. Perhaps Spinoza means to say that our full beliefs about the value of things—our value judgments—are determined by the relative strength of our desires for those things, even though the desires themselves are determined by representations of value that are only belief-like states, i.e., affirmations of value. If this is right, the perceptual version of ER need not conflict with 3p9s. For it can say that joy and sadness are belief-like representations of value, that they determine our desires, and that, finally, our desires determine our value judgments—our overall beliefs about value. We arrive at a value judgment only when one affect overpowers competing affects in a contest of motivational strength. It is our dominant desire that converts a belief-like state value into a full-fledged belief about value.

This is a sophisticated defense of ER. But I do not think it can work for two reasons. The first is that it does not reflect Spinoza’s actual view of practical deliberation. For Spinoza, practical deliberation is not a contest between belief-like states about value that yields a consistent set of full-fledged beliefs or value judgments. Rather, it concerns what we should do given what we already judge to be good or evil. It is focused on action, not belief. This is especially clear in hard cases. In 3p39s, Spinoza describes the affect of “consternation”: “if the desire to avoid a future evil is restrained by Timidity regarding another evil, so that [a man] does not know what he would rather do, then the Fear is called Consternation” (3p39s | G II/171–2, p. 517). Earlier in the same passage, Spinoza calls timidity “fear insofar as a man is disposed by it to avoid an evil he judges to be future by encountering a lesser evil.” In consternation, we are unsure whether we should avoid a future evil by suffering a present evil, or avoid a present evil on pain of suffering a future one. This deliberation is, not a contest among belief-like states competing to become judgments; rather, it concerns options we already judge to be evil. These judgments are part of the contest among conflicting desires, not the outcome of it. So, the claim that we judge something good or evil only once our mind is made up does not reflect Spinoza’s account of practical deliberation.29

Second, consider nondeliberative contexts. In a hypothetical case where a mind has a single idea, we cannot distinguish the affirmation in that idea from a judgment. Recall Spinoza’s comment about the winged horse: “what is perceiving a winged horse other than affirming wings of the horse? For if the Mind perceived nothing else except the winged horse, it would regard it as present to itself, and would not have any cause of doubting its existence” (2p49s | G II/134, p. 489). To perceive a winged horse is to affirm it, and to affirm it is to “regard it as present”—to judge that it is real. It is only when one’s mind also contains additional ideas that conflict logically with the idea of the winged horse that one can judge that such a fantastical creature does not exist.

Now consider a second case, in which we have a single idea that represents an increase in our power. Here too, the affirmation would be identical with a judgment. To represent an increase in power is to affirm an increase in power, and to affirm an increase in power is to judge or believe that one’s power has increased. From 3p9s, it follows that such a judgment determines a desire for its object. But if all of this is right, Kisner’s distinction between affirmations and judgments cannot save ER. For if our idea represents the increase in power as good, then we must also form the overall judgement that the increase in power is good, and this judgment of value would determine us to desire its object—contrary to the order of explanatory priority established in (i).30

I conclude from all this that the perceptual version of ER fails. Like the inferential version, it is inconsistent with the key claim of 3p9s and 3p39s. Absent a new explanation of how Spinoza might understand the dependence of our value judgments on our desires in purely epistemic rather than metaphysical terms, I conclude that ER as a whole fails.

I have argued that ER fails to offer an adequate explanation of two important passages in which Spinoza offers an account of the relation between desires and evaluative judgments. The principal claim of these passages is that all judgments of value depend metaphysically on desires, and that no desires depend metaphysically on value judgments. The idea that desires determine value judgments because they offer epistemic justification for them is unconvincing, both in light of Spinoza’s theory of the affects and his account of the mind. We should therefore reject it.

This is a significant result, as it leaves the Objectivist Interpretation with no clear way to ward off antirealist readings of these passages. Of course, this is not a dispositive argument against the Objectivist Interpretation, as antirealist readings must still be substantiated in their own right. In particular, they must be reconciled with passages in Ethics 4, where Spinoza appears to suggest that not all that we desire is good, and that the highest good lies in the perfection of the intellect. Still, rejecting ER strengthens the antirealist position vis-à-vis the realist one. Despite the passages in Ethics 4, we should remember that Spinoza can avail himself of standard antirealist moves that decouple occurrent desires from the good. And even if perfection plays a key role in Spinoza’s ethics, it does not necessarily follow that the good metaphysically depends on perfection.31 It lies beyond the scope of this paper to make a full defense of these claims. But, given the rejection of ER, both point a way forward for antirealist interpretations of Spinoza’s theory of value.32