In the Preface, I pointed out that formal representations of values and norms can be useful both for the clarification of basic philosophical issues and for applications in subjects such as economics, jurisprudence, decision theory, and social choice theory. In this final chapter, some indications will be given of how the results reported in the previous chapters can contribute to these two purposes.

PHILOSOPHICAL RELEVANCE

The discussions that a formalized treatment of philosophical subject matter gives rise to can be divided into three categories:

1. New aspects on issues already discussed in informal philosophy.

2. Issues not previously discussed in informal philosophy, but with a clear philosophical interest.

3. Issues that are peculiar to the chosen formalism and have no bearing on philosophical issues that can be expressed without the formalism.

To mention just one example from each of these categories, logical approaches to the classification of legal relations belong to category (1), preference transitivity to category (2), and the necessitation paradoxes in deontic logic to category (3). When assessing the philosophical relevance of a formalized approach, it may be useful to compare how much discussion of types (1) and (2) on the one hand, and (3) on the other, it gives rise to.

It is not difficult to find examples of how results from the previous chapters can be applied to philosophical problems, giving rise to discussions that belong to categories (1) and (2) in the above classification.