ON UNDERESTIMATING US Jane Heal Human beings are social animals. A solitary life would be horrible for most of us. What makes life worthwhile is being with others and engaging in shared projects with them. To do justice to these facts, philosophers need to pay more attention to the first-person plural, we/us, and to rethink their accounts of value and virtue. The aim of this article is to recommend the idea that, when thinking about action and reasons for action, philoso- phers should pay more attention to ‘we/us’. Philosophical discussion in these areas usually assumes individualism, in the sense of taking it that the fundamental questions are for an individual and have the form ‘What should I do?’ and ‘What should I value?’ But, I shall suggest, the first-person plural is as important as the first-person singular. So equally fundamental are the questions for us, ‘What should we do?’ and ‘What should we value?’ One upshot of accepting this shift of viewpoint is (I shall suggest) the need to rethink options in metaethics and moral psychology. In the later part of the article I shall say something about ‘fact’ and ‘value’ and also about ‘egoism’ and ‘altruism’. Both of these contrasts, as often understood, presuppose individualism. So, if individualism is false, use of the contrasts may reinforce distorted and unhelpful ways of thinking. Let me stress at the outset that I am NOT claiming to have discovered some new ‘first-person plural’ way of think- ing, which once adopted will lead to people agreeing more on what it is to behave well and finding it easier to do so. The kind of thinking I want to draw to your attention is doi:10.1017/S1477175619000320 # The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2019 Think 54, Vol. 19 (Spring 2020) Think Spring 2020 † 9 Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175619000320 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 3.85.12.244, on 15 Feb 2022 at 18:11:47, subject to the Cambridge