"The reduction of [objective] bonum to [subjective] 'values'"

     "It was Descartes who took the decisive step [in 'the entrance of the good into the orbit of subjectivity']:  'The true office of reason is to examine the just value of all the goods whose acquisition seems to depend in some way on our conduct.'  A bit later he gives an even more radical formulation:  'We must make use of experience and reason to distinguish good and evil and to know their just value, in order not to take one for the other.'  That statement is staggering.  It is no longer a matter of distinguishing true goods from illusory ones [objectively], or of classifying goods on a graded scale [objectively].  The formulation marks a transition that makes an epoch:  good and evil under the yoke of 'value.'  Both, good as well as evil, have a common [subjective] reference and are not as opposed as one would think:  they have a [subjective] 'value.'  It is the latter's measure that alone allows us to distinguish them.  The good is no longer directly worthwhile, as good, but rather as what has value [for the subject in question].  It no longer derives its goodness from itself, but from the value assigned to it."

     Rémi Brague, The kingdom of man:  genesis and failure of the modern project, trans. Paul Seaton, Catholic ideas for a secular world (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 99-100, italics in Descartes Brague's; italics in Brague mine.  Brague cites Letter to Princess Elizabeth, 1 September 1645 (OC 4:284) and Les passions de l'âme, pt. 2, chap. 138 (OC 11:431).  It has become a subjective matter of aestimatio (99.2).