  Stocker is aware of the worry that appeal to something in terms of which comparisons can be made reduces the view to monism: Stocker insists that the synthesizing category (such as a good life) is not a unitary value—it is at most ‘nominal monism’ in my terminology. Stocker argues that it is a philosophical prejudice to think that rational judgment must be quantitative, and so he claims that he does not need to give an account of how we form and use the higher level synthesizing categories.