 At least three quite different sorts of issues are at stake in this debate. First is an ontological/explanatory issue. Some monists have held that a plural list of values would be explanatorily unsatisfactory. If pleasure and knowledge are both values, they have held, there remains a further question to be asked: why? If this question has an answer, some have thought, it must be because there is a further, more basic, value under which the explanation subsumes both pleasure and knowledge. Hence, pluralist theories are either explanatorily inadequate, or have not really located the basic intrinsic values.