Values

Values The term “values” is used widely today, not only in economics and philosophy, but psychology, the social sciences, the humanities, and ordinary discourse. Furthermore, it is used in a confusing variety of ways, signifying everything from discounted merchandise (“a bargain value”) to moral and religious beliefs (“personal values”). This contemporary usage is a comparatively recent development, along with the discipline now called “value theory” or “axiology” (from the Greek axios meaning “of like value” or “worthy,” and logos meaning “account” or “theory”), and stems largely from nineteenth and twentieth century movements. The meaning of the term “value” (from the Latin valere meaning, among other things, “to be worth”) was once comparatively clear: it meant the worth of a thing, primarily in an economic sense. The term was first used in a technical way in the branch of economics called theory of value where it meant a thing’s worth (e.g., Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s “labor theory of value”). Subsequently the use of the term was extended to a wide variety of areas—aesthetics, logic, law, morals, etc.—so that its meaning was broadened to include beauty, truth, rightness, and goodness. This shift was influenced primarily by German philosophers like Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Albrecht Ritschl, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave value a broad, new significance and importance in their theories. The assumption that a variety of questions may be dealt with under the single heading of “value” is anticipated in Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas (Idea of the Good), in Aristotle’s notion of an ultimate final cause or end, and in the Stoic and Epicurean investigation of the “greatest good” (summum bonum). The Christian philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas built on this legacy by identifying the final end and summum bonum with God. Questions about the relative worth of such ends as pleasure, wealth, power, health, honor, virtue, beauty, and truth were thus subsumed (and sometimes ranked) under a single allembracing category. In modern times this idea was revived with the assumption that all such questions belong to a single family, since they are all concerned with what ought to be (value), as opposed to what is (fact). Kant examined the relations of knowledge to moral, aesthetic, and religious values. Hegel made morality, art, religion, and philosophy the pinnacle of his dialectic. Nineteenth century evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics examined values from an empirical perspective. The concept of a general theory of value embracing economics, ethics, aesthetics, jurisprudence, education, logic, and epistemology matured in the work of Alexisus Meinong and Christian von Ehrenfels, two Austrian disciples of Franz Brentano. Through them and through phenomenologists like Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann—both twentieth-century followers of Edmund Husserl (himself influenced by Brentano)—the idea of a general theory of value was popularized in Europe and Latin America. First introduced in the United States just before the First World War by W.M. Urban’s Valuation (1909) and Hugo Münsterberg’s The Eternal Values (1909)—the first systematic treatments in English—it subsequently received wide interest through the works of R.B. Perry, John Dewey, D.W. Prall, Paul W. Taylor, and others. It had less influence in Great Britain, where philosophers held to more traditional terms like “good” and “right,” but it received some exposure through the works of Bernard Bosanquet, W.R. Sorley, John Laird, J.N. Findlay and others. By these means, discussions about “value,” “values,” and “valuation” spread through the social sciences, the humanities, and into popular discourse, whence their significations proliferated in divergent directions. Despite the various and conflicting uses of “value” and its cognates, the following distinctions emerge. “Value” is used both as a noun and as a verb. As a noun it is treated either as an abstract noun or a concrete noun. As an abstract noun, it signifies either a positive property such as “worth,” “goodness,” or “beauty” (in which case the corresponding negative properties may be called “disvalues”), or covers both positive and negative properties (with “positive values” distinguished from “negative values”). As a concrete noun, “a value” or “values” refers either to something bearing such properties, or to something valued. Intermediate between an abstract and concrete noun is the usage influenced primarily by German phenomenology (Scheler, Hartmann), which describes values (Werte) as qualities or essences (Wesen) analogous to colors. Used as a verb, “to value” means to esteem a thing’s worth, or refers to the mental act of apprehending its particular value (beauty, goodness, etc.). In phenomenology “valuation” may also refer to the mental act of apprehending a value as such (Wertnehmung), independently of any empirical bearer of the value. Value theory or axiology is concerned both with (1) the property of value and (2) the activity of valuing. Concerning the former, it examines the nature of value, asking whether it is a quality (like color) or relation (like ownership), whether it is objective (like weight) or subjective (like taste), whether it is intrinsic (like nutrients) or instrumental (like money), and whether it is a single property (like sound), or several properties (like volume, pitch, tone and timbre). Concerning the latter it asks whether it is a feeling or desire, or involves cognitive judgment; and if so, whether it involves cognition of an objective value independent of the valuing or knowing subject. John Dewey thus distinguishes “prizing” (liking, esteeming, or cherishing) from “apprizing” (appraising, estimating, or evaluating). Catholic theorists (e.g., Dietrich von Hildebrand, Karol Wojtyla, Hans Reiner, Robert Sokolowski) have traditionally insisted, against subjectivists and relativists, on the objectivity and absoluteness of certain kinds of values. They have also generally held that the apprehension of value involves some sort of cognition or rational judgment, though some have followed Scheler in suggesting that values are apprehended independently of reason. One of the chief problems faced by value theorists is the challenge of giving an adequate account of the relationship between “values” and “facts,” a legacy of the conventional distinction between “ought” and “is,” and a problem underlined by Martin Heidegger’s criticism of “values” in terms of “being.” Philip Blosser Bibliography Findlay, John N. Values and Intentions: A Study in Value Theory and Philosophy of Mind. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961. Frankena, William K. “Value and Valuation.” Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Frondizi, Risieri. What is Value? An Introduction to Axiology. 2nd ed. La Salle: Open Court, 1971. Hart, James G. and Lester Embree, eds. Phenomenology of Values and Valuing, Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 28. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997. Rescher, Nicholas. Introduction to Value Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969; rpt. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982. Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. Trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. See also ABSOLUTISM, ETHICAL; AXIOLOGY; DEWEY, JOHN; EMOTIVISM; ETHICS; INTENTIONALITY; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM, ETHICAL; PERRY, RALPH BARTON; PHENOMENOLOGY; RELATIVISM, ETHICAL; SCHELER, MAX; SUBJECTIVISM, ETHICAL; VALUES; VALUE THEORY; VIRTUE; VON HILDEBRAND, DIETRICH; WOJTYLA, KAROL [see POPE JOHN PAUL II]