What is Value?

Defining Value

Value or goodness may be defined as the quality or property that something has which means that we ought to appreciate and promote it. It may be applied both to morality (moral or ethical value) and to the appearances of things (aesthetic value). For instance, if we say that an action is morally right, we mean that it has moral value attached to it and therefore ought to be done. Equally, if we say that a painting is beautiful, we mean that it has aesthetic value and therefore ought to be appreciated. Our values are our beliefs in what has value.

Some philosophers disagree with this definition, arguing that talk about value is meaningless in that it doesn’t assert the existence of any property, whether subjectively or objectively. They believe instead what talk about values does is to either express an emotion or taste about something, or to command that something be done. So if I say that something has value, what I really mean is either that I like it, or I am commanding that the person I am talking to act to promote it. But this does not seem to fit how we actually think about values and so I think it can be ruled out.

If we ought to promote and appreciate something purely for its own sake, then it has intrinsic value. For instance, many would say that human life has intrinsic value. If it is of value only because it useful in promoting something else, then it has instrumental value. For instance, food is of instrumental value in promoting human life. It would appear that if anything has instrumental value, it must be derived from something with intrinsic value, since how can something be of value if what it promotes is worthless? Intrinsic value is therefore the main thing that we will talk about.


How values difer from other beliefs

Statements about value seem to be on a different dimension from statements about other things. This is because you cannot construct an argument about what has value purely from factual statements. The most famous example of this is the statement that ‘you should do what God wants’, which is asserting that ‘obeying God’s commands has value’. You might think that this can be derived simply from factual statements about the nature of God (e.g. all loving, creator of the world), and the statement that God exists. But some philosophers have cheekily asked ‘why should I act on what God commands?’ To this, you might reply ‘whatever is created has a moral obligation to obey it’s creator’s commands’, but this is simply another value statement to which the philosopher can again ask ‘why?’ There simply is no way to justify why we should act on God’s commands relying purely on factual statements. This law that you cannot go from a factual statement to a value statement, or from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, is called Hume’s Law after the philosopher who came up with it. And to try to derive a value statement from a factual statement is called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. This means that it is wrong to say that theism provides a basis for values whereas atheism doesn't, since at the end of the day even the value of God must be founded on an assumption (albeit one that many can intuitively accept).


Where Value exists

If statements about value are on a different dimension from statements about other things, this raises the question of where this quality of value exists. There are three possibilities:

a) Outside human minds (objective)
Value exists independently of humans. It is therefore out there to be discovered by us. If I say that something has value, I am asserting that it would still have value even if I didn’t exist.

b) Inside human minds (subjective)
Value only exists inside our minds. When we say that something is valuable, we ourselves are investing it with the property of value. It is therefore created by us – we can decide what things are valuable or important to us. When we say that something has value, there are two possibilities here. On one view, I am really asserting that it just has value to me. On another view, I am asserting that it objectively has value.

c) Beyond the objective-subjective distinction
There are two possibilities here. Value can be an emergent property that arises from the interaction between human minds and an external reality. Or it can be seen as something that belongs to a mystical reality in which the distinction between human minds and an external reality is not valid.

So how can we choose between these different accounts? It seems to me that each account depends upon a wider belief system for its justification, and so we cannot judge between them without first assessing these wider belief systems. For instance, an argument used by some philosophers against the first view that values objectively exist, is that if you cannot go from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’, then it is impossible to ever discover what has value in the world through our physical senses. They argue that values must therefore be within our own minds where we can easily access them. But to this the advocate of values being objective can reply that in addition to our physical senses we have a ‘moral sense’ that connects us to what has value. A secular philosopher may dismiss this, but a theist may have a coherent belief system that justifies the existence of this moral sense e.g. that it was created by God. The only way to resolve this issue is therefore to assess the truth of the different belief systems, which may done using the Belief System Debate method.

To see how to find Value, go to Value - how to find it?.