Value

What it is for anything to matter - and whether mattering is discovered in the world or conferred on it.

Theme: Ethics and character
Tradition: Modern
Term fixed: 1887

In plain terms

Some things matter. That is as plain as anything gets, and saying what it consists in is not.

One answer is that mattering is a feature of the things - that cruelty really is bad in the way that ice really is cold, and that noticing it is a kind of perception. The other is that mattering is something we do: nothing has value until someone values it, and the appearance of a property is the projection of an attitude.

The test that separates them is what happens with nobody there. If every conscious being vanished, would anything still be good or bad? The first answer says yes and owes an account of what kind of fact that is. The second says no and has to explain why moral disagreement feels like disagreement about something rather than a clash of preferences.

As a philosopher would put it

Axiology divides into questions about the bearers of value, its varieties, and its status. Intrinsic value is worth in itself; instrumental value is worth as a means, and the distinction is old and contested at the edges - Korsgaard argues that the intrinsic-extrinsic and final-instrumental distinctions have been conflated.

On status, realists hold that evaluative facts obtain independently of attitudes. Expressivists hold that evaluative language expresses attitudes rather than describing anything, which explains motivation and disagreement without moral facts, and owes an account of why such language behaves logically - the Frege-Geach problem. Error theory, Mackie's position, holds that evaluative claims do describe and are all false, since the properties they would require would be metaphysically queer.

Fitting-attitude accounts define value in terms of what it is appropriate to favour, which relocates rather than removes the question. And the incommensurability debate asks whether values can always be compared, with pluralists holding that some cannot be ranked without loss.

Where you meet it

Cost-benefit analysis in public policy requires a monetary figure for a human life, and every developed government has one.

In the United States the Department of Transportation publishes a value of a statistical life used in rulemaking - around thirteen million dollars in recent guidance. It is not a price on any individual. It is derived from what populations demonstrably accept in wage premiums for risky work and in payments for safety equipment, converted into what a small reduction in risk across many people is worth.

Agencies are explicit that it is a tool for comparing regulations rather than a statement about worth, and the objections are equally explicit: the figure varies substantially between agencies and countries, it embeds existing income differences into the willingness-to-pay data, and it puts a number where many people insist a number does not belong. All of which is the philosophical argument about whether values are commensurable, conducted in the Federal Register with legal force.

What is actually disputed

Whether value is in the world.

Realism explains the phenomenology - moral judgements feel like discoveries and disagreement feels substantive - at the cost of committing to properties that do not fit comfortably into a natural picture and that no one can say how we detect. Anti-realism fits the natural picture and has to explain away the appearance of objectivity, which the Frege-Geach problem shows is harder than it looks, since evaluative sentences embed in conditionals exactly as descriptive ones do.

A second dispute concerns whether the distinctions do any work. If intrinsic value is worth independent of everything else, then very little has it - possibly only states of consciousness - and the whole apparatus becomes narrow. If it is broader, the boundary with instrumental value blurs, and the traditional division that ethics has run on since Aristotle stops being sharp.

Commonly confused with

values in the plural Talk of someone's values means their commitments. The philosophical question is about what it is for anything to have worth at all.

Defined against

Is–ought gap The gap between how things are and how they ought to be is what any account of value has to bridge or explain away

Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche The question of the value of our values
Immanuel Kant Dignity as worth beyond price
John Stuart Mill Value as welfare, with higher and lower kinds
Charles Sanders Peirce Value tied to what enquiry would settle on

Works

On the Genealogy of Morals Where valuing itself becomes the subject
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Dignity against price
Principia Ethica The open question and the indefinability of good
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation Value made calculable
Language, Truth and Logic Evaluative claims as expressions rather than descriptions

Schools

Nietzscheanism Where valuing is examined rather than assumed
Neo-Kantianism Where axiology becomes a distinct field
Classical Utilitarianism Where value is aggregable welfare
Vienna Circle Where evaluative claims are held to state nothing
Classical Pragmatism Where value is tested by consequences in enquiry

Related concepts

The good c. 380 BC · Dignity 1785 · Utility 1789 · Objectivity 1781 · Justice c. 380 BC

Value as a general philosophical category is nineteenth-century, entering from economics through Lotze and the neo-Kantians; Nietzsche's question about the value of values is what makes it a philosophical subject rather than a term of art.