Value (ethics)
In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of some thing or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live, or to describe the significance of different actions. Value systems are proscriptive and prescriptive beliefs; they affect the ethical behavior of a person or are the basis of their intentional activities. Often primary values are strong and secondary values are suitable for changes. What makes an action valuable may in turn depend on the ethical values of the objects it increases, decreases, or alters. An object with "ethic value" may be termed an "ethic or philosophic good".
Values can be defined as broad preferences concerning appropriate courses of actions or outcomes. As such, values reflect a person's sense of right and wrong or what "ought" to be. "Equal rights for all", "Excellence deserves admiration", and "People should be treated with respect and dignity" are representatives of values. Values tend to influence attitudes and behavior and these types include moral values, doctrinal or ideological values, social values, and aesthetic values. It is debated whether some values that are not clearly physiologically determined, such as altruism, are intrinsic, and whether some, such as acquisitiveness, should be classified as vices or virtues.
Fields of study
Value may be regarded as a study under ethics, which, in turn, may be grouped as philosophy. Similarly, ethical value may be regarded as a subgroup of a broader field referred to as axiology. Ethical value denotes something's degree of importance, with the aim of determining what action or life is best to do, or at least attempt to describe the value of different actions.In value theory, the study of ethical value includes the use of other disciplines, such as: anthropology, behavioral economics, business ethics, corporate governance, moral philosophy, political sciences, social psychology, sociology and theology.
Similar concepts
Ethical value is sometimes used synonymously with goodness. However, "goodness" has many other meanings and may be regarded as more ambiguous.Social value is a concept used in the public sector and in philanthropic contexts to cover the net social, environmental and economic benefits of individual and collective actions for which the concepts of economic value or profit are inadequate. For example, UK public procurement legislation refers to "social value" in its requirement that public bodies commissioning public services take account of the social, environmental and economic well-being of the area where a contract will be delivered: see Public Services Act 2012. Local authorities have adopted "social value" policies which facilitate a fair and consistent approach to implementing this duty: for example, Cornwall Council's Social Value policy notes that "bringing consistency in performance and our outcomes will mean that the process for defining social value will be standardised". In regard to central government procurement, the "Social Value Model" aims to ensure that comparable benefits are secured through procurement, and the Welsh government refers to "social value requirements" and "social value clauses" in its own public procurement guidance. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation refers to "social value creation" as a quantifiable objective in public policy and philanthropic decision-making.
Types of value
Personal versus cultural
Personal values exist in relation to cultural values, either in agreement with or divergence from prevailing norms. A culture is a social system that shares a set of common values, in which such values permit social expectations and collective understandings of the good, beautiful and constructive. Without normative personal values, there would be no cultural reference against which to measure the virtue of individual values and so cultural identity would disintegrate.Relative or absolute
values differ between people, and on a larger scale, between people of different cultures. On the other hand, there are theories of the existence of absolute values, which can also be termed noumenal values. An absolute value can be described as philosophically absolute and independent of individual and cultural views, as well as independent of whether it is known or apprehended or not. Ludwig Wittgenstein was pessimistic about the idea that an elucidation would ever happen regarding the absolute values of actions or objects; "we can speak as much as we want about "life" and "its meaning", and believe that what we say is important. But these are no more than expressions and can never be facts, resulting from a tendency of the mind and not the heart or the will".Intrinsic or extrinsic
Philosophic value may be split into instrumental value and intrinsic values. An instrumental value is worth having as a means towards getting something else that is good. An intrinsically valuable thing is worth for itself, not as a means to something else. It is giving value intrinsic and extrinsic properties.An ethic good with instrumental value may be termed an ethic mean, and an ethic good with intrinsic value may be termed an end-in-itself. An object may be both a mean and end-in-itself.
Summation
Intrinsic and instrumental goods are not mutually exclusive categories. Some objects are both good in themselves, and also good for getting other objects that are good. "Understanding science" may be such a good, being both worthwhile in and of itself, and as a means of achieving other goods. In these cases, the sum of instrumental and intrinsic value of an object may be used when putting that object in value systems, which is a set of consistent values and measures.Universal values
, along with a number of psychology colleagues, has carried out empirical research investigating whether there are universal values, and what those values are. Schwartz defined 'values' as "conceptions of the desirable that influence the way people select action and evaluate events". He hypothesised that universal values would relate to three different types of human need: biological needs, social co-ordination needs, and needs related to the welfare and survival of groupsIntensity
The intensity of philosophic value is the degree it is generated or carried out, and may be regarded as the prevalence of the good, the object having the value.It should not be confused with the amount of value per object, although the latter may vary too, e.g. because of instrumental value conditionality. For example, taking a fictional life-stance of accepting waffle-eating as being the end-in-itself, the intensity may be the speed that waffles are eaten, and is zero when no waffles are eaten, e.g. if no waffles are present. Still, each waffle that had been present would still have value, no matter if it was being eaten or not, independent on intensity.
Instrumental value conditionality in this case could be exampled by every waffle not present, making them less valued by being far away rather than easily accessible.
In many life stances it is the product of value and intensity that is ultimately desirable, i.e. not only to generate value, but to generate it in large degree. Maximizing life-stances have the highest possible intensity as an imperative.
Positive and negative value
There may be a distinction between positive and negative philosophic or ethic value. While positive ethic value generally correlates with something that is pursued or maximized, negative ethic value correlates with something that is avoided or minimized. Research has also presented social value as a set of measurable social outcomes that can be positive, neutral, or negative, rejecting the assumption that “social value” is inherently positive or negative.Protected value
A protected value is one that an individual is unwilling to trade off no matter what the benefits of doing so may be. For example, some people may be unwilling to kill another person, even if it means saving many other individuals. Protected values tend to be "intrinsically good", and most people can in fact imagine a scenario when trading off their most precious values would be necessary. If such trade-offs happen between two competing protected values such as killing a person and defending your family they are called tragic trade-offs.Protected values have been found to be play a role in protracted conflicts because they can hinder businesslike negotiations. A series of experimental studies directed by Scott Atran and Ángel Gómez among combatants on the ISIS front line in Iraq and with ordinary citizens in Western Europe suggest that commitment to sacred values motivate the most "devoted actors" to make the costliest sacrifices, including willingness to fight and die, as well as a readiness to forsake close kin and comrades for those values if necessary. From the perspective of utilitarianism, protected values are biases when they prevent utility from being maximized across individuals.
According to Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca, protected values arise from norms as described in theories of deontological ethics. The protectedness implies that people are concerned with their participation in transactions rather than just the consequences of it.
Economic versus philosophic value
Philosophical value is distinguished from economic value, since it is independent from some other desired condition or commodity. The economic value of an object may rise when the exchangeable desired condition or commodity, e.g. money, become high in supply, and vice versa when supply of money becomes low.Nevertheless, economic value may be regarded as a result of philosophical value. In the subjective theory of value, the personal philosophic value a person puts in possessing something is reflected in what economic value this person puts on it. The limit where a person considers to purchase something may be regarded as the point where the personal philosophic value of possessing something exceeds the personal philosophic value of what is given up in exchange for it, e.g. money. In this light, everything can be said to have a "personal economic value" in contrast to its "societal economic value."