Value theory
Value theory, also called axiology, studies the nature, sources, and types of values. It is a branch of philosophy and an interdisciplinary field closely associated with social sciences such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.
Value is the worth of something, usually understood as covering both positive and negative degrees corresponding to the terms good and bad. Values influence many human endeavors related to emotion, decision-making, and action. Value theorists distinguish various types of values, like the contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value. An entity has intrinsic value if it is good in itself, independent of external factors. An entity has instrumental value if it is useful as a means leading to other good things. Other classifications focus on the type of benefit, including economic, moral, political, aesthetic, and religious values. Further categorizations distinguish absolute values from values that are relative to something else.
Diverse schools of thought debate the nature and origins of values. Value realists state that values exist as objective features of reality. Anti-realists reject this, with some seeing values as subjective human creations and others viewing value statements as meaningless. Regarding the sources of value, hedonists argue that only pleasure has intrinsic value, whereas desire theorists discuss desires as the ultimate source of value. Perfectionism, another approach, emphasizes the cultivation of characteristic human abilities. Value pluralism identifies diverse sources of intrinsic value, raising the issue of whether values belonging to different types are comparable. Value theorists employ various methods of inquiry, ranging from reliance on intuitions and thought experiments to the analysis of language, description of first-person experience, observation of behavior, and surveys.
Value theory is related to various fields. Ethics focuses primarily on normative concepts of right behavior, whereas value theory explores evaluative concepts about what is good. In economics, theories of value are frameworks to assess and explain the economic value of commodities. Sociology and anthropology examine values as aspects of societies and cultures, reflecting dominant preferences and beliefs. In psychology, values are typically understood as abstract motivational goals that shape an individual's personality. The roots of value theory lie in antiquity as reflections on the highest good that humans should pursue. Diverse traditions contributed to this area of thought during the medieval and early modern periods, but it was only established as a distinct discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Definition
Value theory, also known as axiology and theory of values, is the systematic study of values. As a branch of philosophy, it examines which things are good and what it means for something to be good. It distinguishes different types of values and explores how they can be measured and compared. This field also studies whether values are a fundamental aspect of reality and how they influence phenomena such as emotion, desire, decision, and action. Value theory is relevant to many human endeavors because values are guiding principles that underlie the political, economic, scientific, and personal spheres. It analyzes and evaluates phenomena such as well-being, utility, beauty, human life, knowledge, wisdom, freedom, love, and justice.The precise definition of value theory is debated and some theorists rely on alternative characterizations. In a broad sense, value theory is a catch-all label that encompasses all philosophical disciplines studying evaluative and normative topics. According to this view, value theory is one of the main branches of philosophy and includes ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. A similar broad characterization sees value theory as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry that integrates research from fields like sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics alongside philosophy. In a narrow sense, value theory is a subdiscipline of ethics that is particularly relevant to the school of consequentialism since it determines how to assess the value of consequences.
The word axiology has its origin in the ancient Greek terms ἄξιος and λόγος. Even though the roots of value theory reach back to the ancient period, this area of thought was only conceived as a distinct discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the term axiology was coined. The terms value theory and axiology are usually used as synonyms, but some philosophers distinguish between them. According to one characterization, axiology is a subfield of value theory that limits itself to theories about which things are valuable and how valuable they are. The term timology is an older and less common synonym.
Value
Value is the worth, usefulness, or merit of something. Value theorists examine the expressions used to describe and compare values, called evaluative terms. They are further interested in the types or categories of values. The proposed classifications overlap and are based on factors like the source, beneficiary, and function of the value.Evaluative terms
Values are expressed through evaluative terms. For example, the words good, best, great, and excellent convey positive values, whereas words like bad and terrible indicate negative values. Value theorists distinguish between thin and thick evaluative terms. Thin evaluative terms, like good and bad, express pure evaluations without any additional descriptive content. They contrast with thick evaluative terms, like courageous and cruel, which provide more information by expressing other qualities, such as character traits, in addition to the evaluation. Values are often understood as degrees that cover positive and negative magnitudes corresponding to good and bad. The term value is sometimes restricted to positive degrees to contrast with the term disvalue for negative degrees. The words better and worse are used to compare degrees, but it is controversial whether a quantitative comparison is always possible. Evaluation is the assessment or measurement of value, often employed to compare the benefits of different options to find the most advantageous choice.Evaluative terms are sometimes distinguished from normative or deontic terms. Normative or deontic terms, like right, wrong, and obligation, prescribe actions or other states by expressing what ought to be done or what is required. Evaluative terms have a wider scope because they are not limited to what people can control or are responsible for. For instance, involuntary events like digestion and earthquakes can have a positive or negative value even if they are not right or wrong in a strict sense. Despite the distinction, evaluative and normative concepts are closely related. For example, the value of the consequences of an action may influence its normative statuswhether the action is right or wrong.
Types
Intrinsic and instrumental
A thing has intrinsic or final value if it is good in itself or good for its own sake, independent of external factors or outcomes. A thing has extrinsic or instrumental value if it is useful or leads to other good things, serving as a means to bring about a desirable end. For example, tools like microwaves or money have instrumental value due to the useful functions they perform. In some cases, the thing produced this way has itself instrumental value, like when using money to buy a microwave. This can result in a chain of instrumentally valuable things in which each link gets its value by causing the following link. Intrinsically valuable things stand at the endpoint of these chains and ground the value of all the preceding links.One suggestion to distinguish between intrinsic and instrumental value, proposed by G. E. Moore, relies on a thought experiment that imagines the valuable thing in isolation from everything else. In such a situation, purely instrumentally valuable things lose their value since they serve no purpose while purely intrinsically valuable things remain valuable. According to a common view, pleasure is one of the sources of intrinsic value. Other suggested sources include desire satisfaction, virtue, life, health, beauty, freedom, and knowledge.
Intrinsic and instrumental value are not exclusive categories. As a result, a thing can have both intrinsic and instrumental value if it is both good in itself while also leading to other good things. In a similar sense, a thing can have different instrumental values at the same time, both positive and negative ones. This is the case if some of its consequences are good while others are bad. The total instrumental value of a thing is the value balance of all its consequences.
Because instrumental value depends on other values, it is an open question whether it should be understood as a value in a strict sense. For example, the overall value of a chain of causes leading to an intrinsically valuable thing remains the same if instrumentally valuable links are added or removed without affecting the intrinsically valuable thing. The observation that the overall value does not change is sometimes used as an argument that the things added or removed do not have value.
Traditionally, value theorists have used the terms intrinsic value and final value interchangeably, just like the terms extrinsic value and instrumental value. This practice has been questioned in the 20th century based on the idea that they are similar but not identical concepts. According to this view, a thing has intrinsic value if the source of its value is an intrinsic property, meaning that the value does not depend on how the thing is related to other objects. Extrinsic value, by contrast, depends on external relations. This view sees instrumental value as one type of extrinsic value based on external causal relations. At the same time, it allows that there are other types of non-instrumental extrinsic value that result from external non-causal relations. Final value is understood as what is valued for its own sake, independent of whether intrinsic or extrinsic properties are responsible.