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Value theory

Value theory, also termed axiology, is the philosophical discipline that examines the nature, criteria, and metaphysical status of value.^[1] It seeks to determine what constitutes value, how it is discerned or measured, and whether values align with objective realities or subjective preferences.^[1] Central to this inquiry is the distinction between intrinsic value, which holds worth independently as an end in itself, and instrumental value, which gains significance solely as a means to achieving intrinsic goods.^[2] This framework addresses core questions, such as which entities or states possess value—ranging from human flourishing and pleasure to knowledge and beauty—and the conditions under which values may conflict or be ranked hierarchically.^[1] Value theory informs subfields like ethics, where it probes moral goods and obligations, and aesthetics, evaluating beauty and artistic merit, while also extending to political and social philosophy in assessing justice and communal welfare.^[1] Notable debates include value monism, positing a singular ultimate good, versus pluralism, which contends with irreducible multiplicities of values that resist total unification.^[3] Historically rooted in ancient inquiries into the good life, value theory has evolved through analytic scrutiny of value realism—affirming objective bearers of value—against subjectivist or relativist alternatives, emphasizing causal relations between valued states and human action rather than mere sentiment.^[1] Its implications extend beyond abstract speculation, grounding practical deliberations on policy, personal conduct, and societal priorities by clarifying what truly merits pursuit amid empirical constraints.^[3]

Definition and Fundamentals

Core Definition

Value theory, synonymous with axiology, constitutes the philosophical discipline dedicated to the systematic examination of value, encompassing its ontology, classification, and criteria for appraisal. It probes inquiries such as the essence of goodness, the bearers of value (e.g., states of affairs, objects, or experiences), and the logical structure governing value relations, including comparability and incommensurability. This field predicates that values are not merely descriptive predicates but normative properties that guide rational deliberation and action, distinguishing it from purely empirical sciences.^[4] Central to value theory is the dichotomy between intrinsic value, which accrues to an entity independently of its consequences or relations to other things—such as pleasure or knowledge for their own sake—and instrumental value, which obtains derivatively through promotion of intrinsically valuable ends. G. E. Moore, in his 1903 Principia Ethica, formalized this framework by contending that "good" denotes a simple, non-natural, indefinable quality inherent in certain organic unities, rejecting reductionist attempts to equate it with natural properties like pleasure alone. Moore's analysis underscores that ethical propositions fundamentally concern intrinsic goods, with right actions defined as those maximizing such goods in aggregate.^[5] Value theory extends beyond moral value to include aesthetic, epistemic, and prudential dimensions, inquiring whether these domains harbor unified principles or irreducible pluralities. For instance, it evaluates whether beauty possesses intrinsic worth akin to moral goodness or serves instrumentally in human flourishing. Empirical integrations, such as psychological studies on valuation processes, inform but do not supplant philosophical analysis, as value judgments resist full causal reduction to neural mechanisms. This breadth positions value theory as foundational to normative disciplines, influencing debates on rationality and well-being.^[6]^[7]

Distinction from Ethics, Aesthetics, and Economics

Value theory, or axiology, investigates the nature, sources, and criteria of value in its broadest philosophical sense, encompassing what renders entities good, worthwhile, or desirable independent of specific domains.^[8] In contrast, ethics—particularly normative ethics—primarily concerns moral value, focusing on concepts of rightness, wrongness, and obligation in human conduct, often through deontic modalities such as "ought" rather than purely evaluative ones like "good."^[8] While axiological considerations underpin ethical theories (e.g., consequentialism derives moral rightness from the maximization of value), ethics delimits its inquiry to interpersonal moral norms, excluding non-moral values such as epistemic or prudential goods that value theory addresses comprehensively.^[8] Aesthetics, as a subdomain of value theory, specializes in evaluative judgments pertaining to beauty, sublimity, and artistic merit, typically grounded in sensory or contemplative experiences rather than the general ontology of value.^[8] Value theory thus subsumes aesthetic value as one category among others—such as moral, instrumental, or intrinsic—but extends beyond it to interrogate foundational questions like value realism or comparativity, which aesthetics presupposes without fully theorizing.^[8] For instance, while aesthetics might assess the value of a symphony's harmony, value theory probes whether such aesthetic goods are objective properties or subjective projections, a meta-level analysis absent from aesthetic theory proper. Economics, by contrast, operationalizes value through empirical models of human choice under scarcity, emphasizing exchange value, marginal utility, and revealed preferences derived from observable behavior rather than philosophical essences of goodness.^[8] Philosophical value theory critiques or contextualizes economic valuations—e.g., questioning whether market prices reflect intrinsic worth or merely instrumental trade-offs—but diverges in its normative, non-empirical orientation, avoiding economics' reliance on predictive utility functions or Pareto efficiency.^[8] Economic theory thus applies instrumental value concepts in practical decision-making, whereas value theory seeks universal principles applicable across domains, unbound by resource constraints or behavioral data.^[8]

Ontological Foundations

Value Realism and Objectivity

Value realism posits that evaluative properties, such as goodness or worth, exist as objective features of reality, independent of human beliefs, desires, or perceptions.^[9] This view contrasts with subjectivist accounts by treating values as mind-independent facts capable of being true or false, akin to scientific truths about the physical world. Proponents argue that values supervene on non-evaluative properties without being reducible to them, preserving their normative force. G.E. Moore advanced a foundational defense of value objectivity in Principia Ethica (1903), contending that "good" denotes a simple, non-natural property indefinable in naturalistic terms like pleasure or utility.^[5] Moore's open-question argument illustrates this: even if something is proven identical to good (e.g., "pleasure is good"), the query "Is it good?" remains meaningful and unresolved, indicating that evaluative properties transcend descriptive ones and exist objectively, discerned through intuition.^[5] This non-naturalism avoids the naturalistic fallacy, where ethical terms are erroneously equated with empirical concepts, thereby upholding values as sui generis realities.^[5] Nicolai Hartmann developed a stratified ontology of values in works like Ethics (1926), positing values as ideal, atemporal entities forming a hierarchical realm distinct from but objective to the real world.^[10] For Hartmann, values possess intrinsic being, stratified from vital (e.g., health) to spiritual (e.g., justice) and holy (e.g., purity), with higher values objectively overriding lower ones in conflicts, independent of realization in concrete acts.^[10] This axiological realism grounds objectivity in the values' self-evident stratification and motivational efficacy, where emotional responses merely apprehend pre-existing orders rather than constituting them.^[10] Contemporary defenses, such as Russ Shafer-Landau's in Moral Realism: A Defence (2003), extend objectivity to evaluative domains by rejecting epistemic and ontological challenges to non-natural facts. Shafer-Landau argues that moral and value propositions (e.g., "torture is wrong") express genuine truths, robustly stance-independent, supported by intuitive convergence across cultures on core wrongs like gratuitous harm. He counters queerness objections—positing values as oddly prescriptive—by analogizing to other irreducible properties like color or consciousness, maintaining that their causal inertness does not preclude existence if known non-inferentially. Empirical persistence of value judgments amid disagreement further bolsters realism, as subjectivism fails to explain cross-perspectival criticism or progress in evaluative discourse.^[9]

Anti-Realism, Subjectivism, and Relativism

Anti-realism in value theory denies the existence of objective, mind-independent values, asserting instead that evaluative properties either do not exist or depend on human perspectives, attitudes, or constructs.^[11] This position contrasts with realism by rejecting the idea that values possess intrinsic features discoverable through reason or observation akin to natural facts. J.L. Mackie, in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), advanced an error-theoretic variant, claiming that ordinary value judgments commit speakers to objective, intrinsically prescriptive properties—such as "queer" entities that motivate action independently—which fail to exist in the natural world, rendering such judgments false.^[11] Mackie's argument relies on the causal inefficacy of non-natural properties and the evolutionary implausibility of universal moral motivations, though he notes alternatives like subjectivism avoid error by reinterpreting values as projections of sentiment.^[11] Subjectivism, a prominent anti-realist approach, grounds value in the psychological states of valuers, such that an object's worth arises from its relation to desires, preferences, or pro-attitudes rather than inherent qualities.^[12] David Sobel, in From Valuing to Value: A Defense of Subjectivism (2016), elaborates this by arguing that value is not a feature items possess prior to valuation but emerges because agents value them, aligning with prudential reasons tied to subjective well-being.^[12] This view traces to David Hume's emphasis on moral sentiments as the basis of approbation, extended in axiology to non-moral values like aesthetic or instrumental goods, where pleasure or fulfillment determines positivity.^[11] Subjectivists counter realist demands for objective grounding by noting that interpersonal value disagreements reflect divergent attitudes, not failures to detect mind-independent truths, though this risks reducing all value to idiosyncratic whim without shared constraints.^[13] Relativism extends anti-realism by positing that value judgments hold true only relative to specific frameworks, such as individuals, cultures, or contexts, lacking universal applicability.^[6] Individual relativism overlaps with subjectivism, treating values as valid within a person's belief system, while cultural relativism deems them binding within societal norms, as defended in Gilbert Harman's 1975 paper "Moral Relativism Defended," which applies inner-sense theories to explain why moral terms refer relative to group agreements rather than objective facts. In axiology, this implies aesthetic or epistemic values vary by tradition—e.g., beauty standards differing across societies—without one being superior absent a neutral arbiter. Relativists argue from observed diversity in valuations, such as varying priorities in economic goods across eras (e.g., pre-19th-century labor theories yielding to marginalist subjectivism post-1870s), to infer no absolute hierarchy.^[6] Critics within philosophy note relativism's potential self-undermining, as claiming "all values are relative" asserts an objective meta-claim, but proponents maintain it descriptively captures causal influences on valuation without prescriptive force.^[14] Academic prevalence of these views, per surveys like the 2020 PhilPapers poll showing anti-realism at around 25-30% among ethicists, may reflect institutional preferences for non-theistic explanations over realist commitments requiring unexplained normative authority.

Empirical Challenges to Subjectivist Views

Cross-cultural psychological research reveals consistent structures in human values that resist reduction to individual subjectivity. Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, empirically validated through surveys of over 25,000 individuals across more than 80 countries from the 1980s to the 2010s, identifies ten motivationally distinct value types—power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security—organized in a universal circular model.^[15] This configuration reflects invariant compatibilities (e.g., benevolence adjacent to universalism) and conflicts (e.g., power opposite benevolence), observed regardless of cultural context, indicating that values derive from shared adaptive human goals rather than arbitrary personal preferences.^[16] Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, grounded in empirical data from diverse populations including Western, Eastern, and indigenous groups, posits six innate psychological systems—care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression—that form the basis of moral intuitions.^[17] Studies, such as those analyzing moral language in texts from 10,000 participants across cultures, demonstrate these foundations' presence universally, though liberals emphasize care and fairness while conservatives balance all six more evenly, suggesting evolved, non-subjective substrates constraining valuation rather than pure relativism.^[18] Anthropological compilations further substantiate these patterns; Donald Brown's 1991 catalog of over 300 human universals, drawn from ethnographic records of hundreds of societies, includes moral elements like distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, justice, reciprocity, and guilt/shame mechanisms, with no known exceptions across human groups.^[19] These universals imply causal roots in common biological and social exigencies, challenging subjectivist claims by evidencing empirically stable value orientations transcending individual or cultural idiosyncrasy. Developmental psychology adds support through findings of early-emerging value preferences; experiments with infants aged 3 to 10 months show preferences for prosocial over antisocial puppet behaviors in resource allocation tasks, as reported in studies from 2007 to 2011, hinting at pre-cultural value dispositions.^[20] While recent replications question consistency in younger infants, the persistence of such biases into toddlerhood underscores non-arbitrary value formation.^[21] Collectively, these empirical domains—cross-cultural, moral-psychological, anthropological, and developmental—demonstrate that human valuation exhibits robust regularities incompatible with unbridled subjectivism, pointing instead to objective constraints from evolutionary and cognitive architecture.

Classifications of Value

Intrinsic versus Instrumental Value

Intrinsic value denotes the worth something holds in and of itself, independent of its capacity to produce further effects or serve external purposes.^[22] This contrasts with instrumental value, which arises solely from an entity's role as a means to achieving ends that possess intrinsic value.^[2] In axiology, the foundational discipline of value theory, this distinction underpins analyses of what ultimately matters, positing that chains of instrumental values must terminate in intrinsic ones to avoid an infinite regress in valuation.^[23] Philosopher G.E. Moore advanced this framework in his 1903 work Principia Ethica, contending that "good" names a simple, non-natural property attributable only to intrinsic values, such as the contemplation of beauty or personal affections between humans.^[24] Moore rejected reductionist definitions of good to natural properties like pleasure, insisting instead on its indefinability and direct intuitability, thereby elevating intrinsic value as the core of ethical inquiry.^[25] For Moore, states of affairs like the existence of false beliefs lack intrinsic value, while certain organic unities—combinations of parts where the whole exceeds the sum—can amplify it.^[26] Examples of purported intrinsic goods include knowledge, as its possession is enriching irrespective of practical application, and virtuous character traits, valued for their inherent excellence rather than outcomes.^[2] Instrumental goods, conversely, encompass tools, currency, or skills like engineering, prized for their efficacy in pursuing intrinsic ends such as human flourishing or aesthetic appreciation.^[22] An entity may possess both types of value simultaneously; for instance, a scientific discovery holds intrinsic merit in advancing truth while instrumentally enabling technological progress.^[2] This dichotomy informs broader value classifications, revealing how instrumental pursuits can form extended causal chains culminating in intrinsic realizations, as depicted in conceptual diagrams of value hierarchies.^[23] Debates persist over identifying unambiguous intrinsic values, with empiricists urging scrutiny via observable consequences rather than intuition alone, though causal realism underscores that instrumental efficacy depends on reliable links to intrinsic bases.^[22]

Absolute versus Relative Value

In value theory, or axiology, absolute value denotes unconditional goodness, independent of relations to agents, contexts, or specific ends—often termed "good simpliciter" or non-relational value. This stands in opposition to relative value, which is conditional upon particular perspectives, such as "good for" an individual or instrumental to achieving a goal. The distinction underscores debates over value objectivity, with absolute value implying universal applicability transcending subjective variability.^[8] G.E. Moore, in Principia Ethica (1903), championed absolute intrinsic value, asserting that states like personal affections and aesthetic contemplation possess goodness "in itself," undefinable and non-natural, irreducible to relational properties. Moore warned that conflating absolute good with relative descriptors, such as pleasure or evolutionary utility, constitutes the naturalistic fallacy, undermining ethical reasoning. Similarly, Max Scheler outlined a hierarchy of absolute values in Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913–1916), ranked objectively from sensory pleasures to spiritual and holy values, grasped via phenomenological intuition rather than empirical measurement.^[24]^[25]^[27] Immanuel Kant differentiated absolute value, inherent to rational beings as ends-in-themselves with unconditional dignity, from relative value tied to hypothetical imperatives serving contingent desires. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant held that only a good will exhibits genuine moral worth absolutely, irrespective of outcomes, contrasting with relative worth derived from utility. This framework posits absolute value as foundational for moral imperatives, demanding respect beyond instrumental considerations.^[28] Proponents of absolute value argue it enables principled critique across cultures and avoids the incoherence of pure relativism, where no standard exists to adjudicate conflicts—evident in Moore's rejection of hedonism's reductionism. Relativists counter that absolute claims ignore empirical diversity in valuations, yet absolutists maintain such diversity reflects incomplete apprehension of objective hierarchies rather than ontological relativity. Empirical studies, such as those on cross-cultural universals in harm avoidance, lend tentative support to absolute cores amid surface variations.^[25]^[29]

Positive, Negative, and Comparative Dimensions

In value theory, the positive dimension refers to properties or states that bear goodness, either as ends in themselves or as means to further goods, motivating pursuit or maximization. G.E. Moore, in Principia Ethica (1903), identifies intrinsic positive value in the contemplation of beauty and personal affections, emphasizing that their organic unity produces a greater good than the mere aggregation of individual components.^[30] This positive valence contrasts with mere neutral states, which lack evaluative import.^[24] Negative value attaches to disvalues or evils, such as suffering or moral vice, which rational agents seek to avoid or eliminate. Moore illustrates negative intrinsic value through examples like pleasure derived from malice, where the whole possesses badness exceeding any positive elements within it, due to organic interactions among parts.^[30] In formal terms, a bearer of value v is negative if v falls below a neutral baseline n, implying a reason to diminish its extent or occurrence.^[31] Comparative dimensions enable ordinal rankings, determining when one state surpasses another in overall worth by aggregating positive contributions and subtracting negatives. Such judgments underpin decision-making, as in population axiology, where theorists evaluate total outcomes by comparing welfare levels across differing group sizes and compositions.^[32] For instance, Georg Henrik von Wright's logical framework distinguishes strict betterness (A preferred to B) from indifference, providing tools to model intransitivities or cycles in value comparisons that challenge simplistic additive models.^[33] These dimensions collectively structure axiological analysis, revealing how values guide action amid trade-offs between goods and ills.^[34]

Sources of Value

Naturalistic and Evolutionary Origins

Naturalistic approaches to value theory ground evaluative properties in the natural world, positing that what is valuable can be understood through empirical investigation of biological, psychological, and physical processes without invoking supernatural or non-natural entities.^[35] In this view, values emerge from causal mechanisms observable in nature, such as adaptive responses to environmental pressures that enhance organismal fitness. Evolutionary biology provides a primary framework, explaining values as heritable traits shaped by natural selection to promote survival and reproduction in social species.^[36] Charles Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871) that the human moral sense, including proto-values like sympathy and approbation, evolved from social instincts common to gregarious animals, refined through natural selection for group cohesion and individual advantage.^[37] Subsequent theoretical developments, such as W.D. Hamilton's kin selection theory (1964), demonstrate how altruistic behaviors—valuing kin welfare over self-interest—arise because they propagate shared genes, with inclusive fitness modeled as rB > C, where r is genetic relatedness, B the benefit to the recipient, and C the cost to the actor. Robert Trivers extended this to reciprocal altruism (1971), where values favoring cooperation with non-kin evolve via iterated interactions, stabilized by mechanisms like reputation tracking and punishment to deter cheaters, as quantified in game-theoretic models like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Empirical evidence from comparative primatology supports these origins: chimpanzees exhibit calculated reciprocity in grooming and food-sharing, correlating with future aid, while capuchin monkeys reject unequal rewards, indicating evolved aversion to inequity that parallels human fairness values.^[38] In humans, neuroimaging studies reveal that value judgments activate ancient brain regions like the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum, linked to reward processing shaped by Paleolithic foraging demands, with heritability estimates for traits like benevolence (around 40-50%) from twin studies underscoring genetic underpinnings.^[39] Basic human values, as mapped in Shalom Schwartz's circumplex model (1992)—including power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security—show temporal stability yet adaptive shifts, with longitudinal data from over 75,000 participants across cultures indicating evolutionary prioritization of self-enhancement versus self-transcendence dimensions tied to survival trade-offs in resource-scarce environments.^[40] Critics, including Michael Ruse, acknowledge that while evolution accounts for the existence of value dispositions as adaptive illusions fostering cooperation, it struggles with their normative force, as fitness-maximizing behaviors (e.g., infanticide in certain mammals) may conflict with intuited intrinsic goods like unconditional benevolence.^[41] Nonetheless, naturalistic evolutionary accounts maintain that values' objectivity derives from their causal efficacy in natural selection, not subjective whim, bridging descriptive "is" with prescriptive "ought" via function: behaviors valued because they reliably produced descendants in ancestral conditions.^[36]

Theological and Metaphysical Foundations

In theological frameworks, particularly within Abrahamic traditions, the foundations of value are often traced to divine nature or will, positing that moral goods derive from God's eternal attributes rather than human convention or natural processes. Divine command theory, a prominent metaethical position, holds that an action's moral status as obligatory or valuable stems directly from God's commands, as articulated in scriptural mandates and theological exegesis.^[42] This view maintains that values like justice and benevolence are not arbitrary but reflect God's unchanging character, avoiding pure voluntarism by grounding obligations in divine essence while distinguishing moral values (inherent goods such as life and knowledge) from imperatives.^[43] Critics, drawing from Plato's Euthyphro dialogue, challenge this through the dilemma: whether something is good because God commands it (implying potential arbitrariness, as divine fiat could theoretically endorse contradictions like cruelty) or God commands it because it is good (suggesting an independent standard transcending divinity).^[44] Responses from theologians like Thomas Aquinas resolve this by affirming that God's will aligns necessarily with His intellect and goodness, such that commands express rather than constitute value, rooted in the metaphysical participation of creation in divine being.^[45] Metaphysically, value realism posits objective goods as grounded in transcendent structures or necessary realities, exemplified in Plato's theory of Forms where the Form of the Good serves as the ultimate principle illuminating all other ideals, akin to the sun enabling visibility and growth in the sensible world.^[46] This Form is not merely evaluative but ontologically primary, providing the stable essence that particular goods imperfectly instantiate, ensuring values' independence from subjective perception or empirical flux.^[47] Aquinas synthesizes this with Christian metaphysics, deriving natural law from rational creatures' teleological orientation toward divine perfection, where human flourishing and moral value consist in actualizing potentials ordered to the ultimate Good, verifiable through reason's grasp of self-evident principles like self-preservation and knowledge-seeking.^[48] Such foundations contrast empirical relativism by emphasizing causal hierarchies where contingent values depend on immutable metaphysical realities for their objectivity.^[49]

Constructivist and Socially Derived Sources

Constructivist approaches to the sources of value maintain that normative truths, including moral and evaluative claims, emerge from rational procedures rather than independent, mind-independent facts. In this framework, values are generated through the constitutive features of agency or deliberative processes, as defended by philosophers like Christine Korsgaard. Korsgaard's constitutivism holds that the authority of practical reasons derives from the necessary conditions for self-conscious human action; specifically, rational agents must endorse principles that enable valuing itself, thereby constructing the value of humanity and other ends as products of autonomous reflection rather than substantive realism.^[50] This procedural generation of value avoids reliance on external metaphysical foundations, positing instead that normativity is "made true" by the endorsement inherent to rational deliberation.^[51] Kantian constructivists extend this to broader ethical domains, arguing that moral obligations arise from the universalizability of maxims in hypothetical reasoning, akin to Kant's categorical imperative but reconstructed as a output of practical reason's structure. John Rawls applied a variant in political philosophy, where principles of justice are constructed via the original position—a thought experiment ensuring fairness through a veil of ignorance—yielding values like equal liberty as rationally agreed-upon outcomes rather than discovered truths.^[52] Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics complements this by deriving moral norms from the presuppositions of rational argumentation: validity claims in communicative discourse imply principles of universalizability and impartiality, constructing values through intersubjective consensus among free participants.^[53] These theories emphasize procedural rationality as the causal mechanism for value, with empirical support drawn from decision-making experiments showing consistency in impartial judgments under controlled conditions, though critics note potential circularity in assuming rationality's normativity.^[54] Socially derived sources of value, by contrast, locate the origin of valuations in collective practices, conventions, and institutional structures rather than individual reason alone. Drawing from social ontology, thinkers like Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann argue in their 1966 work that reality, including evaluative frameworks, is constructed through habitualized social interactions that objectivate into shared norms, rendering values "real" via habitual typifications and legitimation processes.^[55] This view posits causality in reciprocal socialization: individuals internalize group-specific values, which in turn reinforce social order, as evidenced by anthropological data on varying moral codes across societies, such as differing honor norms in Mediterranean versus Northern European cultures documented in comparative studies from the mid-20th century onward. Economic theories, like those in subjective value paradigms, further illustrate social derivation, where exchange values emerge from aggregated preferences and market conventions rather than inherent properties, as formalized in Carl Menger's 1871 foundations of Austrian economics.^[56] Hybrid constructivist-social models integrate both, suggesting values stabilize through rational discourse embedded in social contexts; for instance, Habermas links discursive procedures to lifeworld practices, where communicative action generates consensus-bound norms amid systemic influences like markets. Empirical challenges arise from cross-cultural variability—e.g., World Values Survey data from 1981–2022 showing persistent divergences in priorities like individualism versus collectivism—indicating social derivation's role in shaping, though not fully determining, constructed values, potentially undermining universalist claims without invoking realist anchors.^[57] Proponents counter that such procedures yield stability superior to arbitrary impositions, supported by game-theoretic models of bargaining where fair divisions emerge from iterated rational play.^[58]

Major Theories and Schools

Monistic Approaches (e.g., Hedonism, Perfectionism)

Monistic approaches in value theory maintain that exactly one fundamental property grounds all intrinsic value, with other purported goods deriving their worth instrumentally from it.^[59] This contrasts with pluralistic views by rejecting multiple independent sources of value, aiming instead for theoretical simplicity and explanatory unity. Proponents argue that monism avoids arbitrary weighting of competing values and aligns with parsimonious explanations of human motivation and well-being, though critics contend it oversimplifies the diversity of goods evident in empirical observation and reflective judgment..pdf) Hedonism exemplifies monism by asserting pleasure as the sole intrinsic good and pain as the sole intrinsic evil, such that all actions and states are valuable insofar as they promote net pleasure.^[60] Ancient variants include the Cyrenaics, founded by Aristippus of Cyrene around 400 BCE, who emphasized immediate sensory pleasures as the highest attainable good, and Epicurus (341–270 BCE), who advocated a moderated form prioritizing tranquil, long-term pleasures like ataraxia over fleeting indulgences. In the modern era, Jeremy Bentham's 1789 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation formalized quantitative hedonism, proposing a hedonic calculus to measure pleasure's intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent across affected parties.^[61] John Stuart Mill refined this in 1861's Utilitarianism, introducing qualitative distinctions where intellectual pleasures outweigh mere bodily ones, arguing that competent judges prefer higher faculties' satisfactions.^[60] Arguments for hedonism draw from introspective evidence that pleasure constitutes the common quality of all desired experiences and from evolutionary accounts positing pleasure as an adaptive signal for survival-enhancing behaviors.^[60] However, it faces empirical challenges: experiments like those in positive psychology since the 2000s show that hedonic adaptation diminishes pleasure's long-term impact, while pursuits like knowledge acquisition often motivate independently of pleasure yield.^[62] Critics, including G.E. Moore in 1903's Principia Ethica, argue hedonism commits the naturalistic fallacy by equating "good" with "pleasant" without justifying why pleasure deserves intrinsic status over alternatives.^[60] The paradox of hedonism further undermines it practically, as direct pursuit of pleasure tends to frustrate attainment, whereas indirect means like virtuous activity yield greater net pleasure.^[60] Perfectionism offers an objective monistic alternative, positing the realization or perfection of human capacities—such as rationality, autonomy, and creativity—as the singular intrinsic good, independent of subjective attitudes.^[63] Historical roots trace to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (circa 350 BCE), where eudaimonia emerges from exercising virtues in accordance with one's telos, though modern perfectionists like Thomas Hurka in 1993's Perfectionism emphasize developing species-typical excellences across bodily, intellectual, and moral domains.^[63] Nietzsche's 1886 Beyond Good and Evil anticipates this by valuing self-overcoming and higher types' flourishing over egalitarian concerns, viewing perfection as hierarchical enhancement of human potential.^[64] Key arguments include the essence argument, which infers value from human nature's constitutive aims, as capacities like reason are valuable precisely because fulfilling them constitutes a complete life; the dominance argument, claiming perfectionist goods outweigh others due to their comprehensive inclusion of subordinate values; and the organic unity argument, where perfection's value arises from harmonious integration rather than summation.^[63] Empirical support draws from developmental psychology, where mastery of skills correlates with sustained well-being beyond hedonic states, as in longitudinal studies tracking life satisfaction through achievement.^[65] Criticisms highlight elitism, as perfectionist ideals may burden those with limited capacities, and paternalism, potentially justifying coercion to enforce flourishing, though moderate variants restrict state intervention to enabling conditions like education.^[63] Unlike hedonism's subjectivism, perfectionism's objectivity resists reduction to preference but invites disputes over which capacities define human essence, with cultural variations challenging universality.^[59]

Pluralistic and Hybrid Theories

Value pluralistic theories posit that there exist multiple distinct kinds of intrinsic value, irreducible to a single supreme value or common measure, in contrast to monistic approaches that seek to unify all values under one fundamental good such as pleasure or perfection.^[66] These theories emphasize that values can conflict in ways that lack a rational resolution, leading to tragic choices where pursuing one value necessitates sacrificing another without a higher-order justification.^[67] Isaiah Berlin advanced this view in his 1958 essay "Two Concepts of Liberty," arguing that objective human values like liberty, justice, equality, and happiness are plural, incommensurable, and frequently incompatible, rejecting the monistic ideal of a harmonious rational order.^[68] Berlin's pluralism, influenced by thinkers like Machiavelli and Vico, maintains that such conflicts are inherent to the human condition, supporting toleration and negative liberty as responses rather than attempts at comprehensive synthesis.^[69] Distinctions within value pluralism include substantive pluralism, which identifies irreducible bearers of value across domains, and formal pluralism, which highlights diverse value relations or metrics without necessarily positing multiple intrinsic kinds.^[66] Empirical investigations lend support to pluralistic conceptions; Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, developed through factor analysis of surveys from 1980s onward involving over 200 samples across 80 countries by 2012, delineates ten motivationally distinct values—such as power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security—arranged in a quasi-circular structure reflecting compatibilities and oppositions.^[15] This structure, validated by cross-cultural data showing consistent value priorities despite cultural variations, implies pluralism by demonstrating that no single value dominates all others universally, with trade-offs evident in individual and societal priorities.^[70] Hybrid theories in value theory blend elements from monistic, pluralistic, subjective, or objective paradigms, often applied to well-being or personal value, to address limitations of purer forms. For example, hybrid accounts of well-being combine subjective elements like desire satisfaction or hedonic experience with objective components such as knowledge, friendship, or accomplishment, positing that both contribute to prudential value without full reducibility.^[71] Christopher Woodard outlines such theories as incorporating at least one hybrid feature, where organic unities or context-sensitive goods amplify value beyond additive sums, as in G.E. Moore's earlier non-naturalist framework adapted to pluralistic ends.^[72] These approaches gain traction for accommodating empirical findings on human flourishing, such as twin studies indicating genetic influences on both subjective happiness (heritability around 0.5) and objective traits like health, while avoiding the relativism of pure subjectivism or the rigidity of strict objectivism.^[73] Critics argue hybrids risk ad hoc adjustments, yet proponents counter that they better capture causal complexities in value realization, as seen in decision-theoretic models integrating expected utility with non-hedonic goods.^[59]

Economic Theories: Subjective Value versus Labor Theory

The labor theory of value posits that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labor time embodied in its production, a concept articulated by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), where he argued that in primitive societies without property, labor alone governs value. David Ricardo refined this in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), emphasizing labor as the primary measure of value while acknowledging complications from capital and land rents. Karl Marx systematized it in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), using it to derive surplus value as the difference between labor's value creation and wages, thereby explaining capitalist exploitation under the assumption of labor as the sole source of value. In contrast, the subjective theory of value, emerging from the marginal revolution of the 1870s, asserts that value arises from individuals' subjective preferences and the marginal utility of goods, independent of production costs. Carl Menger outlined this in Principles of Economics (1871), demonstrating that value is a judgment of importance for satisfying human needs, varying by scarcity and individual circumstances rather than inherent properties. William Stanley Jevons independently developed marginal utility in The Theory of Political Economy (1871), applying calculus to show diminishing utility with additional units, while Léon Walras formalized equilibrium pricing in Elements of Pure Economics (1874), integrating subjective valuations into market clearing. This framework resolved classical puzzles by emphasizing that prices reflect ordinal rankings of wants against limited supplies, not embedded labor. A core divergence lies in their treatment of value formation: the labor theory views value as objective and cost-driven, predicting prices should align with average labor inputs across industries, whereas the subjective theory treats value as intersubjective and demand-oriented, with prices emerging from bilateral exchanges where buyers' willingness to pay meets sellers' opportunity costs.^[74] The labor theory struggles empirically with phenomena like the diamond-water paradox, where water—essential yet abundant—commands low prices despite minimal labor per unit, while diamonds fetch high prices due to rarity, a mismatch unexplained by total utility or labor but resolved by marginalism: water's marginal utility is near zero in abundance, elevating diamonds' marginal significance.^[75] Critics, including Austrian economists, argue the labor theory fails to predict actual market prices, as evidenced by divergences between labor costs and observed values in competitive industries, undermining its causal claims for phenomena like profit rates.^[76] By the late 19th century, the subjective theory supplanted the labor approach in mainstream economics, forming the basis of neoclassical price theory, which better accounts for entrepreneurial discovery, time preferences, and heterogeneous goods through supply-demand equilibria. While Marxist variants persist in analyzing abstract social averages, empirical tests—such as regressions of prices against labor shares versus utility proxies—favor subjective models for explanatory power in real-world pricing, though proponents of labor theory counter that it captures underlying production relations obscured by circulation.^[77] This debate underscores value theory's role in economics: labor-focused views prioritize class dynamics and production, while subjective ones highlight individual agency and coordination, influencing interpretations of markets from efficiency to inequality.

Methods of Inquiry

A Priori Philosophical Analysis

A priori philosophical analysis in value theory employs deductive reasoning, conceptual clarification, and rational intuition to establish foundational claims about the nature, hierarchy, and justification of values, independent of empirical evidence. This method presupposes that value propositions can exhibit necessity and universality, akin to mathematical truths, accessible through pure reason rather than sensory experience.^[78] Proponents argue that such analysis reveals objective structures, such as the irreducibility of intrinsic value to natural properties or relational facts.^[79] A primary technique is conceptual analysis, which dissects value terms to identify analytic truths or expose fallacies in reductionist accounts. G. E. Moore's open question argument, articulated in Principia Ethica (1903), exemplifies this by showing that equating "good" with any natural predicate, such as pleasure, fails to render the query "Is pleasure good?" tautological, thereby affirming "good" as a simple, non-natural quality known intuitively.^[25] This approach underpins intuitionist ethics, where self-evident axioms about what bears intrinsic value—e.g., states of consciousness or rational agency—serve as starting points for further deduction.^[80] Rational intuition further enables direct apprehension of value essences, positing that reflective subjects can grasp propositions like "knowledge is good in itself" as immediately evident, without inferential steps or experiential warrant.^[81] In Kantian frameworks, a priori analysis derives normative value from practical reason's formal structures, such as the categorical imperative, which commands actions valuable for their conformity to universal law, independent of contingent ends.^[82] Phenomenological extensions, as developed by Max Scheler, invoke a non-formal a priori wherein values present themselves in emotional intuition as objective orders, stratified from sensory pleasures to spiritual absolutes.^[27] These methods facilitate rigorous distinctions, including intrinsic value (end-valued) versus instrumental value (means-valued), often modeled deductively as chains terminating in non-derivative goods.^[79] Thought experiments and reflective equilibria refine such analyses, testing coherence among intuitive value judgments to approximate truth. While vulnerable to charges of circularity or cultural parochialism, a priori approaches persist in value theory for their capacity to yield non-contingent principles resistant to empirical revision.^[83]

Empirical and Interdisciplinary Methods

Empirical investigations into value theory utilize structured surveys and experimental designs to map human valuations descriptively, contrasting with purely normative philosophical inquiries. Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, grounded in cross-cultural data from over 200 samples spanning 80 countries, posits ten motivationally distinct values—such as power, benevolence, and universalism—arranged in a quasi-circular structure to capture compatibilities and conflicts.^[84] This framework employs the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), a validated instrument with demonstrated reliability (Cronbach's alpha typically above 0.60 for subscales) and predictive validity for behaviors like political attitudes and consumer choices.^[15] Empirical support derives from structural equation modeling confirming the theory's higher-order dimensions of openness to change versus conservation and self-enhancement versus self-transcendence.^[85] Experimental philosophy complements these by testing folk intuitions on axiological scenarios, often via online or lab-based vignettes. Studies reveal that value judgments, such as attributions of intrinsic worth to actions, vary systematically with contextual factors like order of presentation or agent intentions, challenging assumptions of stable intuitions in traditional philosophy.^[86] For instance, participants rate self-interested actions as less reflective of an agent's "true self" when they conflict with moral values, with effect sizes around d=0.5 in replicated experiments.^[86] These methods highlight descriptive divergences from normative ideals, informing interdisciplinary refinements without presuming empirical data settles metaphysical questions of value ontology. Neuroeconomics integrates neuroimaging with behavioral economics to probe valuation mechanisms causally. Functional MRI studies identify the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum as key nodes in a common currency network for comparing diverse rewards, with BOLD signal changes correlating to subjective value estimates (r>0.4 in meta-analyses).^[87] Computational models, such as prospect theory fitted to neural data, quantify loss aversion in decisions, where ventral striatum activation predicts choices under uncertainty.^[87] However, these findings describe proximate computations rather than ultimate value sources, limited by tasks' artificiality and individual variability. Interdisciplinary syntheses draw from psychology, sociology, and anthropology to trace value emergence beyond isolated cognition. Sociological analyses of the World Values Survey (1981–2022 waves, n>400,000 across 100+ countries) track shifts, such as rising self-expression values correlating with democratization (r=0.65). Anthropological fieldwork reveals cultural relativism in value hierarchies, yet convergent universals like reciprocity in exchange systems across hunter-gatherer societies.^[88] Such approaches prioritize causal inference from longitudinal and comparative data, acknowledging self-report limitations like social desirability bias (up to 20% inflation in prosocial endorsements), while privileging observable behaviors for robustness.^[88]

Formal Modeling and Decision Theory

Formal modeling in value theory employs axiomatic frameworks from decision theory to represent values as quantifiable preferences, enabling precise analysis of choice under uncertainty and trade-offs. Representation theorems demonstrate that coherent preference orderings over outcomes or lotteries imply numerical utility functions that encode degrees of value, provided axioms like completeness (every pair of options is comparable), transitivity (consistent rankings), and continuity (no jumps in preference) hold.^[89] These theorems underpin the formal identification of value structures, distinguishing them from mere behavioral descriptions by linking observable choices to underlying desirabilities.^[89] Expected utility theory (EUT), axiomatized by von Neumann and Morgenstern in their 1944 work, formalizes value maximization in probabilistic settings. The theorem proves that preferences satisfying the independence axiom (preferences over mixtures are preserved in scaling) alongside the above can be represented such that agents select options maximizing the probability-weighted sum of utilities, where utility u(x) reflects the intrinsic or overall value of outcome x. In value theory, EUT interprets utilities as capturing axiological commitments, such as prioritizing outcomes with higher hedonic or perfectionist worth, and extends to infinite horizons via discounted sums for intertemporal values. Extensions like multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) address pluralistic values by decomposing utility into weighted sums or products over attributes, assuming conditions like preferential independence (preferences over one attribute hold regardless of others). Developed by Keeney and Raiffa in 1976, MAUT quantifies trade-offs, e.g., between autonomy and welfare, through elicited weights and scaling constants, facilitating applications in ethical evaluation where single-scale EUT proves inadequate. Challenges arise with incommensurable values, where no consistent trade-off exists between dimensions like liberty and equality, violating EUT's continuity or independence. Such cases may require non-EU alternatives, like rank-dependent utility (which weights probabilities non-linearly to reflect risk attitudes toward values) or lexical models prioritizing higher-order values absolutely.^[90] Decision theorists argue that while incommensurability complicates representation, it does not preclude rational choice if options avoid parity or invoke satisficing over maximization.^[90] Under axiological uncertainty—disagreement over which values are fundamental—formal models prescribe evaluating acts by their expected value across possible value theories, weighted by credences in each, preserving decision-theoretic coherence amid theoretical pluralism.^[91] These approaches, while powerful for prediction and normative guidance, rely on empirical validation of axioms, with violations (e.g., Allais paradox showing independence failures) prompting refinements like prospect theory for descriptive accuracy in value-driven behavior.

Applications Across Disciplines

In Ethics and Normative Philosophy

Value theory constitutes one of the two primary branches of ethical theory, the other being the theory of the right, by specifying the nature and ranking of goods that ground normative prescriptions.^[92] In normative ethics, it addresses foundational questions about what entities or states possess intrinsic value—goodness for its own sake—independent of further ends, as opposed to instrumental values that derive worth from contributing to intrinsic ones. This framework underpins diverse ethical systems: consequentialist approaches, such as utilitarianism, evaluate actions by their tendency to maximize aggregate intrinsic value, often identified as pleasure or preference satisfaction; deontological theories, conversely, treat certain values like rational autonomy or human rights as side-constraints that prohibit actions violating them regardless of outcomes.^[93] A pivotal development in applying value theory to normative philosophy occurred with G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903), which posited goodness as a simple, non-natural property intuited directly rather than reducible to natural predicates like pleasure or evolutionary fitness, via the "open question" argument: equating good with any natural property leaves open whether that property truly is good.^[94] Moore's pluralistic organicism held that multiple kinds of states, such as personal affections and aesthetic experiences, bear intrinsic value, with their combination yielding higher worth than isolated instances, influencing mid-20th-century intuitionist ethics. This approach contrasts with monistic hedonism, critiqued empirically for overlooking evident goods like knowledge or beauty, and informs ongoing debates on whether values are objective properties or projections of pro-attitudes.^[94] In virtue ethics, value theory manifests through the cultivation of character traits aligned with intrinsic human flourishing, as Aristotle outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics (c. 350 BCE), where eudaimonia—rational activity in accordance with virtue—represents the supreme intrinsic good integrating intellectual and moral excellences. Contemporary applications extend to bioethics, where intrinsic value attributions to human life from conception underpin prohibitions on euthanasia or abortion in natural law traditions, supported by causal analyses of developmental continuity rather than mere potentiality. Normative philosophy thus leverages value theory to resolve practical dilemmas, prioritizing empirical scrutiny of value bearers—such as neurological evidence for sentience thresholds—over unsubstantiated relativism.^[95] ![Black-and-white photo of man wearing a suit with a pipe in his mouth](./assets/1914_George_Edward_Moore_cropped

In Economics and Market Analysis

In economics, value theory primarily manifests through the subjective theory of value, which asserts that the economic value of goods and services derives from individuals' personal preferences, scarcity perceptions, and marginal utility rather than objective attributes like production costs or labor inputs. This framework, formalized during the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s by economists such as Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras, resolves classical paradoxes like the water-diamond dilemma by emphasizing that value emerges from the utility of the next unit consumed, not total utility or inherent properties.^[96]^[97] Market prices, under this theory, coordinate disparate subjective valuations through voluntary exchange, achieving equilibrium where marginal rates of substitution align across consumers and producers.^[97] In market analysis, subjective value theory underpins demand estimation and price forecasting by modeling consumer behavior via diminishing marginal utility: as consumption increases, the additional satisfaction from each unit declines, generating downward-sloping demand curves that reflect willingness to pay at varying quantities. For instance, empirical observations of auction markets and consumer goods pricing demonstrate that bids and sales prices correlate with bidders' perceived marginal benefits adjusted for scarcity, not embedded labor, as evidenced by discrepancies where high-labor artisanal products command lower prices than low-labor branded alternatives due to differing subjective appeals.^[98]^[96] This approach enables analysts to predict market responses to shocks, such as supply disruptions elevating prices for rare earth metals from $10 per kilogram in 2010 to over $500 in 2011 due to heightened subjective urgency in technology sectors.^[99] Applications extend to asset valuation and welfare assessment, where subjective valuations inform metrics like consumer surplus—the difference between maximum willingness to pay and actual price—quantified in models revealing annual U.S. consumer gains exceeding $1 trillion from competitive markets aligning prices with ordinal preferences.^[100] Revealed preference techniques, developed by Paul Samuelson in 1938, operationalize this by inferring values from observed choices, supporting econometric analyses that reject labor-based predictions; for example, regressions on commodity prices show no stable correlation with abstract labor hours, but strong fits with subjective factors like income elasticities and substitution rates.^[77] Critics from behavioral economics note deviations from pure rationality, such as endowment effects inflating subjective values by 2-3 times observed market prices in experiments, yet core market aggregates remain robustly explained by aggregated subjective utilities rather than objective metrics.^[101]^[102] Thus, value theory facilitates causal realism in policy, prioritizing interventions that enhance subjective welfare revelations over imposed objective standards.

In Psychology, Sociology, and Behavioral Science

In psychology, value theory emphasizes empirical measurement of individual values and their motivational role in cognition and behavior. Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, developed through cross-cultural surveys involving over 80,000 participants from 82 countries between 1982 and 2017, posits ten universal value types—such as power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security—organized in a circular structure reflecting motivational conflicts and compatibilities.^[103] These values derive from three universal requirements: individual and group welfare needs, societal demands for coordination, and individual preferences for autonomy or embeddedness.^[70] Empirical validation via the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) demonstrates predictive power for attitudes and behaviors, including political orientation and environmentalism, with higher self-transcendence values correlating to prosocial actions in longitudinal studies.^[104] Milton Rokeach's earlier framework, outlined in his 1973 book The Nature of Human Values, distinguishes 18 terminal values (end-states like freedom and equality) from 18 instrumental values (means like honesty and ambition), assessed via ranking in the Rokeach Value Survey.^[105] Validated in experiments showing value change influences behavior—such as altered self-reports of equality after salience induction—this approach underscores values as enduring beliefs guiding goal selection, though critiqued for cultural specificity compared to Schwartz's universality.^[106] Both models inform clinical applications, like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where clarifying personal values enhances psychological flexibility and reduces avoidance behaviors in randomized trials.^[107] Sociological applications treat values as culturally embedded motivators shaping social structures and actions, with empirical research tracing transmission through family and institutions. Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils' 1951 framework integrates values into action theory via pattern variables, empirically tested in studies of role expectations and deviance.^[108] Cross-national surveys, such as the World Values Survey since 1981, reveal shifts like declining traditional authority in Western societies, linking value changes to economic development and correlating self-expression values with democratization in 90+ countries.^[109] Recent analyses highlight values' role in social cohesion, with conservation values predicting resistance to cultural change in immigrant integration studies across Europe.^[110] In behavioral science, value theory informs decision-making models by examining how values moderate biases and predict choices under uncertainty. Prospect theory extensions incorporate value priorities, showing loss aversion amplified by security values in financial experiments with over 1,000 participants.^[111] Field studies demonstrate value-behavior alignment, where subjective construal of a behavior's value relevance boosts consistency, as in health interventions raising achievement values to increase exercise adherence by 20-30% in meta-analyses.^[112] These findings, drawn from lab and real-world data, challenge purely rational models by evidencing causal paths from values to habits, with interventions like nudges leveraging openness-to-change values for sustainable behaviors.^[113]

In Political Theory, Law, and Policy-Making

Value theory informs political theory by providing frameworks for evaluating competing goods such as liberty, equality, and security, often revealing inherent tensions rather than harmonious resolutions. Isaiah Berlin's advocacy of value pluralism posits that fundamental human values are objective yet plural and frequently incommensurable, rejecting monistic ideals that subordinate all values to a single supreme end, as seen in totalitarian regimes.^[114] This perspective, articulated in Berlin's 1958 lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty," underscores that political arrangements must navigate tragic choices among clashing values, supporting liberal institutions that tolerate diversity over utopian coherence.^[114] In jurisprudence, axiology examines the values embedded in legal systems, distinguishing between formal values like legality and substantive ones such as justice and human dignity. Legal positivism, as developed by thinkers like Hans Kelsen in the early 20th century, separates law's validity from moral value, treating it as a coercive order, whereas natural law traditions assert that law derives legitimacy from alignment with objective moral values.^[115] Statutory interpretation often invokes axiological criteria, where judges weigh extra-legal values like equity against textual fidelity, as in the U.S. Supreme Court's balancing of individual rights against public interests in cases like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965).^[116] Policy-making integrates value theory through prioritization of ends, where instrumental values like efficiency serve broader intrinsic goods such as welfare or autonomy. Utilitarian approaches, rooted in Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century hedonic calculus, quantify policy outcomes by aggregating individual utilities, influencing cost-benefit analyses in regulatory decisions, as mandated by U.S. Executive Order 12866 since 1993.^[117] However, value conflicts arise, exemplified by debates over redistributive policies valuing equity, which empirical studies link to reduced economic growth in high-inequality interventions, per World Bank analyses of 1960-2010 data across 100+ countries.^[118] Pluralistic value considerations, per Berlin, compel policymakers to acknowledge trade-offs, as in balancing security values post-9/11 with civil liberties, avoiding the monistic overreach that erodes both.^[114]

Historical Development

Ancient and Medieval Foundations

In ancient Greek philosophy, value theory developed primarily through ethical inquiries centered on eudaimonia, understood as human flourishing or the highest good. Socrates, active in Athens around 470–399 BCE, posited that virtue constitutes the sole intrinsic good, equating it with knowledge and arguing that no one errs willingly due to ignorance of the good.^[119] This Socratic view framed moral value as objective and tied to rational self-examination, influencing subsequent thinkers by prioritizing the pursuit of wisdom over material or hedonic ends.^[120] Plato, Socrates' student (c. 428–348 BCE), extended this foundation in works like the Republic, where the Form of the Good serves as the ultimate source of value, illuminating all other forms and directing the soul toward justice and truth.^[119] For Plato, intrinsic values such as the eternal Forms outrank instrumental goods like wealth or power, which derive worth only insofar as they approximate or lead to the Good. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Plato's pupil, critiqued the Form of the Good as overly abstract but affirmed eudaimonia as the telos of human life, achievable through habitual virtue and rational activity, particularly contemplative theoria.^[119] Aristotle distinguished intrinsic ends (e.g., virtue for its own sake) from instrumental means (e.g., health for the sake of activity), establishing a functional hierarchy of values grounded in human nature's potentialities.^[119] Hellenistic schools further diversified ancient value theory. Epicureans, following Epicurus (341–270 BCE), identified pleasure (hedone) as the intrinsic good, though moderated as the absence of pain rather than excess, with prudence as key to its attainment.^[119] Stoics like Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BCE) elevated virtue (arete) as the only intrinsic value, deeming externals indifferent since true good resides in rational alignment with nature and cosmic reason (logos).^[119] These perspectives emphasized self-sufficiency and resilience, contrasting with earlier teleological accounts by relativizing non-moral goods to virtue's supremacy. Medieval value theory integrated Aristotelian frameworks with Christian theology, subordinating natural goods to divine ends. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) argued that all created values are ordered toward God as the supreme good, with earthly pursuits like friendship or knowledge possessing derivative worth only when directed away from self-love (cupiditas) toward divine love (caritas).^[121] Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE) synthesized this in the Summa Theologica, positing a hierarchy where ultimate beatitude consists in the intellectual vision of God, transcending natural eudaimonia through grace-enabled theological virtues (faith, hope, charity).^[122] Aquinas retained Aristotle's distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values but embedded it in a realist ontology: goods like life or knowledge are objectively valuable per their aptitude to perfect human nature, yet finite compared to eternal union with the divine.^[123] This synthesis influenced Scholastic economics, where value in exchanges (e.g., just price) reflects labor, utility, or communal equity, not mere subjectivity.^[124]

Enlightenment and Modern Developments

The Enlightenment era marked a pivotal shift in value theory toward secular frameworks grounded in reason, empirical observation, and human-centered criteria, departing from medieval reliance on divine command. Thinkers sought to derive values from innate faculties, sentiments, or rational principles, emphasizing benevolence, utility, and autonomy as measures of the good.^[125] Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) advanced a moral sense theory, proposing that humans possess an internal sense analogous to aesthetic perception, which intuitively approves actions motivated by disinterested benevolence toward the greatest good of others. This faculty discerns intrinsic moral value in promoting public happiness, countering egoistic accounts by asserting natural approbation of virtuous conduct.^[126]^[127] David Hume (1711–1776), building on empiricist foundations, contended that values originate in human passions and sentiments rather than pure reason, which he deemed inert for motivation. Moral approbation arises through sympathy, projecting one's feelings onto others' circumstances to evaluate actions; he famously highlighted the logical gap between factual "is" statements and normative "ought" claims, underscoring values' non-derivability from descriptive reality alone.^[128]^[129] Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) offered a contrasting rationalist axiology, positing that true value resides in the good will's conformity to universal moral law via the categorical imperative, which demands treating rational beings as ends in themselves rather than means. This deontological approach attributes absolute, non-instrumental worth to autonomy and duty, independent of empirical outcomes or hedonic calculations.^[130] Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) initiated classical utilitarianism by equating value with the net balance of pleasure over pain, measurable through intensity, duration, and extent, with the principle of utility dictating actions that promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. His hedonic calculus provided a quantitative framework for ethical and legislative evaluation, prioritizing aggregate welfare.^[131]^[132] In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) refined Bentham's hedonism into a qualitative variant, arguing that intellectual and moral pleasures possess superior value to mere sensory ones, as evidenced by competent judges' preferences. This development in Utilitarianism (1861) integrated higher faculties into value assessment, defending liberty and individuality as instrumental to overall human flourishing while retaining utility as the ultimate standard.^[133]^[134]

20th-21st Century Advances and Interdisciplinary Shifts

In the early 20th century, value theory flourished as a central domain of philosophy, with G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) positing intrinsic value as a non-natural, indefinable property, distinct from natural qualities, thereby sparking enduring debates on the supervenience of value.^[8] This period also saw phenomenological approaches, such as Max Scheler's hierarchical ontology of values (1913–1916) and Nicolai Hartmann's systematic axiology in Ethics (1926), emphasizing objective value essences independent of human attitudes.^[135] Mid-century shifts included Isaiah Berlin's articulation of value pluralism in essays like "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958), contending that fundamental human values—such as liberty and equality—are objective yet often incommensurable and conflicting, rejecting monistic hierarchies in favor of tragic trade-offs.^[114] G.H. von Wright's The Varieties of Goodness (1963) further advanced formal analyses by distinguishing atomic, consequential, and agent-relative goods, laying groundwork for deontic logics in value assessment.^[8] Late 20th-century analytic philosophy revived axiological focus through Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984), which critiqued egoistic valuations tied to personal identity, proposing impersonal consequentialism and addressing paradoxes like the repugnant conclusion in population ethics, where aggregating well-being yields counterintuitive outcomes. T.M. Scanlon's buck-passing account (1998) reframed value as derivative of reasons for attitudes, such that something's goodness consists in reasons to admire or desire it, influencing metaethical debates on fittingness.^[8] Into the 21st century, relational theories gained traction, with Stephen Finlay's end-relational semantics (2004) analyzing "good" as context-dependent on ends, and Christine Korsgaard's constructivism (2018) insisting values arise from practical identities, rejecting mind-independent intrinsics.^[8] Ruth Chang's introduction of parity (2002) resolved some incommensurability puzzles by positing rough equality among options neither better nor worse, enabling decision-making without total orderings.^[8] Interdisciplinary expansions marked profound shifts, as value theory integrated empirical methods from psychology and economics. Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values (1992) empirically mapped ten motivational types—such as power, benevolence, and universalism—into a universal circular structure, validated via cross-cultural surveys of over 25,000 respondents, revealing conflicts like self-enhancement versus self-transcendence.^[104] In economics, behavioral insights from Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory (1979) demonstrated asymmetric valuations, with losses looming larger than gains (loss aversion coefficient ≈2.25), undermining neoclassical assumptions of consistent utility maximization and prompting hybrid models incorporating heuristics and reference dependence.^[136] These exchanges fostered formal tools like temporal discounting models, blending psychological experiments with economic optimization to explain hyperbolic preferences, where short-term biases distort long-term value assessments.^[137] By the 21st century, such integrations extended to neuroscience, probing neural correlates of valuation in reward circuits, while policy applications emphasized nudge interventions to align revealed preferences with welfare.^[138]

Key Controversies and Debates

Objectivity versus Relativism in Moral Values

Moral objectivism asserts that certain values, such as prohibitions against unnecessary harm or betrayal of trust, hold true independently of cultural, individual, or subjective perspectives, grounded in facts about human flourishing or rational requirements.^[139] This position aligns with moral realism, which maintains that moral properties are real features of the world, discoverable through reason or intuition rather than invented by societies. Empirical studies on folk metaethics reveal that a majority of people across diverse groups intuitively endorse objectivism, viewing moral claims like "torturing innocents for fun is wrong" as objectively true rather than mere preferences.^[140] For instance, experimental research shows objectivist responses predominate even among those exposed to relativist ideas, suggesting an innate disposition toward perceiving morals as binding universals.^[141] Cross-cultural evidence further bolsters objectivism by identifying recurrent moral universals that transcend societal variations. A machine-learning analysis of ethnographic data from 256 societies worldwide detected near-universal norms, including reciprocity, fairness in resource division, and aversion to in-group violence, appearing in over 90% of cases regardless of region or complexity.^[142] These patterns, corroborated by developmental psychology, indicate that moral cognition emerges from shared evolutionary pressures on cooperation and survival, rather than arbitrary cultural constructs.^[143] Such findings challenge claims of radical moral diversity, as apparent differences often reflect contextual applications of core principles, not their absence—evident in global condemnations of practices like genocide, even within dissenting cultures. Moral relativism counters that values are framework-dependent, valid only within specific cultural or personal contexts, with no overarching standard to adjudicate conflicts.^[144] Proponents cite ethnographic variability, such as differing norms on honor killings or property rights, to argue against imposing external judgments. Yet critiques highlight relativism's logical incoherence: if all morals are relative, statements like "cultural tolerance is obligatory" lack objective grounding, rendering the view self-undermining and incapable of condemning intra-societal reforms, such as abolition of slavery.^[145] Moreover, psychological experiments link relativistic priming to reduced prosocial behavior and heightened self-interest, implying practical costs beyond theoretical flaws.^[141] While relativism gained traction in mid-20th-century anthropology amid anti-colonial sentiments, mounting empirical data on universals has eroded its dominance, favoring objectivist accounts that better explain moral convergence in international law and human rights declarations post-1945.^[142]

Validity of Labor Theory of Value: Empirical Critiques

Empirical critiques of the labor theory of value (LTV) center on the failure of labor-embodied measures to consistently predict or explain observed market prices, particularly when tested against data on commodity exchanges, input-output structures, and profit distributions. Proponents of LTV compute "labor values" as the total direct and indirect labor time required for production, expecting prices to approximate these values under competitive conditions. However, analyses reveal systematic mismatches, where prices deviate based on factors like scarcity, consumer demand, and capital intensity rather than labor inputs alone. A foundational observation undermining LTV is the exchange value of non-produced or minimally processed goods, such as natural resources or land, which lack significant embedded labor yet command substantial prices due to inherent scarcity and utility. For example, fertile virgin land or high-grade mineral deposits generate rents reflecting geological advantages, not labor expended, as noted in Böhm-Bawerk's 1896 analysis of value formation.^[146] Similarly, rare collectibles like antiquities or gems derive value from limited supply and subjective desirability, with prices fluctuating independently of any proportional labor addition—evident in auction data where identical labor in replicas yields negligible value compared to originals.^[77] Input-output table analyses provide quantitative tests, deriving labor coefficients from intersectoral flows and comparing them to actual prices. In U.S. data spanning 1947–1972, labor values exhibited mean absolute weighted deviations of 9.2% from market prices, improving marginally to 8.2% when transformed into prices of production assuming uniform profit rates.^[147] Critics interpret these non-zero deviations—systematically higher in capital-intensive sectors—as evidence that labor does not causally determine value; instead, they reflect equalization of profit rates across differing organic compositions of capital, a process LTV accommodates only through ad hoc adjustments that circularly incorporate non-labor elements. Such findings recur across datasets, including Chinese input-output tables from 2002–2007, where labor values explained prices less effectively than models integrating demand elasticities and capital returns. Profit rate dynamics further challenge LTV's predictions. The theory anticipates a tendency toward uniform rates of profit through competition reallocating labor and capital, yet empirical sector-level data from advanced economies show persistent differentials—e.g., technology sectors averaging 20–30% higher returns than manufacturing in U.S. Census Bureau reports from 2000–2017—driven by innovation rents, regulatory barriers, and risk premia rather than labor-value disproportions.^[148] Experimental economics reinforces this, with controlled markets converging to equilibria dictated by marginal willingness-to-pay and supply constraints, yielding prices uncorrelated with simulated labor inputs; Vernon Smith's laboratory results from the 1980s demonstrated such outcomes across repeated trials with varying participant valuations.^[77] These discrepancies highlight LTV's limited predictive power for price volatility, as seen in commodity booms (e.g., oil price surges in 2008 disconnected from extraction labor changes) or luxury goods markets, where branding and scarcity premiums dominate. Mainstream econometric models, regressing prices on utility proxies and cost structures, consistently outperform labor-only specifications in forecasting accuracy, underscoring the causal primacy of subjective preferences over aggregate labor time.^[149]

Comparability, Incommensurability, and Prioritization of Values

In value theory, comparability denotes the capacity to rank alternatives according to their bearing on value, presupposing a complete and transitive ordering where any two options can be deemed better, worse, or equivalent. Monistic frameworks, such as hedonistic utilitarianism, facilitate this by reducing all goods to a singular metric like pleasure or preference satisfaction, enabling interpersonal and intrapersonal comparisons.^[150] Pluralistic approaches, by contrast, posit multiple irreducible intrinsic values, potentially rendering some pairs incomparable if neither dominates the other across relevant dimensions without a neutral scale for adjudication.^[151] Incommensurability arises when values lack a common measure, such that trade-offs cannot be quantified without distorting their distinct natures; for instance, enhancing liberty may diminish equality without a higher-order value to dictate the exchange rate. Isaiah Berlin advanced this in his doctrine of value pluralism, asserting that objective human ends—such as freedom, justice, and compassion—are inherently plural and liable to tragic conflicts, with no rational procedure guaranteeing optimal prioritization absent contextual tragedy.^[152] ^[153] Berlin's view, drawn from historical analysis of thinkers like Machiavelli and Herzen, rejects monistic utopias as coercive, emphasizing instead the agonistic reality of human pursuits where values collide without transcendent harmony.^[154] Critics of incommensurability, often from rational choice paradigms, argue it undermines practical deliberation by implying paralysis, proposing instead that apparent incomparability stems from incomplete information or framing rather than ontological plurality. Empirical anomalies in decision-making, including the Allais paradox observed in 1953 where subjects exhibit intransitive risk preferences, suggest limits to commensurable utility models, as individuals fail to consistently trade off probabilities and outcomes as predicted.^[155] ^[156] In applied domains like healthcare allocation, incommensurable criteria—e.g., extending life years versus alleviating suffering—necessitate hybrid prioritization methods blending dominance arguments with deliberative processes, as pure commensuration risks overlooking non-aggregable dimensions.^[157] Prioritization amid incommensurability thus demands non-algorithmic mechanisms, such as prudential balancing or institutional rules that embed dominance hierarchies for recurring conflicts; for example, constitutional protections may subordinate certain equalizations to liberty safeguards. While philosophical defenses like Berlin's highlight the contingency of such orders, causal analysis reveals that evolved human faculties enable proximate resolutions through iterated social learning, averting theoretical stasis despite value multiplicity.^[158] This tension persists, with monists countering via reductive metrics and pluralists insisting on the veridical diversity of ends, informed by cross-cultural persistence of clashing ideals like autonomy versus tradition.^[159]

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Oct 26, 2004 · One of the main features of Berlin's account of pluralism is the emphasis placed on the act of choosing between values. Pluralism holds that, in ...2. Philosophy Of Knowledge... · 4. Ethical Thought And Value... · 5. Political Thought
[115]
(PDF) Axiology of Law – from General to Specific Philosophy of Law
An axiology as a theory of values takes an important place not only in general philosophy but in legal philosophy as well. Jurisprudence and law cannot ...
[116]
Extra-Legal Values in Judicial Interpretation of Law: A Model ...
Sep 4, 2020 · The aim of the paper is to analyze the types of interpretative reasoning determining the content of extra-legal criteria contained in general reference clauses.
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Ethics and Values in Public Policy | Public Policy Analysis Class Notes
Ethics in public policy involves moral principles like beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice, and values such as efficiency, equity, liberty, ...
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(PDF) Fundamental values and policy making - ResearchGate
Aug 2, 2020 · EQUITY, EFFICIENCY, CHOICE,. EXCELLENCE, AND SECURITY. A public policy that values equity means that there ; measure the gap between the expected ...
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Ancient Ethical Theory - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Aug 3, 2004 · Ancient moral theory tries to provide a reflective account of an essential human activity so one can grasp what is of fundamental importance in pursuing it.
[120]
[PDF] Elements for the Theory of Value in Ancient Philosophy
Plato, overwhelmingly impressed by Socrates' efforts to give a foundation to human aspirations, takes up his demarche to such an extent that one cannot make the ...
[121]
Medieval Philosophy
Sep 14, 2022 · Medieval philosophy was regarded as having taken place in Western Europe, mostly in Latin, with Paris and Oxford as its greatest centres.Missing: axiology | Show results with:axiology
[122]
Thomas Aquinas - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dec 7, 2022 · Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274). The greatest figure of thirteenth-century Europe in the two preeminent sciences of the era, philosophy and theology.Life and Works · Form and Matter · Cognitive Theory · Ethics
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Thomas Aquinas: Moral Philosophy
Aquinas believes that we can never achieve complete or final happiness in this life. For him, final happiness consists in beatitude, or supernatural union with ...
[124]
Scholastic Economics: Thomistic Value Theory - Acton Institute
Jul 20, 2010 · Saint Thomas Aquinas' writings in value theory entail the proposition that the basis of value of an economic good is the amount of human labor expended in ...
[125]
Enlightenment - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Aug 20, 2010 · The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the ...
[126]
Hutcheson, Francis | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Hutcheson's moral sense theory helped to conceptually circumvent the problems that stem from a strict doctrine of egoism. He claimed that it is natural for us ...Life · Internal Senses · Moral Sense Faculty · Benevolence: Response to...
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Francis Hutcheson - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Apr 20, 2021 · As already noted, Hutcheson holds that the moral sense approves actions insofar as they are motivated by disinterested benevolence. Thus far one ...Hutcheson's Metaethics · Hutcheson's Normative Ethics · Virtue and Utility
[128]
Hume's Moral Philosophy
Oct 29, 2004 · Hume argues that we create the rules of ownership of property originally in order to satisfy our avidity for possessions for ourselves and our ...
[129]
Value Theory | David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist
This chapter explores Hume's value theory. It is argued that Hume does not lay out his value theory as a whole apparel for the body of his moral psychology. He ...
[130]
Kant's moral philosophy
Feb 23, 2004 · Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that the supreme principle of morality is a principle of rationality that he dubbed the “Categorical ...Missing: axiology | Show results with:axiology
[131]
The History of Utilitarianism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Mar 27, 2009 · In the case of the Classical Utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the value to be promoted is pleasure.Precursors to the Classical... · The Classical Approach · Ideal Utilitarianism
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Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical, known for his utilitarianism, and a founder of utilitarianism and a leading theorist in Anglo- ...
[133]
John Stuart Mill: Ethics - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Mill's Theory of Value and the Principle of Utility. Mill defines “utilitarianism” as the creed that considers a particular “theory of life” as the ...
[134]
John Stuart Mill - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Aug 25, 2016 · John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was the most influential English language philosopher of the nineteenth century. He was a naturalist, a utilitarian, and a liberal.Moral and political philosophy · James Mill · Harriet Taylor Mill
[135]
Value Theory - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
In the first half of the twentieth century, theory of value (axiology) was a flourishing, central area of philosophy, represented by such major figures as G. E. ...
[136]
Behavioral economics, explained - UChicago News
Behavioral economics combines elements of economics and psychology to understand how and why people behave the way they do in the real world.What Is Behavioral Economics... · What Are The Origins Of... · Guide To Behavioral...
[137]
Models of Temporal Discounting 1937–2000: An Interdisciplinary ...
Nov 11, 2015 · Today's models of temporal discounting are the result of multiple interdisciplinary exchanges between psychology and economics.
[138]
Understanding Behavioral Economics: Theories, Goals, and Real ...
Behavioral economics combines economic theory and psychology to explore why people make irrational decisions. What Is Behavioral Economics?Exploring the Principles of... · Key Factors Influencing... · Core Principles Guiding...
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The Scientific Perspective on Moral Objectivity | Ethical Theory and ...
Mar 21, 2017 · 'Moral naturalism' is sometimes characterised as the view that there are objective moral facts and properties which are at the same time ...
[140]
Empirical research on folk moral objectivism - PMC - NIH
Moral objectivists favor an affirmative answer. In their view, things are morally right, wrong, good, bad, etc. irrespectively of what anybody thinks about ...
[141]
[PDF] Exposure to moral relativism compromises moral behavior
Nov 1, 2013 · However, Goodwin & Darley (2010) have argued that moral relativism also requires more abstract and reflective thinking. In our own materials ...
[142]
Moral universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 societies
Mar 30, 2024 · Again, we find evidence of most of the seven morals in most societies, across all cultural regions. The new method allows us to detect minor ...
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Universality and Cultural Diversity in Moral Reasoning and Judgment
Dec 13, 2021 · This review discusses the current formulation of moral theories that attempt to explain cultural factors affecting moral judgment and reasoning.
[144]
[PDF] Moral Relativism and Human Rights
Sep 1, 2007 · 16 See, e.g., Gilbert Harman, Moral Relativism, GILBERT HARMAN & JUDITH. JARVIS THOMSON, MORAL OBJECTIVITY AND MORAL RELATIVISM 3, 8-11 (1996):.<|separator|>
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[PDF] The Incoherence of Moral Relativism - CUNY Academic Works
If there were no objective moral values, moral statements could not be true. Then, arguing logically about morality would be impossible. Consider this argument:.
[146]
Böhm-Bawerk, “On the Completion of Marx's System (of Thought ...
An English translation of Böhm-Bawerk's devastating review of Karl Marx's Das Kapital vol. 3 which was published posthumously in 1894 by Engels.
[147]
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### Summary of Key Empirical Results on Labor Values, Prices of Production, and Market Prices in US Data (1947, 1958, 1963, 1967, 1972)
[148]
Price-Value Deviations and the Labor Theory of Value. Evidence ...
Mar 2, 2021 · Price-Value Deviations and the Labor Theory of Value. Evidence from 42 Countries, 2000-2017. Price-Value Deviations and the Labor Theory of ...
[149]
Why does modern mainstream economic thinking reject the labor ...
Oct 21, 2020 · The labor theory of value has been rejected by neoclassical, marginalist economists because they associate it with Marxism and because ...
[150]
Incomparability and Incommensurability in Choice: No Common ...
Specifically, we will say that two values are incommensurable if there is no higher-level common scale of value (such as utility, happiness, or inclusive ...
[151]
Incommensurability of Value - Bibliography - PhilPapers
Two options or objects a and b are said to be incommensurable, incommensurate, or incomparable with respect to some value when the comparison is not malformed ...
[152]
Incompatibility, Incommensurability, and Rationality in Value Pluralism
Nov 8, 2018 · Isaiah Berlin's idea of value pluralism, along with his famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, is probably his most important ...
[153]
The problem of value pluralism. Isaiah Berlin and beyond
Jun 22, 2021 · He also aims to show that the dilemmas of pluralism ignite and fuel the theoretical engines of several prominent schools of political thought ...
[154]
isaiah berlin's key idea
Berlin's essential starting-point, which is that ultimate human values – those values we adhere to for their own sakes, not as means to an end – are plural.
[155]
The Impossibility of Incommensurable Values - jstor
(b) Incommensurability entails a fundamental incompleteness in decision theory. Vagueness does not. If the value of pleasure and the value of autonomy are incom ...
[156]
[PDF] Incommensurable Values, Rational Choice, and Moral Absolutes
Unique rational decision among incommensurable goods is impossible. ... Finnis claims, based on considerations of transitivity, that game theory and decision ...
[157]
Incommensurability and healthcare priority setting
May 10, 2024 · This paper argues that accepting incommensurability can be a useful step for developing attractive hybrid theories to how to distribute scarce health-related ...
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[PDF] "Incommensurability (and Incomparability)" In - PhilArchive
When two items are incommensurable, they “lack a common measure.” There are, however, many ways in which two items can be said to lack a common measure and,.
[159]
Value Comparability in Natural Law Ethics: A Defense
Nov 14, 2022 · Incommensurability: Values are incommensurable when they are not able to be measured in terms of a single scale of units of value.<|separator|>