Value (ethics)

• 1. Introduction

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  Value, in the language of ethics and the social sciences, names the degree of importance we assign to something. That single, quiet idea turns out to carry enormous weight. It shapes which actions we judge as best, which ways of living we find admirable, and why two people who share nearly every surface-level belief can still find themselves in an ideological or even physical conflict. What counts as a value? What makes one value override another? And what happens when two people's deepest commitments collide head-on? These are the questions this documentary explores.

• 2. Mapping the Territory

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  Axiology is the broader field that encompasses ethical value, and within it the study of value theory draws on an unusually wide circle of disciplines. Anthropology, behavioral economics, business ethics, corporate governance, moral philosophy, political science, social psychology, sociology, and theology all contribute to understanding what values are and how they work. That breadth is itself a signal: values are not owned by any single way of thinking about human life.

  Ethical value is sometimes treated as a synonym for goodness, but philosophers point out that "goodness" carries many additional meanings and is more ambiguous as a result. Distinguishing the two lets thinkers be more precise about what they are measuring and comparing.

  One early question any such study must answer is whether values are relative or absolute. Relative values differ between individuals and, on a larger scale, between cultures. Absolute values, sometimes called noumenal values, are described as philosophically independent of any individual or cultural viewpoint and independent of whether they are even known or understood. Ludwig Wittgenstein was pessimistic about ever reaching clarity on this. He wrote that discussions about life and its meaning may feel important, but that they are "no more than expressions and can never be facts, resulting from a tendency of the mind and not the heart or the will."

• 3. Intrinsic and Instrumental Worth

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  Philosophic value divides into two fundamental kinds: intrinsic and instrumental. An instrumental value is worth having as a means toward something else that is good. A radio, to use one illustration from the literature, is instrumentally good as a way of hearing music. An intrinsically valuable thing is worth having for itself alone, not as a path to anything further.

  These two categories are not mutually exclusive. "Understanding science" may be an example of a good that is both worthwhile in and of itself and a means of achieving other goods at the same time. Where an object is both, the sum of its instrumental value and its intrinsic value together determines its place in any given value system.

  Beyond the intrinsic-versus-instrumental divide, philosophers distinguish the intensity of a value from its amount per object. Intensity is the degree to which a value is generated or acted upon, and it can be zero even when the valued object still retains its value. The two dimensions vary independently. In value systems that prize maximizing outcomes, intensity becomes an imperative: the goal is not merely to generate value but to generate it in as large a degree as possible.

  Positive and negative ethical value also come apart. Positive value generally correlates with something pursued or increased; negative value with something avoided or minimized. Research on social value has pushed this further, showing that social outcomes can be positive, neutral, or negative, and should not be assumed to land on one side by default.

• 4. Sacred Commitments

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  Protected values, also called sacred values, sit in a category of their own. A protected value is one that a person refuses to trade away no matter how large the potential benefit. Some people, for instance, are unwilling to take a human life even if doing so would save a greater number of lives.

  Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca traced the origin of protected values to the norms described in deontological ethics, a tradition often associated with Immanuel Kant. On this view, the protectedness signals that people care about their participation in a transaction, not only about what the transaction produces.

  A series of experimental studies led by Scott Atran and Angel Gomez among combatants on the ISIS front line in Iraq and with ordinary citizens in Western Europe found that commitment to sacred values motivates what the researchers called the most "devoted actors" to make the costliest sacrifices. That includes willingness to fight and die, and even a readiness to abandon close family and comrades for the sake of those values. The same research found that protected values play a role in protracted conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because they can block utilitarian negotiations before they begin. From a utilitarian standpoint, protected values function as biases whenever they prevent the maximization of overall benefit across individuals.

• 5. Universal Values and Individual Differences

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  S. H. Schwartz and a number of psychology colleagues set out to discover empirically whether any values are universal across cultures. Schwartz defined values as "conceptions of the desirable that influence the way people select action and evaluate events," and he hypothesised that universal values would relate to three kinds of human need: biological needs, needs around social coordination, and needs tied to the welfare and survival of groups.

  His model organizes values along two axes: growth versus protection, and personal versus social focus. From those axes he derived four broad orientations. Openness to change aligns with personal growth; self-enhancement with self-protection; conservation with social protection; and self-transcendence with social growth. Within that structure Schwartz identified ten universal values: self-direction, stimulation, and hedonism relate to openness; achievement and power relate to self-enhancement; security, conformity, and tradition relate to conservation; and humility, benevolence, and universalism relate to self-transcendence.

  Personality data from the big five measure corroborate the model. Openness correlates especially with the self-direction value; extraversion correlates especially with stimulation; agreeableness correlates with benevolence; and conscientiousness correlates with achievement, conformity, and security.

  Gender differences appear within the model as well. Men are found to value achievement, self-direction, hedonism, and stimulation more than women. Women value benevolence, universality, and tradition more. The ordering of Schwartz's values shows substantial stability in adults over time, including in migrants who have moved to a new country. Motherhood shifts women's values toward stability and away from openness to change, a pattern that does not appear in fathers.

• 6. Culture, Transmission, and Conflict

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  Cultural values are passed on primarily through socialization, especially from parents to children. Parents in different cultures select very different qualities to cultivate. Italian parents prioritize social and emotional abilities and an even temperament. Spanish parents want their children to be sociable. Swedish parents emphasize security and happiness. Dutch parents value independence, long attention spans, and predictable schedules. American parents are unusual for their strong emphasis on intellectual ability, particularly in a narrow academic sense. Among the Kipsigis people of Kenya, the valued trait is called ng'om: being not only smart but also responsible and helpful. The Luos of Kenya place high value on education and pride, expressed through the word "nyadhi."

  Values and norms are related but not the same thing. Norms provide rules for behavior in specific situations; values identify what should count as good or evil. Flying a national flag on a holiday is a norm; the underlying concept it expresses is patriotism. When a group member expresses a value that seriously conflicts with the group's norms, the group may employ various means to encourage conformity or to stigmatize the non-conforming behavior. Imprisonment is one outcome that can follow from a conflict with norms that a state has codified as law.

  At a global level, cultural values surface in tensions between governance systems. The Inglehart-Welzel cultural map of the world plots countries along two dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on one axis, and survival values versus self-expression values on the other. These tensions also show up in trade and international law: European audiences may regard a film as an artistic creation deserving special treatment, while audiences in the United States may treat the same film as mere entertainment. EU policies built on the idea of "cultural exception" can come into direct conflict with what are described as the more liberal policies of English-speaking countries, and those disagreements have caused failures in international negotiations.

  The List of Values, known in management studies as LOV, identifies nine internal and external personal values that shape consumer behavior: self respect, warm relationships, sense of accomplishment, self-fulfillment, fun and enjoyment, excitement, sense of belonging, being well respected, and security. These nine are grouped into three functional categories: interpersonal relationship factors, personal factors, and non-personal factors. Research has also noted that, over the last three decades, traditional-age college students have shown increased interest in personal well-being and decreased interest in the welfare of others.

• 7. Value Systems and Their Conflicts

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  A value system is a set of consistent values used for the purpose of ethical or ideological integrity. Consistency has two dimensions: internal and external. A value system is internally consistent when its values do not contradict each other and its exceptions are abstract enough to apply in any situation. It is externally consistent when it can coexist with a person's communal value system without contradiction.

  There are three types of value systems. An idealized value system lists values with no exceptions and functions as an absolute code. Those who hold it and claim no exceptions are called absolutists. A realized value system includes exceptions to resolve conflicts between values in practice, which is what most people actually use in daily life. A formal value system contains an implicit exception attached to every value: "as long as no higher-priority value is violated." Lying may be wrong as a general principle; preserving a life is probably ranked higher; therefore lying to save a life becomes acceptable within a formal value system.

  Conflicts between value systems become most visible when one system is built on individualism and another on collectivism. The discipline of ethonomics, described as the rigorous examination and comparison of value systems, exists specifically to understand such conflicts and find paths to resolution. The resolutions it proposes tend to be layered with recursive exceptions, a sign that the underlying tensions do not dissolve easily.

  The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 in the United Kingdom offers a concrete example of a value system being written into law. It requires public bodies commissioning services to take account of the social, environmental, and economic well-being of the area where a contract is delivered. Cornwall Council's Social Value policy describes the aim of standardizing the process for defining social value so that performance and outcomes become consistent. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation uses "social value creation" as a quantifiable objective in its public policy and philanthropic decision-making, showing that abstract ethical concepts can become operational targets in institutional practice.