V - VALUES AND VALUE SYSTEMS

Summary

VALUES

In the previous chapter, I argued that analyses of emotion and valuing provide the foundation for understanding value judgments. Once we grasp what is involved in valuing something, we can see the point of the claim that some things, but not others, are appropriate or worthy objects of a particular type of valuing. We are apt to go astray, though, if we take the idea of a value judgment as our point of departure in developing a value theory, for then it is all too likely that we will seek some special sort of property – valuableness, goodness, or whatever. It is, I suppose, possible to make sense of value judgments by focusing on the (supervenient) property of valuableness; but this approach tends to obscure the intimate relation between value judgments, valuing and motivation, with the consequence that externalism appears even more of a challenge than it is. In any event, even if one insists on seeing value judgments in terms of a supervenient evaluative property, it is a property that can only be grasped once we know what it is to value something.

Just as some insist that value theory is best conceived as a study of an evaluative property, others maintain that abstract values are the key. Consider, for example, Nicholas Rescher's “full exposition” of a specific evaluation such as “Smith's friendship was of the greatest value for the advancement of Jones's career.”