The Foundations of Morality
18. The Problem of Value
1. The Value of Value
Aldous Huxley, in his book Ends and Means (1937) and in some of his essays, was greatly troubled by what he thought was the verdict of “Science” regarding the existence of “Value.” “Science,” he thought, denied “value” and “meaning” in the Universe; yet “Science” must be wrong: life, he asserted, does have “value” and “meaning.”
Huxley was completely right in declaring that life does have value and meaning, but wrong in supposing that Science proclaimed the absence of such value and meaning. Only the bad metaphysical assumptions of materialism or panphysicalism did that.
When we come to aesthetic values or moral values, however, the matter becomes more complicated. It seems to be precisely the function of the moral philosopher to evaluate moral judgments and moral values. For ethics seems to be not only a study of how people do value actions, means and ends, but of how they ought to value actions, means and ends. It may be true that there can be no dispute about ultimate ends. But this does not mean that there can be no dispute concerning what are “ultimate” ends and what are merely means or intermediate ends, and how appropriate or efficacious these means or intermediate ends are in achieving ultimate ends.
Putting the matter another way: Economics is concerned with the actual valuations that people make; ethics with the valuations they would make if they always had benevolence and foresight and wisdom. It is the function of the ethical philosopher to determine what some of these valuations would be.
In any case we need have no misgivings about the value of value itself. Values are, by definition, the only things worth while! There need be no apology for them, no uneasy effort to “justify” them. The function of science is to discover the objective truth about the universe, or some particular aspect of it. But the sciences exist only because men have already decided that the objective truth is worth discovering. Men have recognized that it is important—i.e., valuable—to know the objective truth. That is why they think it important that science, including the sciences of human action, should be “value-free.” They insist on value-free science, in brief, because they find it more valuable than argument into which an author has insinuated his own personal prejudices or value-judgments. And though men are seeking for objective facts or truths, they are constantly deciding which facts or propositions, out of an infinite possible number, are worth finding or proving; and what objective knowledge, out of infinite possible knowledge, will best serve some human purpose.
The case has been eloquently put by Santayana:
In sum, for human beings value not only “exists”; it is all important. It is the very standard by which we judge importance. All men act. All men seek to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory state. All men strive for definite ends. They wish to choose the most effective or appropriate means to achieve their ends. This is why they need knowledge—knowledge of factual truth, knowledge of physical cause and effect, knowledge of science. All such knowledge helps them to choose the most effective or appropriate means for achieving their ends. Science, knowledge, logic, reason, are means to the achievement of ends. The value of science is primarily instrumental (though knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge are also valued “intrinsically” and for their own sake). But men’s ultimate ends need not be justified by science; the pursuit of scientific knowledge is justified, for the greater part, as a means for the pursuit of ends beyond itself. Science must be justified by value, not value by science.
2. Subjectivism vs. Objectivism
We come now to a problem that has been a source of immemorial perplexity and division of opinion in ethics. Is value “subjective” or “objective”? More often the problem has been framed in a somewhat different way: Is ethics (or are ethical rules) “subjective” or “objective”?
This dispute has proved so persistent, I think, partly because the answers have been oversimplified, and partly because the wrong questions have been asked (or, what is almost the same thing, because the wrong vocabulary has been used).
All valuation is in origin necessarily subjective. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. All valuation implies a valuer. Valuation expresses a relation between the valuer and the thing valued. This relation depends upon the valuer’s own needs, wants, desires, preferences, as well as upon his judgment regarding the extent, if any, to which the object valued will help him to realize his desires.
Objects or activities may be valued as means, or subordinate ends, or final ends. Activities or states of consciousness that are valued “purely for their own sake,” as ultimate ends, are said by ethical writers to have “intrinsic” value. Though the term is widely used by ethical philosophers, it is troublesome to anyone trained in economics. Applied to an object, it implies that the value is in the object itself, rather than in the mind of the valuer, or in a relation between the valuer and the object. It is difficult, however, to find a satisfactory substitute for the term and the distinction it emphasizes. Objects or activities that are valued merely as means to ends may be said to have merely instrumental or derivative value. But many things—promise-keeping, truth-telling, freedom, justice, social cooperation—have both “instrumental” and “intrinsic” value.
Let us return to the problem of subjectivity and objectivity in value. All valuation, to repeat, is in origin subjective. But here a major difficulty develops. My (subjective) opinions, estimates, valuations, and purposes are objective for you. And your (subjective) valuations and purposes are objective for me. That is, to me, your valuations are external facts with which I must deal (say in trying to sell something to you or buy something from you) as I am forced to deal with any other “objective” facts. And my valuations are “objective” facts which you must take into account as you would any other objective fact.
And just as you and I must deal with the valuations and attitudes of each other as objective facts, so each of us must deal, as objective facts, with the valuations and attitudes of all other people, or “society” as a whole. Prices in the market place are formed by the diverse valuations of individuals. They are the composite result of these diverse individual valuations. Our individual valuations have been, in turn, “socially” formed. And the market price is to each of us an objective fact by which he must guide his own actions. If the price of a house that you would dearly love to own is $25,000, this is the hard “objective” fact with which you must deal (even though this market price can be traced back to other people’s subjective valuations). Unless you have or can get the $25,000, and unless you yourself (subjectively) value the house more than you (subjectively) value $25,000, you cannot or will not buy it.
And so, again, when the housewife goes to the supermarket to make her purchases, she is confronted with an enormous number of (to her) “objective” prices of different foods, different grades, and different brands, about which she must make her subjective decisions to buy or not to buy. But her own subjective decisions of yesterday (by resulting in objective actions) have helped to form today’s objective prices, as her subjective decisions today will help to form tomorrow’s objective prices.
So far we have been drawing our illustrations purely from the economic realm. But what is true of market prices and economic values is also true, though in a less precise way, of aesthetic, cultural, and moral values. The individual, in the whole range of his life and thought and activity, finds himself confronting and dealing with an infinitely complex set of social values. These are, of course, ultimately the valuations of other people; but the mutual relationship and causation are complex. Just as, in the economic realm, the infinitely diverse valuations of other people do not result in an infinite number of market prices, but, at a given time and place, just one market price for a given (homogeneous) commodity, a price that is the composite result of individual valuations, so in the political, aesthetic, cultural and moral realms we find ourselves dealing also with such composite valuations, which seem to have a life and existence of their own, and to stand apart from the valuations of any one individual. Thus we speak, and seem to be warranted in speaking, of the reputation of Beethoven, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, of the sentiment of the community, of public opinion, of the moral tradition, or the prevailing moral code.
And this is certainly more, and something different from, a mere “average” of everybody’s opinion or valuation. Each of us individually grows up, in fact, in a world of such social valuations, with a social moral code, which, like our language, had an existence prior to any of the individuals now living, and seems to have determined their thought and opinions rather than been determined by them.
Thus value, which is in origin individual and subjective, becomes social, and so in this sense objective. This is true both of economic and of moral values. The objective heating power of coal, for example, gives it “objective” value on the market. And the rules of ethics, of course, are objective in the sense that they must be acknowledged and followed by everybody. We cannot have an ethics for one man alone that is not also the ethics of other people. The rules of ethics demand general acceptance and conformity. Without this there would be complete ethical disorder, anarchy, and confusion. Thus moral values are subjective from one aspect and objective from another.
3. The Social Mind
There is nothing inexplicable or mysterious in all this. All mental processes are in the minds of individuals. There is no social “oversoul” which transcends individual minds. There is no social “consciousness” which stands outside of and above the consciousness of individuals. Yet social moral values are a product of the interplay of many minds—including the minds of our long-dead ancestors. The individual is born into a world in which there already exists a Moral Law, which seems to stand above him, demanding the sacrifice of many of his impulses and immediate desires. There is, in brief, a realm of Social Objectivity, which seems to be set above the individual’s own will and purpose.
This “social mind” is completely accounted for when all individuals (past as well as present) are completely accounted for. But it cannot be accounted for by considering these individuals separately. No individual is completely, or primarily, accounted for until his relations with the rest of society are analyzed. The individuals are in society, but society is more than the mere sum of the individuals. It is also their interrelations and interfluences. Men’s minds function together, in a cooperative unity. Morality is the product of a cooperating society, the product of the interplay of many minds.
How this works out in the economic as well as in the moral realm has been brilliantly explained by the late Benjamin Anderson:
Economic value is not intrinsic in goods, independent of the minds of men. But it is a fact which is in large degree independent of the mind of any given man. To a given individual in the market, the economic value of a good is a fact as external, as objective, as opaque and stubborn, as is the weight of the object, or the law against murder. There are individual values, marginal utilities, of goods which may differ in magnitude and in quality from man to man, but there is, over and above these, influenced by them in part, influencing them much more than they influence it, a social value for each commodity, a product of a complex social psychology, which includes individual values, but includes very much more as well.
Our theory puts law, moral values, and economic values in the same general class, species of the genus, social value. . . . They are the social forces, which govern, in a social scheme, the actions of men.
The only statement in the preceding quoted paragraphs which I might seriously question is that maintaining that social value influences individual values more than they influence it. But I would certainly agree that social value is more than a mere average or composite, and more than a mere resultant, of individual values. There is a two-way interaction, a two-way causation.
I hope the reader will forgive me if I stress once more the complex relation of the “individual” to “society.” Society is not merely a collection of individuals. Their interrelations in society make them quite different from what they would be in isolation. Brass is not merely copper and zinc; it is a third thing. Water is not merely hydrogen and oxygen, but something quite different from either. What an individual would be like if he had lived completely isolated from birth (assuming he could have survived at all) we can hardly even imagine. If we did not have some experience of hydrogen and oxygen in their pure state, we could certainly not have deduced their nature from looking at water. We can hope to solve many social problems not by looking at them exclusively from either an “individualist” or a “collective” aspect, but by looking at each aspect alternately.
The complex two-way interaction of the individual and society is most impressively illustrated by the example of language. Language is a social product. It was not a gift to man from heaven. It did not suddenly spring into existence in a Tower of Babel. All its words and structure and meaning were contributed by individuals—though very few, proportionately, by individuals in the present generation. Each of us now living grew up “into” a language already existing and functioning. That language has shaped each individual’s concepts and values. Without it the individual could hardly think or reason at all. We think in words and in sentences—in inherited, socially-given, words and sentence structures. We improve and develop our thought by mutual exchange, by listening to words and sentences, talking words and sentences, reading each other’s words and sentences. Language not only enables us to think as we do but, by the concepts that its words and sentences embody or suggest, almost forces us to think as we do. The individual is almost completely dependent on language.
And yet language is—ultimately—the product of the interplay and “interfluence” of individual minds. It would certainly be true to say that language has influenced any given individual more than that individual has influenced language. It might even be true to say that language has influenced the present generation more than the present generation has influenced language. But it would not be valid to say that language has influenced all individuals, past and present, more than they have influenced language. For it is they who created it.
And this applies also when we are discussing the moral tradition and moral values. The moral tradition in which we grow up exercises so powerful an influence that it is accepted by many people as “objective.” And for any given individual it is objective, however subjective it may be in the sense that it originally developed and was formed by the interplay of individual human minds. Moral judgments do have objective binding force on the individual. And moral rules are objective not only in the sense that they call for objective actions but that they call for objective adherence by everybody.
4. The Solipsistic and the Shared
In brief, there is an element of truth on both sides of the subjectivist-objectivist controversy—and an element of error on both sides. Subjectivists are right in contending that all moral judgments are in one sense subjective. But they are wrong when they go on to draw disparaging inferences from this—to imply, for example, that they are “merely” subjective. For there is a profound difference between a subjective judgment, as any judgment is bound to be, and a solitary or solipsistic judgment confined to a single individual. The latter might be merely the passing hallucination of an unbalanced mind. But a subjective judgment may be socially shared; it may be a judgment that is held in only slightly different form by the majority in a community, or even a judgment that is held generally and almost universally.
The Objectivists are right, on the other hand, in pointing out that all human acts have objective consequences. But they are wrong in assuming that these consequences are objectively “good” or “bad.” They can only be good or bad in somebody’s opinion.
The controversy between Objectivists and Subjectivists may take another form. There are “objectivists” who, like Kant, view morality as a matter of categorical obligation, independent of the human will, independent of consequences, inherent in the nature of things. And there are “subjectivists” for whom morality is merely the arbitrary opinion, emotion, or approval of some individual, not necessarily binding or valid for anybody else. We have already, in substance, examined both of these views. Neither can stand analysis.
To sum up: The individual’s moral values are necessarily subjective, however he may have come by them. The moral values of others are for him necessarily objective facts to which he must adjust himself or with which he must deal. And there is a body of social moral values, of moral values accepted and shared by most of the people in the community (and even existing prior to those now living), which for each individual in the community is an objective fact that exercises tremendous influence on his own thought and conduct, and which he in turn may apply to influence the thought and conduct of others. Finally, moral rules require objective adherence from everybody.
Perhaps the confusion on this subject may be due to a deficiency in the traditional concepts and vocabulary. Moralists and scientists have assumed that whatever is not objective must be subjective, and vice versa. But may this not be equivalent to the assumption that whatever is not day must be night, or whatever is not black must be white? Just as there is a twilight zone between day and night (which cannot, except arbitrarily, be said to be either), and just as there are an infinite number of possible shades and colors between black and white, may there not be a twilight zone, or even a third category, between the objective and the subjective?
5. The Multifaceted Nature of Value
The difficulties in which we seem to have become involved are, I suggest, the result of inadequate analysis. Nearly all philosophical discussion has hitherto assumed that whatever is not “objective” must be “subjective,” and vice versa; that these categories are exhaustive, and that they are also mutually exclusive.
In brief, because values are relational, they can be either objective or subjective, individual or social, depending on the point of view from which they are regarded. There is no contradiction in this, any more than there is in saying that the same object may be to the left or to the right, above or below, depending on the position of the observer.
The reader must keep in mind, however, that when we call value “objective” we are using that predicate in a special sense. We mean that a valuation is not necessarily peculiar to one individual, but that it can be shared by others—even, in effect, by a whole society. But an “objective” value in this sense is not a physical property. Value, in fact, is not a properly of an object at all. Nor are good and bad properties of objects or actions. They are relational predicates. They express valuations in the same way as do such words as valuable and valueless. They express a relation between the valuer and the thing valued. If the valuer is an individual they express a “subjective” value. If the valuer, by implication, is society as a whole, they express an “objective” value. The tacit assumption that good referred to a property of a thing or that right referred to a property of an action—the failure to recognize that these words simply expressed valuations—was the basic fallacy of G. E. Moore and the early Bertrand Russell. Moral philosophers have been taking half a century to grope their way out of that fallacy.
6. Can Value be Measured?
We come now to the final major problem of value in ethics. Each of us is constantly seeking to bring about what he regards as a more satisfactory state of affairs (or a less unsatisfactory state of affairs). This is another way of saying that each of us constantly seeks to maximize his satisfactions. And this again is but another way of saying that each of us is constantly seeking to get the maximum value out of life.
Now the word “maximum” or “maximize” implies that values or satisfactions can be increased or added together to make a sum—in other words, that values or satisfactions can be measured, can be quantified. And in a sense they can be. But we must be careful to keep in mind that it is only in a special and limited sense that we can legitimately speak of adding, measuring, or quantifying values or satisfactions.
Even when we are talking of exchange values, or of the relative valuations of an individual, in short, we can never know these more than approximately. We can know when an individual values sum-of-money A less than commodity B; it is when he actually pays that much for it. We can know when he values sum-of-money A more than commodity B; it is when he refuses to pay that much for it. If a man refuses $475 for a painting but accepts $500, we know that he values the painting (or valued it) somewhere between $475 and $500. But we don’t know exactly where. He never values it at precisely the price he accepts; he values it at less: otherwise he would not have sold. (Of course he may believe that the “real” value of the painting is considerably more than what he is “forced” to accept; but this does not change the fact that at the moment of sale he values [for whatever reason] the sum received more than the painting he parts with.)
Psychic values can never be measured in any absolute sense, even when they are “purely economic.” To the unsophisticated layman it may seem obvious that a man will value $200 twice as much as $100, and $300 three times at much. But a little study of economics, and particularly of “the law of diminishing marginal utility,” will probably change his mind. For it is not merely true that a man who will pay, say, $1 for a lunch will probably refuse to pay $2 for double portions. The law of diminishing marginal utility works, though not so quickly and sharply, even with the generalized or “abstract” good called money. The diminishing marginal utility of added monetary income will be reflected in practice by a man’s refusal to make proportionate sacrifices—e.g., to work proportionately longer hours (though these of course will have an increasing marginal disutility)—to earn it.
Those who think that we can make an exact “hedonistic calculus” are mistaken, but they are at least dealing with a real problem which those who talk vaguely of “higher” and “lower” pleasures, or who insist that values or ends are “irreducibly pluralistic,” refuse to face. For when it comes to choosing between a “large amount” of a “lower” pleasure and a “small amount” of a “higher” pleasure, or among “irreducibly pluralistic” ends, how do we make our choice? Either these pleasures or ends must be commensurable, or they must at least be comparable in such a way that we can say which is greater and which less.
When we say, in short, that our aim is always to “maximize” satisfactions or values, we mean merely that we are constantly striving to get the most satisfaction or value or the least dissatisfaction or “disvalue”—though we can never measure this in exact quantitative terms.
And this brings us back again to the great goal of social cooperation. Each of us finds his “pleasure,” his happiness, his satisfactions, his values, in different objects, activities, or ways of life. And social cooperation is the common means by which we all forward each other’s purposes as an indirect means of forwarding our own, and help each other to achieve our individual and separate goals and to “maximize” our individual values.
7. The Pushpin-vs.-Poetry Problem
We are now in a position to solve more fully a problem that we touched on in Chapter 5.
Bentham’s famous dictum: “Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry,” was deliberately written as a shocker. One of those it shocked was John Stuart Mill, who tried to rescue Utilitarianism from its supposed philistinism by insisting on a qualitative difference between “higher” and “lower” pleasures.
What troubled Mill in ethics was the same “paradox of value” that baffled the classical economists. Why was “gold” so much more valued in the market than “bread,” or “platinum” than “water,” when bread and water had an infinitely higher “usefulness”? The classical economists were confused because they were unconsciously comparing “gold” and “bread” in general, and forgetting that what was exchanged on the market was definite quantities, specific units of gold and bread. When something of vital importance, like water, is abundant, the marginal value of a small unit is very low; when something of much less total importance to humanity, like platinum, is very scarce, the marginal value of a small unit is very high.
This discovery of marginal-utility economics supplies the key to the solution of the value problem in ethics. A man does not choose between pushpin-in-general and poetry-in-general. He is not forced to choose between abstract classes of activities at all. And certainly he is not forced to make any exclusive or permanent choice among activities. When he is satiated with poetry he can turn for a moment to pushpin. When he has had his fill of golf he can turn to Goethe, and vice versa. So Bentham’s dictum becomes defensible if amended to read: “Marginal satisfaction being equal, a unit of pushpin is as good as a unit of poetry.” A man need not lose intellectual or moral stature if he occasionally turns to something trivial. Marginal value being equal, an hour of tennis is worth an hour of Tennyson.
