value of a variable See ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT,. VARIABL. value theory, also called axiology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of value and with what kinds of things have value. Construed very broadly, value theory is concerned with all forms of value, such as the aesthetic values of beauty and ugliness, the ethical values of right, wrong, obligation, virtue, and vice, and the epistemic values of justification and lack of justification. Understood more narrowly, value theory is concerned with what is intrinsically valuable or ultimately worthwhile and desirable for its own sake and with the related concepts of instrumental, inherent, and contributive value. When construed very broadly, the study of ethics may be taken as a branch of value theory, but understood more narrowly value theory may be taken as a branch of ethics. In its more narrow form, one of the chief questions of the theory of value is, What is desirable for its own sake? One traditional sort of answer is hedonism. Hedonism is roughly the view that (i) the only intrinsically good experiences or states of affairs are those containing pleasure, and the only instrinsically bad experiences or states of affairs are those containing pain; (ii) all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pleasure than pain are intrinsically good and all experiences or states of affairs that contain more pain than pleasure are intrinsically bad; and (iii) any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically good is so in virtue of being pleasant or containing pleasure and any experience or state of affairs that is intrinsically bad is so in virtue of being painful or involving pain. Hedonism has been defended by philosophers such as Epicurus, Bentham, Sidgwick, and, with significant qualifications, J. S. Mill. Other philosophers, such as C. I. Lewis, and, perhaps, Brand Blanshard, have held that what is intrinsically or ultimately desirable are experiences that exhibit ‘satisfactoriness,’ where being pleasant is but one form of being satisfying. Other philosophers have recognized a plurality of things other than pleasure or satisfaction as having intrinsic value. Among the value pluralists are Moore, Rashdall, Ross, Brentano, Hartmann, and Scheler. In addition to certain kinds of pleasures, these thinkers count some or all of the following as intrinsically good: consciousness and the flourishing of life, knowledge and insight, moral virtue and virtuous actions, friendship and mutual affection, beauty and aesthetic experience, a just distribution of goods, and self-expression.
Many, if not all, of the philosophers mentioned above distinguish between what has value or is desirable for its own sake and what is instrumentally valuable. Furthermore, they hold that what is desirable for its own sake or intrinsically good has a value not dependent on anyone’s having an interest in it. Both of these claims have been challenged by other value theorists. Dewey, for example, criticizes any sharp distinction between what is intrinsically good or good as an end and what is good as a means on the ground that we adopt and abandon ends to the extent that they serve as means to the resolution of conflicting impulses and desires. Perry denies that anything can have value without being an object of interest. Indeed, Perry claims that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘Interest is taken in X’ and that it is a subject’s interest in a thing that confers value on it. Insofar as he holds that the value of a thing is dependent upon a subject’s interest in that thing, Perry’s value theory is a subjective theory and contrasts sharply with objective theories holding that some things have value not dependent on a subject’s interests or attitudes. Some philosophers, dissatisfied with the view that value depends on a subject’s actual interests and theories, have proposed various alternatives, including theories holding that the value of a thing depends on what a subject would desire or have an interest in if he were fully rational or if desires were based on full information. Such theories may be called ‘counterfactual’ desire theories since they take value to be dependent, not upon a subject’s actual interests, but upon what a subject would desire if certain conditions, which do not obtain, were to obtain. Value theory is also concerned with the nature of value. Some philosophers have denied that sentences of the forms ‘X is good’ or ‘X is intrinsically good’ are, strictly speaking, either true or false. As with other forms of ethical discourse, they claim that anyone who utters these sentences is either expressing his emotional attitudes or else prescribing or commending something. Other philosophers hold that such sentences can express what is true or false, but disagree about the nature of value and the meaning of value terms like ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘better’. Some philosophers, such as Moore, hold that in a truth of the form ‘X is intrinsically good’, ‘good’ refers to a simple, unanalyzable, non-natural property, a property not identical with or analyzable by any ‘natural’ property such as being pleasant or being desired. Moore’s view is one form of non-naturalism. Other philosophers, such as Brentano, hold that ‘good’ is a syncategorematic expression; as such it does not refer to a property or relation at all, though it contributes to the meaning of the sentence. Still other philosophers have held that ‘X is good’ and ‘X is intrinsically good’ can be analyzed in natural or non-ethical terms. This sort of naturalism about value is illustrated by Perry, who holds that ‘X is valuable’ means ‘X is an object of interest’. The history of value theory is full of other attempted naturalistic analyses, some of which identify or analyze ‘good’ in terms of pleasure or being the object of rational desire. Many philosophers argue that naturalism is preferable on epistemic grounds. If, e.g., ‘X is valuable’ just means ‘X is an object of interest’, then in order to know whether something is valuable, one need only know whether it is the object of someone’s interest. Our knowledge of value is fundamentally no different in kind from our knowledge of any other empirical fact. This argument, however, is not decisive against non-naturalism, since it is not obvious that there is no synthetic a priori knowledge of the sort Moore takes as the fundamental value cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear that one cannot combine non-naturalism about value with a broadly empirical epistemology, one that takes certain kinds of experience as epistemic grounds for beliefs about value. See also ETHICS, EUDAIMONISM , HEDONISM , MOORE , VALU. N.M.L.