Philosophical Concepts of Value

Introduction

Value has been a fundamental issue in philosophy from the time of Plato, although the common usage of the term "value" in philosophy extends only back to the nineteenth century. Before that time, value were discussed in terms of the good, the right, beauty, virtue, truth, obligation, moral judgement, aesthetic judgement etc. The recognition that all these separate concepts are based on the same underlying structure led to the development of "value theory" through the works of such eminent philosophers as Lotze, Meinong, von Ehrenfels, and later Scheler, Nicolai Hartman, Perry, Dewey and Pepper. The common ground of concepts such as the good, the beautiful, the right is that they deal essentially with what ought to be, rather than with what is. This distinction between value (what ought to be) and fact (what is) pervades all of the social sciences and humanities and is the subject of considerable debate, most recently in the area of policy analysis.

The term value or values is used in a great variety of contexts and has many meanings in everyday language. Value can mean standards, beliefs, principles, moral obligations and social norms, but also desires, wants, needs or interests. Furthermore, value can also mean the worth, importance or significance of a thing or object of interest. This abundance of different meanings is not only found in ordinary speech, it is also evident in the usage of "value" in the social sciences and humanities.

As far as philosophy is concerned the term “value theory” is used in different ways. Firstly, it is used to encompass all the other fields of philosophy, like social, political, feminist and also the philosophy of religion — whatever areas of philosophy are deemed to encompass some “e...

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