Concept of Values in Contemporary Philosophical Value Theory

The term "value" has a wide range of current usage in philospohy and the sciences. Descriptively, a man's "values" may refer to all his attitudes for-oragainst anything. His values include his perferences and avoidances, his desireobjects and aversion-objects, his pleasure and pain tendencies, his goals, ideals, interests and disinterests, what he takes to be right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, his approvals and disapprovals, his criteria of taste and standards of judgment, and so forth. Parallel to this descriptive usage lies the realm of normative usage. Men not merely have values; they also make value judgments assessing their values. For in every self-conscious choice that the individual makes, in every creative act as well as every criticism, whether economic, moral, aesthetic, or any other, there are assumptions about what is desirable as well as desired, preferable as well as preferred, appropriate standards as well as functioning standards, and so forth. The same is true of social decisions, even as embedded in the normal functioning of social institutions and agencies.