I believe the question of the ontological status of values is behind much of the controversy, among theoreticians, over values. The following discussion is my first effort to think through this question. I offer it only as suggestive of an intellectual strategy to answer the question. I am not certain that it shall represent where my thinking will be in six months. I define values as in two earlier discussions, here and here.
In what sense can values be said to exist? The answers offered to this question tend to follow existing common sense and philosophical positions (which we have already explored; see links above). Scientific thinkers say that values exist only as expressions of the human mind, that is, as feelings and ideas. Values have no independent, necessary, or physical existence. A value, such as a standard of social conduct ("Do not kill noncombatant women and children in warfare"), is an idea or conception; it is not an independently existing material object, like a chair. From this point of view, values are subjective phenomena.
Religious thinkers believe that some values are created by God. These values - call them spiritual values - exist, but they do not exist in the same way that material entities, such as people and chairs, exist. They do not have a location in space or material dimensions. We do not know them by sensory observation, as I would know that a chair is in my room by looking at it and seeing its position on the floor, its shape, colors, and the fabric of its seat cushion. Values exist independently of our existence as humans and independently of the physical world. They are not innate knowledge. We become acquainted with these divinely-created values as we are religiously enlightened. We experience spiritual values with our mind as ideas, but the values are not products of the mind. For religious persons, spiritual values are objective. All religious persons will learn of them. A spiritual value exists is essentially the same all persons, though it might be expressed or phenomenologically received differently.
The Hebrews of the Old Testament received values by revelation from God as contracts that they maintained orally and eventually wrote down. Their religious values exist in a material form, just as any written laws exist. Social scientists reject this answer, however, since the origin of their values was supernatural.
A secular version of spiritual values is called Idealism. Secular idealism traces its roots, in Western thought, to the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. The Christian religious philosophy of values draws much inspiration from the Platonic tradition in its own theory of values. Idealists argue that values exist as perfect conceptions of, for instance, justice. Persons apprehend these conceptions by thinking and apply them to practical situations by reasoning. As with divine values, secular ideals cannot be said to exist in a material way; but we testify to their existence, somehow, every time we think about them.
Modern philosophers and scientific theorists have tried to invent new ways to think about values, in an effort to break out of the traditional dichotomy between subjective values and objective values. Most of these efforts have failed to obtain general public acceptance, perhaps because religious institutions remain important, in the United States especially, in promoting their theory of religious values. As a result, philosophical and scientific theories about values have tended to diminish the importance of values as an explanation of anything. In the social or behavior sciences, values are today just one, among many, ways of explaining how people guide or rationalize their behavior. In this role, values are subjective phenomena of psychological nature.
The social sciences should provide an opportunity for new ways of thinking about values as objective, non-mental phenomena. One opportunity is provided by the concept of the population, or, to be more precise, by analogy to the concept of the population. When the population concept was developed in the eighteenth century in Adam Smith's concept of the free price market economy, it added a new kind of thing to the universe. Not only are there material objects and people with consciousnesses in the world, there are also interactive social systems. The free economic market place with price determining supply and demand exists independently of any particular individual or participant. The market place is an example of a population system that is maintained by contradiction (i.e., competition), rather than by agreement. It has its own mathematical laws that describe its states and processes. It's presence can be observed. Darwin adopted the concept of population to re-define a biological species as a reproductive population with natural selection (in the place of price) determining the evolution of species. In the evolutionary synthesis, as it emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, the species gets defined in terms of the gene pool. The gene pool is all the genes carried by all organisms interacting through reproduction. Natural selection determines determining the direction of accumulation of genes, that is, of evolution. The population has its own laws and can be observed.
The social sciences in America made use of the population system concept in the 1940s and 1950s, but these theoretical developments were largely set aside when social scientists fell under the spell of anthropology and the concept of culture in the 1960s and 1970s (values had not been absent from their previous work). Values are central to culture, in anthropological theory; but the way in which values work culturally, from the point of view of a person holding them, is philosophically awkward. Culture represents a consensus or agreement on values by the members of the culture. The problem is that behavior based on agreement and sharing attributes of habit does not make the values, supposedly guiding the behavior, conscious to the persons involved. When things are going our way, we are not particularly aware of our values. When scientists observe a consensual society, they have to infer indirectly from patterns of behavior the presence and agency of values (supposedly) held by members of the society.
Persons become aware of their values when their values are contradicted. By contradiction, I mean simply that the behavior expressing the values somehow fails to secure its goal. The behavior could fail accidentally because of circumstances. It could fail because someone else thwarts our efforts. Social contradiction occurs because of accidental failure, opposition, conflict, competition (such as competitive bidding in a market), violence, and many other reasons. When our behavior fails, we become aware. If I habitually pay $1 for a newspaper, I do not think about the values by which reading the news in the newspaper makes the purchase price acceptable. If some other person at the news stand offers the dealer $2 for the newspaper, supposing it to be the remaining copy, I will then think about whether I want to pay more for it in a counter-bid. Contradiction makes us scrutinize our assumptions, our values, and the circumstances. When we choose an altered behavior or course of action, we might well select from a different value to guide our choice of means and ends. As this brief schematic indicates, we become aware of our values in moments of contradiction when we must turn to the values to make decisions on courses of action.
Values are features, symptoms, and products of systems of social behavior in which contradiction exists. Politics in a free, democratic society can be analyzed in social system terms. Public decisions will be made in arenas in which opposition, that is, contradiction, operates. One party will propose a certain policy; a different party will counter with a different policy. When contradiction occurs, they refer to their values to justify and rationalize their policy choices. Citizens of the political society will become aware of their values in this population system held together by opposition, competition, and conflict. We see this process in operation, for instance, in the American debate over reforming social security and in the Israeli debate over abandoning settlements in Gaza.
How might this scenario answer the ontological question of values? Values would be entities (for want of a better term) in social systems maintained through social processes of contradiction. They would have objective, real existence as social entities, since such systems have objective, real existence. They could be studied by direct observation. Because such values would be objective, rational deliberation about them would be possible. Evidence of such rationality is all around us today. Indeed, rational discussion of values is one of the results of free, democratic political systems with oppositional parties.
In this scenario, values would not be subjective states, though they would be known by persons subjectively, in the popular sense of the term. We would know a value in the way we know a chair is in the room - by observing it and recognizing it in private mental processes of awareness. Social processes of contradiction would manifest the values to participants. Values could be studied by introspection and scientific observation, as well as by third-party observation.
This social system concept of values is significantly different from both traditional phenomenological theory and cultural theory of values. It would return social science theory to - what I consider to be - the unfinished agenda of 1950s structural-functionalism in the study of values. What properties would system values in a general way have? How would be the phenomenology of values work in participants in the system; that is, what general features would exist in the way values manifest themselves to people? How adequately would such a conceptualization explain existing evidence about values?
Contents
- Ontological Status
- Values as Expressions of Contradiction
- New Categorization of Values
- Perception of Values
- How Fundamental Values Arise
Revised. May 25, 2005.
Update. May 18, 2008. In this article, I label "values" as "entities". I would now change that label to "objects". As I am arguing in the Values Journal that values are perceived by the senses, and senses only sense physical objects, values would therefore be objects. (Spatial fields, as in 'an object in a field', are not directly perceived, but are constructed by the brain by locating objects in frames. [I believe I am correct in this understanding.])
I'll take the bait because I find your take on things plausible & interesting. Let's agree: analogies may or may not work in establishing ontological status. [I think that's what they call an "intuition pump."] Numbers don't exist & neither does Santa Claus, but I can't prove anything specific about either by talking about the other. "The social sciences should provide an opportunity for new ways of thinking about values as objective": you astutely used the more modest term "opportunity" (I notice you also threw in "should").
Are you using the term "rational" (as in "rational discussion of values") in the same sense as you would in a case of "rational discussion of geographic location"? Can we say a member of a warrior culture (where a bar mitzvah involves murder) is irrational in the way someone who thinks California is near Pittsburgh is irrational? Or is there some slippage in the relationship between truth, evidence & justified belief?
Terrific site, kudos.
Posted by: David Lane | April 10, 2009 at 12:55 AM