Theory of Value

On Values In Logic

“We may hold, finally, that the whole of logic is presided over by a number of values and disvalues which are seldom explicitly acknowledged, and hardly ever argued about.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 54.

Values and Disvalues

“Values and disvalues are as much an indefeasible part of the phenomena, of the world we live in, as are the cold objects that assault our senses, and the insensibility of most bodies to the darkly ignoble or glorious things that take place among them, is itself an incredible even nonsensical phenomenon, one that forces us to locate our world in a wider setting.” The Discipline of the Cave, p. 155.

On Systematic Axiology

It is not illuminating to treat the ordering of values like the topography of the moon which can be established by simply training a telescope on one’s object, or, more satisfactorily, by going there.  The sort of values that one is concerned to establish in a systematic axiology are ineluctable, framework values, things presupposed in all rational choice, and indispensable to a complete account of anything whatsoever (Axiological Ethics, pp. 79-80). 

On Values and One's Vocation

We are not free to determine the points of the compass in the realm of values, but remain free, within wide limits, to steer a course among them (Axiological Ethics, p. 90).

On the Infinite Regress of Values and Other Minds

Obviously...the beings who often perform whatever may be meant by putting themselves into other people's shoes, and who have acquired some skill and zest in this performance, must in the end tend to move to a new, higher level of interest where what they concern themselves with is not what this one or that one likes or is interested in, but only with what survives all such laborious translation of oneself into everyone else's shoes, so that one then, at that level, only desires and likes what everyone must desire and like, and desire and like for everyone, and desire and like everyone to desire and like for everyone, and so on in unending complication (Axiological Ethics, p. 84).

On the Limitations of "Obligation" Ethics

That it would be 'rather fine' or 'somewhat shabby' to do something, which it is none the less not a matter of strict obligation to do or avoid, is an idea as common in ordinary ethical discussion as it is ignored by philosophers...

It remains fairly clear always what it would be better or worse to seek to realize, while it is always maddeningly unclear what one is obliged to do.

The obligatory...has a much closer relationship with the undesirable and the evil than with the desirable and or the good.  We are obliged to do things mainly because certain grave evils would otherwise befall, and not merely to realize what is positively good (Values and Intentions, p. 21).

What is worthwhile per se or the contray is, of course, something having the closest possible relation to what ought to be done, but nevertheless not so close as to not leave it possible to assert the existence or possibility of worthwhile or unworthwhile things having little or no relation to what ought to be done.  The field of ethics presupposes the field of axiology, but the latter, arguably, stretches out beyond the limits of the former (Axiological Ethics, pp. 3-4).

It is of supreme importance that in axiological considerations we should never assume that disvalues are in any sense the mirror-image of values, that the absence of goodness is automatically very bad, or the absence of badness deeply good, etc., or that the principles governing valuation and disvaluation are in any way closely parallel (Axiological Ethics, p. 8).

Values and Contradiction

What is good, [Nicolai] Hartmann tells us, necessarily lies in a large number of incompatible directions, and it is intrinsically impossible that all of these should be followed out into realization. One cannot, for example, achieve pure simplicity and variegated richness in the same thing or occasion, and yet both incontestably make claims upon us, and ought both to be realized. The realm of values, in fact, always imposes a logically impossible task upon us: we are to achieve each and all of a large number of things which yet cannot all be achieved together…What is self-contradictory certainly makes no sense in theory: there are no states of affairs that can ever make it true.  But, contrary to what is generally thought, what is self-contradictory makes sense in practice: we are in fact obliged to strive towards value accommodations to which full reality can never be given.  Even Kant saw this when he held that only in eternity could we conform to the demands of the categorical imperative (Axiological Ethics, p. 73).

Thge Origin of Values in Mystical Unity

“All our higher valuations of impersonal benevolence, of justice, of knowledge, of beauty, of virtue are…attitudes having their roots in a transcendence of the separate individual and his contingent interests, and in a rise to higher-order interests which make an appeal to everyone and consider the state of everyone. The supreme dignity and authority of these valuations is much more understandable on a mystical than on an unmystical basis: a moralist like Schopenhauer, for example, bases all morality on a profound suprapersonal identity” ((The Logic of Mysticism, Ascent to the Absolute, p. 181).