what does it mean to say that something has value? A common and apparently sensible starting point is to reply that it either means that some person(s) value it (or could value it) or that it is valuable. Yet what might seem like a straightforward choice between two plausible starting points turns out to be the source of an ancient and intractable problem—“the Euthyphro problem” from Plato’s dialogue of that name. In our terms, the question is whether we value something because it is valuable or whether something is valuable because we value it. The Euthyphro dilemma bears not just upon understanding the concept of value but also upon the sort of thing (in metaphysical terms) we take it to be. Nevertheless, we shall see presently that there is a pragmatic approach to this problem that can help us at least avoid or defer it.
At least one apparently uncontroversial claim is that whatever else value might be, it is goodness or “the good.” This seems to point us in the direction of explaining why we seek value out, why we are motivated to pursue it. And this observation, in turn, underpins several of the better-known accounts of value. According to a simple version of hedonism, goodness is nothing more than pleasure (and badness is nothing more than pain or suffering). Put this way, hedonism will be familiar to many of us from the role it plays in the classical versions of utilitarianism developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, according to which the morally right action is whatever brings about the most good (defined in terms of pleasure).
However, the definitional question is now merely moved back a step, since defenders of hedonism then have to say what pleasure is—a task that is more complicated than it might seem. Mill, for example, acknowledged that there are different kinds of pleasure that plausibly have greater or lesser value, although this is a contentious claim. (Is the pleasure one gets from watching televised soccer the same in kind as the pleasure one gets from watching an experimental film? Are they comparable? We return to this sort of question below.) Hedonism perhaps seems more plausible in its negative formulation that takes badness to be pain and emphasizes its avoidance. However, the positive formulation, especially, has been subjected to much of the sort of criticism one would expect to see leveled at a theory that equates value with pleasure (e.g., it regards as good or valuable the drug addict’s high, the sadist’s torture of his victim, Schadenfreude, a “pleasurable” life plugged into “the Matrix,” and so forth). In the present context, it is worth noting that hedonism is premised upon a kind of psychological individualism. In principle, hedonism allows for the possibility of overall goodness as an aggregate of the pleasures experienced by multiple individuals; but there is, apparently, no possibility of a collective or common good that does not ultimately reduce to individual states of pleasure.
One might raise a similar worry with regard to another of the central accounts of value—namely, desire accounts. Very roughly speaking, desire accounts of value characterize the valued or valuable as that which is desired or desirable. As Thomas Hurka explains, desire accounts are popular in part because “they seem to simplify the metaphysics of value, making it not a mysterious addition to the universe but the product of human desires. They are democratic and make value comparatively easy to identify and measure” (2006, 363). In these regards, desire theories share the same attractive features of hedonism. Moreover, the more sophisticated desire theories at least appear to be able to avoid some of the objections we noted above by invoking the idea of a second-order desire. For example, according to David Lewis (1989), an addict “may hate himself for desiring something he values not at all. It is a desire he wants very much to be rid of…. We conclude that he does not value what he desires, but rather he values what he desires to desire” (1989, 115). Lewis then proposes to explicate the concept of value in terms of the act of valuing as second-order desiring: “Valuing is just desiring to desire. I say that to be valued by us means to be that which we desire to desire. Then to be a value—to be good, near enough—means to be that which we are disposed, under ideal conditions, to desire to desire” (1989, 116). Lewis’s so-called “dispositional theory of value” illustrates just how tight a connection there is between definitions of value and theories of (the nature of) value.
Let us briefly consider some objections to desire-based accounts of value with Lewis’s dispositional theory in mind as an example. One potential problem is that, like hedonism, such accounts seem premised on a sort of egoism—that is, on the idea that value is ultimately reduceable to what is valued at an individual level. But we might question if this is really the case, especially in societies that are not as individualistic as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) ones (Flanagan 2017). We can imagine, for example, a collectively-oriented society in which a single individual’s satisfaction of his desires (first- or second-order or otherwise) does not register as good in any respect if this undermines or detracts from the common good of the community (say, in the form of shame, dishonour, and so forth). Another problem, noted by Gary Watson in response to a similar second-order account of desire advanced by Harry Frankfurt in a different context, is that there is no reason to think one’s second-order desires should be especially privileged. Rather, it would seem that one can also “be a wanton, so to speak, with respect to one’s second order desires and volitions” (Watson 1975, 217). That is, one could desire what one does not value at the second order, as well as the first, and, indeed, the problem is recursive in nature so adding more “levels” will not solve it. Another way of putting this objection is to say that although desire-based theories of value boast the ability to acknowledge the diversity of ways in which people identify, desire, and realize what is good for them, this comes at the cost of not being able to acknowledge the wide variety of ways people can be mistaken or misguided about what is good.
Thus far, we have canvased some prominent analyses of value that seek to explicate the concept in terms of the act of valuing, and we have seen that there are forceful objections to all of them. There are many more accounts of value (perfectionist accounts, fitting-attitude accounts) that we cannot explore here. But one possibility we need to consider is that value (or goodness) simply is not the sort of concept that is amenable to further analysis in terms of other concepts. G.E. Moore, for example, held that “good” is a basic concept that is neither definable nor amenable to reductive analysis (2004 [1903]). That view might seem to be a dead end for understanding what value is, but, on the contrary, there are many concepts that we understand even if we cannot define them. Our understanding of such concepts is evident in the way that we use them in ordinary contexts.
This observation points us toward the pragmatic solution to the Euthyphro problem. Roughly speaking, the question raised by Socrates in this dialogue is whether the gods love an action because it is pious or whether an action is pious because the gods love it. In our terms, recall, the question is whether we value something because it is valuable or whether things are valuable because we value them. Now, what initially motivates Socrates’s question is the desire to know what piousness is, and his question assumes that such knowledge is essentially a matter of being able to define and describe the nature of piousness. So, it may seem we face a similar dilemma in attempting to say what value is. However, one might simply reject the assumption that knowledge of what value is and the ability to describe value necessarily requires one to provide a definition or an account of its nature. This is the point Peter Geach makes in his analysis of Euthyphro, in which he observes, “We know heaps of things without being able to define the terms in which we express our knowledge. Formal definitions are only one way of elucidating terms; a set of examples may in a given case be more useful than a formal definition (1966, 371). The upshot of this argument is that the best way of elucidating a slippery concept like value may simply be to point to and try to describe the way we use the term in language and conceive of the concept of value in our everyday practices.
In fact, this is what many, if not all, of the contributors do tacitly throughout the book. The book’s seven-section structure, too, suggests something about value that may seem obvious, but that is far from trivial: the evidence from our practices suggests that value is plural—that there are distinct domains of value that may not be reducible to a single kind of value (or good). We seek out aesthetic experiences, spiritual experiences, social encounters, interaction with the natural environment, and so forth in ways that indicate those experiences afford a plurality of goods. So, too, we create, seek out,
