What Do We Mean By "Value"?

 In 1942, American ethicist and philosopher Paul Weiss wrote, quite unequivocally mind you, “we are lacking in clear thought”. As I sit here pondering the loaded concept of ‘values’ in South Africa 73 years later, his words seem to have been remarkably proleptic.

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The word value seems to be readily used interchangeably with the related ideas of principles, ethics, price, and worth. To an extent, this is understandable because these are all so closely related to each other that the need to distinguish between them in everyday discursive acts- speech, writing and so on- becomes obsolete. Yet conceptual clarity demands that we go beyond the grey lines that don’t matter in daily casual conversation. The kind of clear thought Weiss is alluding to does not happen accidentally, arising from the cracks of life’s mundanity. It requires deliberate contemplation, a kind of intellectual chiselling that does away with the excess fragments in order to arrive at a vivid and coherent whole.

 However our collective idea of what ‘value’ constitutes is not at all uniform, and is far from being vivid or coherent. Simply, it is unclear. My attempt at thinking this theme through brought me to three Cs­ – broad reasons why the term seems at times to be a floating signifier.

Context

 I suppose it goes without saying that little if anything makes any sense outside of a particular set of circumstances that give it meaning. If I just hang the word ‘it’ in the middle of the line with no words before or after, it is nonsensical. There needs to be some kind of context that gives the word some sort of meaning. Of course, any meaningful discussion of the concept ‘value’ needs to be placed against a particular background, even if we are framing it ‘in the broadest possible sense’.

Thus, I would argue that the first problem has been the cowardly divorce of values from morality- the “concern with the distinction between good and evil”[1]. Indeed, morality is troubling: it requires one not only to take a stance but also to defend it, even when it means offending other people. In a sense it demands what is simply intuited to be explained with reason (another tricky term). The 17^th and 18^th century Enlightenment saw a shift away from absolutism, but it cannot and should not take with it essence. In avoiding inflexible dogma, in other words, we should not roll down the slippery slope of decontextualized relativism.
The context of the concept ‘value’, then, is our individual and collective conviction on what is right and wrong. Reconciling the two isn’t always easy but, in the end, necessary if we are to think clearly about what ‘value’ is, why we value what we do, and how we assign and measure that value.

         Continuum

What often emanates from decontextualization is fragmentation. Let’s call it the Jenga effect: remove one part from the whole and the integrity of the entire thing comes undone, resulting in collapse. Once we conceptually root value within the intangible but powerful context of morals, it becomes a more unified, fluid idea. Instead of it being a term that can be used for several things- price, quality, importance and so on, it becomes more coherent as a construct.  Values are a continuum, beginning from an internal conviction about right and wrong, evidencing themselves in what we think is good and bad, and then translating into how much we are willing to spend on something. This begins to make clearer when and how we commodify the activites, people, and objects that we do.  Simply, my values will be manifest in what I value , materially and otherwise. Of course, we don’t always act in ways that show what we value due to the curious human tendency toward self-destruction. But human nature is a topic for another article entirely.
This way of thinking about value(s), it seems to me, approaches a level of clarity that is otherwise elusive when we try to understand what value is outside of the context of morality.

Capitalism

 In the above I touched on our tendency in modern life to put a monetary value on everything. A few decades ago, for instance, it would have been almost absurd to imagine any marriage between altruistic philanthropy and for-profit investment. Yet since 2006 the buzzword ‘philanthrocapitalism’ does just that, attempting to combine the moral imperative of helping the needy with donors’ concerns about ‘social returns’- ostensibly a term for making a difference in society. The jury is out on the merits of this idea. In any case, the point is that almost anything can be thought of in terms of profit or a price tag.

We can scarce talk of this tendency towards commodification without talking about capitalism—that economic system in which means of production and wealth are largely controlled by individuals and corporations, both of which seek profit. There are of course no limits to the potential maximization of these profits in a free market economy. As such, when the opportunity to gain wealth arises, humans have been known to exercise their right to profit even to the detriment of the own wellbeing.

What is undeniable is that the (admittedly over-cited) logic of capitalism cannot be ignored in the aforementioned tendency to divorce morality from practise; the exploitative economic system needs to justify its creation and abuse of the have-nots, and we need to justify our otherwise perplexing bent towards selfishness when teamwork is clearly a winning formula.
Still, capitalism also has a right-and-wrong compass. A common misconception is that capitalism is itself devoid of any moral framework, but this is untrue. Capitalism too, as a system of organizing society, is based on moral convictions. As Russian-born novelist Ayn Rand once put it: “The moral justification for capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature…and that its ruling principle is: justice”. The problem arises in the continuum effect outlined in the previous section: if indeed the moral foundation of capitalism is the ‘rationality’ of humans, and that it is right to have a system that accommodates this, then it is indeed ‘right’ when inequality bows to profit, for it is rational to maximise it. Yet where is the justice in this?

All this makes it all the more compelling to leave the morality factor out of it so that it is not at odds with the profit imperative. Subsequently, it is easy to see how property can be assigned more value than, say, the right of a community to have access to fertile land. It does not have to be this way, neither is it always the case. I am merely illustrating the role of the way we organise our economy in adding to the dilution of what we may understand value to be.

Context, Continuum, and Capitalism are therefore three lenses that help us think more clearly, and even more creatively, about the concept of value. But, for crying out loud, what is the value of dedicating an entire article to understanding the term? Well, in the words of preeminent historian  David McCullough,

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly.

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[1] Advanced English Dictionary