Values and Value Judgments

1. Values Distinguished from Preferences

2. Types of Value and Value Judgments
3. Ethical Relativism
4. Good-Bad, Right-Wrong, and What One Ought To Do
5. Consequences, Harm, Improvement and Benefit
1. Values Distinguished from Preferences
The question of what is good or bad, better or worse, and more or less desirable is a
question of something's merit. It is a question of values and it calls for a value
judgment. A value judgment is any judgment that can be expressed in the form "X is
good, meritorious, worthy, desirable" or "X is bad, without merit, worthless,
undesirable."
The first point to consider is the difference between being desirable or worthy in some
respect, and simply being desired, liked or preferred by some person or group. This
distinction is crucial to my later discussion of ethical judgments and standards for
engineering practice. Consider the sentences below:
"I like fried peppers."
"I am unalterably opposed to having cats in the neighborhood."
These are statements of preference, that is of liking and disliking, rather than
judgments about whether something is good or bad in some respect.
Unlike a value judgment, the statement of a preference, such as "I like fried peppers,"
is a statement about the speaker. More specifically, it is a statement about the
speaker's feelings, views or attitudes toward the thing in question. Statements of
preference are false only if they are not true of the speaker.
It is normal to feel some repugnance at wrongdoing, but the strength of
one's feelings are not a reliable guide to the gravity of an offense. As people
mature they learn to distinguish between their feelings on a subject and their moral
judgments. For example, someone believe that, ethically speaking, shooting a person

is much worse than shooting a dog. However, if someone recently shot and killed his
dog, and he had never been personally acquainted with any person who was shot to
death, that person might have a much stronger emotional reaction when hearing about
the shooting of a pet than when hear about the murder of a person.
Like this speaker, a person may know the origins of her preferences and attitudes and
may give causal explanations in terms of psychological factors that have contributed
to their development. For example:
"We always served fried peppers at celebrations when I was growing up."
"When I was a young child, my closest friend was attacked by a cat.
Alternatively she may analyze her preferences to identify more precisely what it is she
likes or dislikes:
"I can't stand the sound of cats fighting."
Such a person may even give you reasons for thinking that what she prefers is
desirable or at least desirable for her, such as:
"Cats carry disease."
"I am extremely allergic to cats."
However, the speaker need not give any reasons for a preference. For some matters,
such as preferring one flavor of ice cream to another, people usually do not have
reasons for their preference. When you state your preference, you are stating your own
attitudes or feelings, not giving a reasoned judgment. A person may have a strong
preference for something without believing it fulfills some high standards or brings
about some good. He may not even know how he came to prefer what he does.
If something is claimed to be good or desirable, one makes a statement about the
thing that is claimed to be good, rather than about the person who likes it. As Aristotle
argued, and many subsequent philosophers have agreed, to say that something is good
or desirable is to say that it has qualities it is rational to want (in a thing of that sort).
For example, a good knife is one with the properties it is rational to want in a tool
with one blade used for cutting, such as being sharp, well-balanced and comfortable to
grip. To claim that something has the qualities that it is rational to want in a thing of
that sort is to claim that there are good reasons for wanting it.

Given the differences between value judgments and statements of preferences, you
may expect that others expect you to back up your judgments and preferences in
different ways. If you make a value judgment, others are likely to ask you for the
reasons you judge it rational to want (or not to want) whatever is the object of your
judgment. If, on the other hand, you merely state your preference, you need give no
further reasons for your liking or disliking. You may or may not have reasons
underlying your preference.

2. Types of Value and Value Judgments

There are different types of value and value judgments. Both works of art and
naturally occurring objects and events may be judged in terms of aesthetic value.
Words like "beautiful," "harmonious," "elegant" and "engaging" are terms of aesthetic
praise. Words like "ugly," "banal," "dull," "lopsided" are terms of aesthetic scorn.
Statements--both ordinary statements and statements in specialized areas of study-along with hypotheses, research studies, theories and designs for experiments are also
judged to be good or bad (or something in between) in terms of what are sometimes
called knowledge values or epistemic values. These include truth, informativeness,
precision, accuracy and significance. For example, research is regularly judged not
only by whether it reveals a relationship that is unlikely to have occurred by chance-that is, it reaches "statistical significance"--but also by its larger implications,
assuming its findings to be true. Research is also judged in terms of its fruitfulness,
that is, of the further lines of inquiry the research questions or results suggest.
Hypotheses are judged in terms of plausibility, the scope of the phenomena explained,
and testability.
Plans and strategies are common objects of prudential judgment. When someone
speaks of a good (prudent or effective) strategy or a bad (stupid, short-sighted) plan,
they are making a prudential judgment about the efficacy of the plan or strategy in
question, that is, whether it will achieve certain ends. Behind most prudential
judgments are other value judgments that certain ends are worth achieving. A special
case of an end that is generally assumed to be valuable and, therefore, something that
should not be casually jeopardized, is survival, either biological survival or survival as
a member of some group. A plan or idea is generally judged imprudent or stupid to the
extent that it neglects matters crucial to the biological survival of those involved (or,
by extension, to their continued membership in some cultural or organizational group,
to their career or economic well-being). People do speak colloquially of "survival
value." When two people disagree in their prudential judgments, they may be
disagreeing about what is risked in some course of action or whether that thing should

be put at risk. For example, in response to the warning "If you want to survive in this
organization, you will not report corruption, so it would be stupid to stick your neck
out," one might reason that one does not want to risk one's integrity by being part of a
corrupt organization. If corruption does permeate the organization so that reporting
wrongdoing will be punished, there might be more survival value in leaving than in
staying. In this case, one puts the maintenance of one's integrity ahead of continuance
with the organization.
The final type of value other than ethical value I will discuss is religious
value. The terms of evaluation include "sacred" and "holy" as contrasted
with "profane" and "mundane." Purely religious standards are often applied to people,
writings, objects, times, places, liturgies, rituals, stories, doctrines, and practices.
Religions that emphasize the importance of doctrine are called "doctrinal;" others
emphasize liturgy, the order of worship. Some religions understand life in terms of
sacred stories. Other religions emphasize non-liturgical practices, such as forms of
yoga or meditation, either for spiritual training or for their own sake. Some emphasize
care of less fortunate members. One emphasis may co-exist with others. (These
differences are noted because a surprising number of philosophers write as though
doctrine were the central element in religion. In fact, doctrinal issues are not the
central concern of many religions.) Some emphases change over time. For example, in
Judaism before the exile, a place--the Temple at Jerusalem--had central importance.
After the exile, when people could no longer go to the Temple, scripture--the Torah-became central.
Most existing religions, and all major world religions, have moral, or ethical,
standards which they apply to moral agents--to their character traits, motives or
actions. Religions vary in their relative emphasis on the development of spiritual and
moral virtues of individuals, on the realization of a particular kind of family or
community, and on the faith of people as a whole and its practice in community.
Confucianism puts great emphasis on the family, for example. Buddhism in contrast
emphasizes enlightenment of the individual. Judaism emphasizes the relation of the
whole people of Israel to God, and praiseworthy individuals are those who make the
relation between God and community flourish. Because Christianity emphasizes
individual salvation, it is generally regarded as more individualistic than Judaism,
notwithstanding a continuing emphasis on the community of the faithful or "the
Church." Islam emphasizes the duty to form an equitable society where the poor and
vulnerable are treated decently. (These are rough generalizations about each of these
major religions and does not take account of differences among branches of them.)
Although major religions do have ethical components, a religion need not have a
morality associated with it other than enjoining piety toward divine beings or forces,
especially if, according to that religion, divine beings or forces are amoral and
unconcerned with the behavior of humans toward one another.

There is not space here to examine all the many views about how the different types
of value relate to one another, but here are two examples: aesthetic criteria, such as
beauty and symmetry, are commonly held to enter the assessment of scientific
theories. Conversely, many argue that great art gives a profound insight into reality,
which brings aesthetic value close to religious, or perhaps scientific, value. So,
although I have distinguished various types of value here, it is an open question
whether there are fundamental connections among them.
Notice that all of the types of value discussed differ from market value. When one
assesses market value, one is not making a value judgment of what is good or bad in
some respect. Rather, one is simply determining the price at which the supply of an
item equals demand for it. For example, we all need breathable air for health and
survival--health is commonly regarded as a fundamental good. Since there is no
scarcity of air of breathable quality in most areas, no one needs to buy it. Therefore,
breathable air has no market value.
Just as valuable items, like clean air, may have no market value, so high "market
value" may attach to items that are not good by any reasonable standards. Market
value depends on the relation of supply and demand. So it may depend on the strength
of preference of those who have the means to pay for an item and the willingness of
those who have it or can make it, to sell it. An addictive and physiologically
destructive drug with analgesic or euphoric properties might have high market value.
Such a drug would not be "good" even in the sense of having properties it would be
rational to want in an analgesic or euphoric drug.

3. Ethical Relativism
"Ethical relativism" or simply "relativism" is used for several distinct views. First it is
used for a view, more precisely called "ethical subjectivism," that whether it is right or
wrong for a person to do a certain thing in a given situation is determined by whether
that person thinks is right or wrong, irrespective of the grounds for the person's moral
beliefs. This view represents ethics as a subjective matter lacking in objective
standards. It is difficult to have much of a discussion about reasons for thinking some
action is right or wrong if a person's moral beliefs determine whether it is right or
wrong for that person, and the beliefs themselves cannot be subjected to any external
moral or rational standards.
It is important to distinguish between ethical subjectivism and another view that also
is called "relativism" or "cultural relativism." Cultural relativism with regard to ethics
is the view that ethical judgments, rules and norms reflect the cultural context from

which they are derived and cannot be immediately applied to all other cultural
contexts. Cultural relativists put the burden of proof on those who think that they can
generalize from one social context to another.
Many, like philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Annette Baier, who do not consider
themselves relativists, argue that moralities are social products constructed by
particular people in particular societal contexts and must be understood in relation to
those societal contexts. For example, the Hippocratic oath specifies extensive duties
towards those who have taught one medicine. In this oath physicians pledge to respect
and care for their teachers as for their own parents. The societal context in which these
duties of physicians were formulated was very different from what it is in
industrialized nations today. It is implausible that the same duties should apply to
physicians in all societies, but this does not mean that they did not have validity when
the oath was first formulated. What makes the difference is not a person's opinion, but
the social reality in which the person participates.
One must cope with the social reality to be effective in it, regardless of one's ethical
assessment of it. Suppose that in one culture the person who is expected to educate a
child in certain respects is that child's father. Suppose further that in a second culture
the person who usually oversees that aspect of a child's education is the maternal
uncle. These factors may make a significant difference to how someone acting within
that culture might go about meeting a need of a child within that society. A teacher
who saw a child was having difficulty in the area of learning that is overseen by the
father in the first culture, and the uncle in the second culture, would be wise to try to
consult the father, if the child was from the first culture, or the maternal uncle if the
child was from the second. This has nothing to do with the teacher's moral belief
about who, if anyone, in a child's family ought to take care of these things. The
teacher may be from the first, or second or some third culture. Understanding how a
culture influences opportunities for effective action is objectively important for
understanding how to effectively carry out one's responsibilities.
Further there is a more modest relativism that recognizes the development of specific
ethical standards over time. So to judge an action in some other period by today's
standards, is simplistic, but this does not mean that the action can be criticized only by
the criteria commonly used in the other period. For example, informed consent for
medical experiments is a standard that has developed in the United States and other
industrialized democracies only since the Second World War. The implicit prior
standard was, "First do it [the experiment] on yourself." Someone who used the prior
standard conscientiously in 1940 is not subject to the same moral criticism as would a
person who tried reverting to that standard today. However, the informed consent is
arguably a superior standard; we would think highly of someone for seeking his
subject's informed consent for experiments in 1940.

4. Good-Bad, Right-Wrong, and What One Ought To Do

Ethical judgment of an act or a course of action can take the form of a judgment about
whether (or the extent to which) the action was a good or a bad thing to do. For
example, "signing the peace accord was a good (compassionate, responsible,
beneficial) thing to do." But ethical evaluation of an act can also be in terms of the
rightness (or wrongness) of the act, that is, whether (or the extent to which) it was "the
right thing to do." The two types of ethical judgment, good/bad and right/wrong, are
similar in some respects. The presence of "the" in the "the right thing to do" rather
than "a" in "a good thing to do" suggests that the "the right thing to do" was the only
morally acceptable response. However, speakers do not always mean that it was the
only acceptable response. Often a speaker uses the language of right and wrong if her
justification for the ethical judgment rests on an appeal to moral rules, rights or
obligations, often to the exclusion of any mention of the consequences of the act.
Speaking of good and bad things to do usually signals a consideration of the total
configuration of consequences, and perhaps of other moral constraints, such as
demonstration of virtues such as kindness or wisdom as well.
The term "ought" is sometimes used to mean what is desirable or advisable, other
things being equal. For example, "You ought to avoid bad company" means that other
things being equal, you should avoid bad company, rather than that there
are no circumstances in which you ought, ethically speaking, to be in the company of
morally corrupt people. Sometimes it means what is advisable, all things considered-as in "in these circumstances what you ought to do is start over." Often, as in the
above examples, when the general case is being discussed, "ought" without further
specification is understood as "necessary, other things being equal." When a specific
instance is being discussed, "ought" is understood as "ought, all things considered."
In this book, the term "ought" without further qualification should be understood as
according to a given case's generality or specificity. Therefore, if I am discussing a
specific case, "ought" without further qualification means "ought, all things
considered." If I am discussing a general type of situation "ought" without further
qualification means "ought, other things equal." The qualifiers "all things considered"
and "other things being equal" may be added in some contexts for clarity.
Moral and Amoral Agents
Acts, agents and the character or motives of agents are the objects of moral
evaluation. However, only certain agents have their acts, character or motives morally
evaluated. For example, the statement "the storm was responsible for three deaths and

heavy property damage" means that the storm caused these outcomes. Although the
storm was the agent of destruction, the actions of the storm are not subject
tomoral evaluation. The storm is not guilty of murder or even manslaughter. Those
whose actions, character and motives can be morally evaluated are called moral
agents. A competent and reasonably mature human being is the most familiar example
of a moral agent. In contrast, most "lower" (that is, non-human) animals are generally
understood to be amoral. Saying they are amoral is to say that morality is not a factor
in their own behavior, and, therefore, questions of morality are not appropriate in
evaluating them and their acts.
To say that lower animals are not capable of acting morally or immorally is not to
deny that there are moral constraints on the way moral agents should treat them.
Moral constraints on the way lower animals are treated is a matter of the
animals' moral standing, not their moral agency. I discuss moral standing in Part 2,
in the section Moral Obligations, Moral Rules and Moral Standing. Any moral agent
has moral standing, but the prevalent view is that some beings are not moral agents
yet have moral standing. For example, it is generally held that it is wrong to be cruel
to animals--even though they are incapable of moral action.
Although one can evaluate the behavior of amoral beings in other ways (as being
stupid or clever, instinctual or learned, adaptive or maladaptive), their behavior is
neither moral nor immoral, because those beings are incapable of considering moral
questions. Some animals, like pet dogs, do sometimes sacrifice themselves for
humans, but this behavior is (perhaps mistakenly) taken to be motivated by their
attachment to their owners rather than by moral considerations. Recall the earlier
discussion of the difference between emotions and ethical evaluation.
Human beings and human groups such as nations are the most familiar moral agents.
However, some other species, like porpoises, are often alleged to qualify as moral
agents, even though they are not human. The Planet of the Apes portrays apes as moral
agents. Science fiction often describes non-human extra-terrestrials as persons and
moral agents. Various religious traditions speak of beings, such as angels or dakinis,
who seem very much like people and count as moral agents. Humans may be the most
common example of moral agents, but they are not the only example.
Moral agents are not necessarily morally good individuals. They are those who can
and should take account of ethical considerations. Moral agents are those of whom
one may sensibly say that they are either moral or immoral, ethical or unethical in
contrast to the amorality of most other beings.
Common terms of moral praise for agents include "good," "a person of high moral
character," "virtuous." Particular character traits that are praised as moral virtues are

"kindness," "honesty," "courage," "bravery." Acts are judged as right and wrong
according to three criteria: the nature of the acts--e.g., "Murder is wrong;" the specific
circumstances of a particular act--e.g., "Arthur's unprovoked assault on Cecil was
wrong;" and the motives with which the agent committed the act--e.g., "Cedilla's
criticism was destructive and motivated by hostility rather than a sincere attempt to
improve performance."

5. Consequences, Harms, and Benefits

An action may help or harm someone either directly or indirectly. Someone is harmed
directly, for example, by being run over. A person is harmed indirectly if something
that she cares about or in which she has an interest is harmed or diminished. Values of
all sorts, then--not only moral, but also religious, aesthetic, epistemic, and prudential-are often relevant to moral considerations, because indirectly as well as indirectly
injuring or harming a person (benefiting a person) is morally significant.
When the consequences considered are ones that can be quantified, the formal
technique of cost-benefit analysis may be helpful in clarifying the tradeoffs involved
in exchanging one harm or benefit for another. (Of course, the same action may
produce both harms benefits. For example, some water purification measures
currently in use result in the introduction of minute quantities of carcinogens into the
water.) In cost-benefit analysis one compares different courses of action by
multiplying the probability that a given course of action will produce some
consequence by the magnitude of the harm (or benefit) of that consequence, and
comparing this quantity to the quantity resulting from alternative actions. For
example, one might compare business plans with respect to their success in acquiring
a substantial share of the market for one's product.
Cost-benefit analysis is technique for making tradeoffs among consequences (harms
and benefits) that can be represented as arithmetic quantities, such as number of
deaths, days of illness or monetary cost. The probability of some consequence is
multiplied by a magnitude representing the degree of harm (or benefit) of that
consequence. This quantity, the probability multiplied by degree of
harm, defines risk, in the technical sense. This notion of risk is a bit different from
the ordinary one.
"Risk" as the term is commonly used means a danger or hazard that arises
unpredictably, such as being struck by a car or capsizing in a boat. The
"unpredictable" element in the ordinary notion of risk links it to the notion of an
accident. The term "risk" is also used for the likelihood of a particular hazard or

accident, as when someone says, "You can reduce your risk of capsizing, by sailing
only in light or moderate winds."
Risk analysis, risk assessment, or risk management use the technical sense of "risk"
that is, the probability or likelihood of some resulting degree of harm. The harms (or
benefits) often considered are increased (or decreased) probability of death (mortality
risk) or monetary cost (or receipt). Engineering oversight for safety or environmental
protection often employ the technical sense of risk in contexts that have nothing to do
with accidents. Risk of illness and risk of death are often calculated for a person's
chronic exposure to some pollutant, for example. In the technical sense one focuses on
the resulting harm and not just the harmful event. So one would speak of the risk of
death by drowning or exposure as a result of capsizing, rather than simply of the risk
of capsizing. With this notion of risk one can compare, say, the average person's risk
of death from crossing the street with the average person's risk of death from cancer in
a given period, or the relative mortality risk of traveling a certain distance by
automobile and traveling the same distance by airplane. One can also compare the
risks associated with harms of different magnitudes. For example, consider two
monetary risks: the rather likely event of losing money in a broken vending machine,
and the rarer event of having one's money stolen in a holdup. In a some locales that
there is a greater risk of monetary loss from a malfunctioning vending machines than
from being held up and robbed.
Notice that use of the technical sense of risk requires that one be able to meaningfully
treat the resulting harms as arithmetic quantities (i.e., not only quantify them so as to
be able to rank order them, but assign the harms quantities that may be added and
subtracted). At the least this requirement usually results in considering one type of
harm, a type that can be so represented, and ignoring others. Assessment of the
magnitude harm of some event is notoriously difficult, to do in a way that is not
arbitrary, which is why the technique is most readily applicable to certain only to
certain kinds of harm. For example, in the case of monetary loss to vending machines
as compared with monetary loss to robbers, we did not consider the greater emotional
trauma associated with being held up. It would be a mistake to conclude that someone
was behaving irrationally in taking more precautions against being held up than
against using malfunctioning vending machines even if the risk of monetary loss to
the latter was greater.
Comparison of different sorts of harms or benefits is especially difficult, not only
because in a pluralistic society there are different notions of the good life and what
promotes or frustrates it, but because a specific harm will have different implications
for people in different circumstances. Consider whether is it worse to increase one's
chance of death by 25% or to be painfully disabled for ten years of one's life. When
such choices are made in healthcare we say that the individual patient has the right to

make them. Similar decisions, such as decisions about what risks to tolerate in order
to purify the public water supply must be made for the general population. When
using cost-benefit calculations in such cases, it is not possible to get meaningful
assessments of degree of harm an benefit. Instead what is often used is a measure or
estimate of the degree that each consequence would be preferred by most people,
converted to the dollar amount that people would be willing to pay to achieve the
benefit or avoid the harm. However, as we have already seen preferences are
subjective, and strongly influenced not only by value commitments and practical
circumstances, but by personal history. Therefore, measure of degree of preference is
not a measure of magnitude of harm or benefit. Furthermore, measuring harms and
benefits in terms of willingness to pay ignores the fact that people vary in the value
that money has for them (for example, because of their ability to pay.)
If the type of harm or benefit is held constant, and one can simply compares different
course of action all of which might lead to that state, it is not necessary to assign a
magnitude to the harm, one can simply compare the actions in terms of their
likelihood of producing that consequence. When the harm or benefit is held constant,
it is common to speak of "risk-benefit" rather than cost-benefit analysis. (Assessments
of those probabilities are often very difficult to make. The field of risk assessment has
developed many sophisticated mean for making these assessments. Such assessments
often raise subtle value questions by the way they focus attention on some
consequences rather than others. However, risk-benefit calculations avoid the crude
substitution of market preferences for judgments of harm and benefit.
There are, however, other morally significant matters that risk-benefit
calculations may obscure. One such question is whether some measure not
only reduces the net risk of harm or increases net benefits, but harms one group while
benefiting another. When those who are harmed are different from those who are
benefited, it is called "risk shifting." Even if the net risk is lessened, there is an
ethically significant question of the fairness of the transfer of risk. The responsible use
of cost-benefit and risk-benefit techniques requires a clear understanding of their
ethical limitations.