Value

Are values nothing more than priorities and preferences, or is there something deeper at work?

Comments

Some philosophers do think that moral and aesthetic values (right, wrong, good, evil, beauty, ugliness) are reflections of proper or correct priorities and preferences. It is proper to prefer compassion, for example, over cruelty. Some seek to articulate the best values in terms of those things (acts, events, properties) that would be approved of by an ideal observer. There are, however, more skeptical philosophers who think values are neither (in some objective sense) proper or improper except in terms reflecting what individuals or communities happen to prefer. This is sometimes a part of what has been called "error theory" because it claims that most people who are committed to moral (aesthetic / religious) values are in error when they take such values to be objectively binding. J.L. Mackie takes up such a stance in the book Ethics; Inventing Right and Wrong. I personally suggest Mackie's position is deeply problematic and the same reasons he offers to be skeptical about the objective validity of ethics could be applied about the objective validity of evidence relationships (or epistemology) and the latter would be (again, in my view) highly implausable.

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