The Right and The Good in General Value Theory.
The general theory of value appears to have arisen
from different sources, at points with opposing motives.
The earliest modern source was the Benthamite em-
phasis on measurement. For Bentham, value is, like
price in economics, the measure of a consignment of
pleasure or pain entering into decision. The theoretical
importance of this evaluative phenomenon was noted
above. It also had practical support in the existence
of a money economy in which things and services of
extremely diverse type and “use value” in consump-
tion, acquire a comparative “exchange value.” Eco-
nomic analysis of exchange value furnished the earliest
comprehensive model for a general theory of value.
It both provided concepts and inspired hopes of a
systematic account of human choices and preferences
in all fields.
A second source was the naturalistic continuation
of Hobbes' or Spinoza's account of good as the object
of endeavor, now seen in an evolutionary light. Generic
value would be the earliest or most rudimentary
response—the elective act of acceptance or rejection,
the exhibition of an interest, a pro- or con- attitude.
While some theorists reached such a broad base simply
by throwing all different forms into a common hopper
and postulating a value genus for the variety of value
species, others had clearly in mind the evolutionary
sketch of rising complexity on different integrative
levels beginning with an originally simple reaction. The
explanatory derivation of the complex would show how
the differentiated notions such as the right or the sense
of obligation arose out of the ordinary materials of
human sympathy in the reactions of men in groups
held together for survival. It was the functions they
performed in harmonizing or marshalling or integrat-
ing interests that kept them going. Darwin had himself
led the way by attacking the exaggeration of remorse
into some supernatural voice. It was, he said, just
different in degree from ordinary repentance, as agony
differed from pain or rage from anger.
Precisely the opposite motive operated in the idealist
generalization of value. For it the drawing together
of different kinds of categories into a single basic notion
of value was the sign of the characteristic mark of
spirit. The glimmer of the ideal now operative in bare
desire or selection, now in deliberate obligation, repre-
sented the same basic phenomenon.
Phenomenological approaches have sometimes gone
even farther than idealist philosophy in isolating a
separate domain of value. For example, Nicolai
Hartmann, in his Ethics, contrasts sharply the sensory
domain which science explores, the ontological domain
which includes both the religious and the general
metaphysical accounts of reality, and the axiological
or value domain which is self-sufficient and inde-
pendent, grasped by sensitive insight or intuition. It
has its own laws and its own structure. Ethics consists
in an exploration of the different values in this domain—
what ought to be, whether it exists or not, in all its
rich variety and often with conflicting possibilities. This
is the realm of the traditional good, broadly conceived
by the theory of value. Duty is the application and
selection under given conditions of the structure of
existence. It is, for Hartmann, a fundamental philo-
sophical mistake to argue that the structure of reality
determines value—for example, a religious teleology
in which God's will is therefore good. Hartmann attacks
Plato too for identifying the good and the real. Value
is the independent base for evaluating even the
ultimately real.
The relation of the right and the good in this new
framework of general value theory has shown, how-
ever, a variety comparable to that in the older tradi-
tion. At first sight, the value concept itself seems to
be wholly on the side of the good. The general ques-
tions asked are all of one type: the nature of the value
phenomenon, the meaning of “value,” the mode of
verifying value judgments, the mode of comparing
values. Yet as its very breadth carries it beyond the
moral domain to include aesthetic value, religious
value, economic value, and so on, some distinctive
mark is then required for the more limited province
of the moral. Sometimes this has been taken to be the
values of character, in the older tradition of virtue,
but perhaps more often there has been a reference to
the values that ought to be brought into existence under
given conditions. The ought thus becomes the distinc-
tive mark of the moral. Similarly, where value is
identified in terms of interest or desire or inclination,
the additional selective element, as in the contrast of
the desired and the desirable, carries the connotation
of what is worth desiring or ought to be desired. Some-
times the concept of the normative is used for the
selective or critical element; sometimes, however, the
term “norm” becomes rather descriptive of some pat-
tern of interest or desire, and “value” then carries the
connotation of the standard or the desirable. In
Hartmann's account, the tension of the ought is carried
into the heart of the good by construing value itself
as an ought-to-be. Similarly, in a quite different kind
of phenomenological approach—extending to value the
methods that Gestalt psychology found fruitful in the
study of perception—Wolfgang Köhler attempts to
identify a phenomenal quality of requiredness as a
generic element and interprets both aesthetic and
moral fittingness as special cases of it.
Whatever these skirmishes in the dialectic of no-
menclature, it is clear in general value theory that the
concepts represent rather functional differentiation in
the one material. The critical element lies in the com-
parative evaluation, and the question what one ought
to do or what is appropriate is readily translated into
what is the best thing to do. The contrast of the right
and good has lost its basic importance in general value
theory. Attention has shifted rather to the whole prob-
lem of the autonomy of the value domain, which,
interestingly enough, is indifferently termed the ques-
tion of the relation between the ought and the is, and
that between fact and value, as if they were the same
problem.
In more recent study of the language of morals, the
old sharper distinction reappears within the new
framework. A contrast is made between evaluation and
prescription, and the older problems of the relation
between the good and the right appear in the form
of the relation between value and obligation, once
again as major differences in categories.
