Chapter 18: The Problem of Value

1. The Value of Value

Aldous Huxley, in his book Ends and Means (1937) and in some of his essays, was greatly troubled by what he thought was the verdict of "Science" regarding the existence of "Value." "Science," he thought, denied "value" and "meaning" in the Universe; yet "Science" must be wrong life, he asserted, does have "value" and "meaning."

Huxley was completely right in declaring that life does have value and meaning, but wrong in supposing that Science proclaimed the absence of such value and meaning. Only the bad metaphysical assumptions of materialism or panphysicalism did that.

It is merely a confusion of thought to assume that Science denies value. The physical sciences abstract from value, simply because that is not the problem with which they are concerned. Every science abstracts from a total situation or an infinity of facts simply the particular facts or the particular aspects of the situation with which it is concerned. This abstraction is merely a methodological device, a necessary simplification. For physics, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, mathematics, etc., human valuations, human hopes and fears, are irrelevant. But when human values are our subject matter, the case is different. And in all the "social sciences," in "praxeology," in the "sciences of human action" (1) human valuations -- human actions, decisions, choices, preferences, ends and means -- are precisely our subject matter.

Yet there is another possible course of confusion. Ever since Max Weber (2) it has been an established maxim that even the social sciences must be "wertfrei," i.e., free from judgments of value. But this means that no writer on these subjects is entitled to impose or smuggle in his own valuations. If he is an economist, for example, he must deal with the valuations that he finds in the market place as his ultimate data, or "givers." He studies how market prices and values are formed. He studies the consequences of given actions and given policies. But he takes the ends of people for granted, and asks only whether the means they adopt are appropriate or likely to achieve their ends. He does not, qua economist, either praise or condemn their ends, and he does not undertake to substitute his own scale of values for theirs. (3)

When we come to aesthetic values or moral values, however, the matter becomes more complicated. It seems to be precisely the function of the moral philosopher to evaluate moral judgments and moral values. For ethics seems to be not only a study of how people do value actions, means and ends, but of how they ought to value actions, means and ends. It may be true that there can be no dispute about ultimate ends. But this does not mean that there can be no dispute concerning what are "ultimate" ends and what are merely means or intermediate ends, and how appropriate or efficacious these means or intermediate ends are in achieving ultimate ends.

Putting the matter another way: Economics is concerned with the actual valuations that people make; ethics with the valuations they would make if they always had benevolence and foresight and wisdom. It is the function of the ethical philosopher to determine what some of these valuations would be.

In any case we need have no misgivings about the value of value itself. Values are, by definition, the only things worth while! There need be no apology for them, no uneasy effort to "justify" them. The function of science is to discover the objective truth about the universe, or some particular aspect of it. But the sciences exist only because men have already decided that the objective truth is worth discovering. Men have recognized that it is important i.e., valuable to know the objective truth. That is why they think it important that science, including the sciences of human action, should be "value-free." They insist on value-free science, in brief, because they find it more valuable than argument into which an author has insinuated his own personal prejudices or value-judgments. And though men are seeking for objective facts or truths, they are constantly deciding which facts or propositions, out of an infinite possible number, are worth finding or proving; and what objective knowledge, out of infinite possible knowledge, will best serve some human purpose.

The case has been eloquently put by Santayana:

Philosophers would do a great discourtesy to estimation if they sought to justify it. It is all other acts that need justification by this one. The good greets us initially in every experience and in every object. Remove from anything its share of excellence and you have made it utterly insignificant, irrelevant to human discourse, and unworthy of even theoretic consideration. Value is the principle of perspective in science, no less than of rightness in life. The hierarchy of goods, the architecture of values, is the subject that concerns man most. Wisdom is the first philosophy, both in time and in authority; and to collect facts or to chop logic would be idle and would add no dignity to the mind, unless that mind possessed a clear humanity and could discern what facts and logic are good for and what not. The facts would remain facts and the truths truths; for of course values, accruing on account of animal souls and their affections, cannot possibly create the universe those animals inhabit. But both facts and truths would remain trivial, fit to awaken no pang, no interest, and no rapture. The first philosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets who knew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the better to understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. Before their day, too, wisdom had spoken in proverbs. It is better, every adage began: Better this than that. Images or symbols, mythical or homely events, of course furnished subjects and provocations for these judgments; but the residuum of all observation was a settled estimation of things, a direction chosen in thought and in life because it was better. Such was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still. (4)

In sum, for human beings value not only "exists"; it is all important. It is the very standard by which we judge importance. All men act. All men seek to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory state. All men strive for definite ends. They wish to choose the most effective or appropriate means to achieve their ends. This is why they need knowledge -- knowledge of factual truth, knowledge of physical cause and effect, knowledge of science. All such knowledge helps them to choose the most effective or appropriate means for achieving their ends. Science, knowledge, logic, reason, are means to the achievement of ends. The value of science is primarily instrumental (though knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge are also valued "intrinsically" and for their own sake). But men's ultimate ends need not be justified by science; the pursuit of scientific knowledge is justified, for the greater part, as a means for the pursuit of ends beyond itself. Science must be justified by value, not value by science.

It is not Science, in any case, that denies value. It is only an arbitrary and unprovable metaphysical theory, it is only a philosophy of materialism, panphysicalism or logical positivism that attempts to deny value. (5)

2. Subjectivism vs. Objectivism

We come now to a problem that has been a source of immemorial perplexity and division of opinion in ethics. Is value "subjective" or "objective"? More often the problem has been framed in a somewhat different way: Is ethics (or are ethical rules) "subjective" or "objective"?

This dispute has proved so persistent, I think, partly because the answers have been oversimplified, and partly because the wrong questions have been asked (or, what is almost the same thing, because the wrong vocabulary has been used).

All valuation is in origin necessarily subjective. Value, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. All valuation implies a valuer. Valuation expresses a relation between the valuer and the thing valued. This relation depends upon the valuer's own needs, wants, desires, preferences, as well as upon his judgment regarding the extent, if any, to which the object valued will help him to realize his desires.

Objects or activities may be valued as means, or subordinate ends, or final ends. Activities or states of consciousness that are valued "purely for their own sake," as ultimate ends, are said by ethical writers to have "intrinsic" value. Though the term is widely used by ethical philosophers, it is troublesome to anyone trained in economics. Applied to an object, it implies that the value is in the object itself, rather than in the mind of the valuer, or in a relation between the valuer and the object. It is difficult, however, to find a satisfactory substitute for the term and the distinction it emphasizes. Objects or activities that are valued merely as means to ends may be said to have merely instrumental or derivative value. But many things -- promisekeeping, truth-telling, freedom, justice, social cooperation -- have both "instrumental" and "intrinsic" value.

The distinction between the two types of value in ethics is analogous to the distinction in economics between the value of consumers' goods and the value of producers' goods or capital goods. The value of capital goods is ultimately derived from the value of the consumers' goods they help to produce. Nevertheless, capital goods have the same kind of exchange value, the same kind of market value, as consumers' goods. A home, a dwelling, is a consumers' good: it is wanted for its own sake, for the direct needs it meets and the direct satisfactions it yields. A factory is a producers' good: its value is derivative: it is valued because of the value of the consumers' goods that it helps to produce, and therefore because of the monetary profit that it yields its owner. But though the value of the dwelling may be direct and "final" and "intrinsic," and the value of the factory is indirect, instrumental, and derivative, the factory has a value in the market just as the dwelling has, and may be saleable at a much higher monetary price. A final and "intrinsic" value, in brief, in the ethical as in the economic realm, is not necessarily a higher or greater value than a derivative or instrumental value. And many things, in the ethical as well as in the economic realm, can have both kinds of value. (6)

Let us return to the problem of subjectivity and objectivity in value. All valuation, to repeat, is in origin subjective. But here a major difficulty develops. My (subjective) opinions, estimates, valuations, and purposes are objective for you. And your (subjective) valuations and purposes are objective for me. That is, to me, your valuations are external facts with which I must deal (say in trying to sell something to you or buy something from you) as I am forced to deal with any other "objective" facts. And my valuations are "objective" facts which you must take into account as you would any other objective fact.

And just as you and I must deal with the valuations and attitudes of each other as objective facts, so each of us must deal, as objective facts, with the valuations and attitudes of all other people, or "society" as a whole. Prices in the market place are formed by the diverse valuations of individuals. They are the composite result of these diverse individual valuations. Our individual valuations have been, in turn, "socially" formed. And the market price is to each of us an objective fact by which he must guide his own actions. If the price of a house that you would dearly love to own is $25,000, this is the hard "objective" fact with which you must deal (even though this market price can be traced back to other people's subjective valuations). Unless you have or can get the $25,000, and unless you yourself (subjectively) value the house more than you (subjectively) value $25,000, you cannot or will not buy it.

And so, again, when the housewife goes to the supermarket to make her purchases, she is confronted with an enormous number of (to her) "objective" prices of different foods, different grades, and different brands, about which she must make her subjective decisions to buy or not to buy. But her own subjective decisions of yesterday (by resulting in objective actions) have helped to form today's objective prices, as her subjective decisions today will help to form tomorrow's objective prices.

So far we have been drawing our illustrations purely from the economic realm. But what is true of market prices and economic values is also true, though in a less precise way, of aesthetic, cultural, and moral values. The individual, in the whole range of his life and thought and activity, finds himself confronting and dealing with an infinitely complex set of social values. These are, of course, ultimately the valuations of other people; but the mutual relationship and causation are complex. Just as, in the economic realm, the infinitely diverse valuations of other people do not result in an infinite number of market prices, but, at a given time and place, just one market price for a given (homogeneous) commodity, a price that is the composite result of individual valuations, so in the political, aesthetic, cultural and moral realms we find ourselves dealing also with such composite valuations, which seem to have a life and existence of their own, and to stand apart from the valuations of any one individual. Thus we speak, and seem to be warranted in speaking, of the reputation of Beethoven, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare, of the sentiment of the community, of public opinion, of the moral tradition, or the prevailing moral code.

And this is certainly more, and something different from, a mere "average" of everybody's opinion or valuation. Each of us individually grows up, in fact, in a world of such social valuations, with a social moral code, which, like our language, had an existence prior to any of the individuals now living, and seems to have determined their thought and opinions rather than been determined by them.

Thus value, which is in origin individual and subjective, becomes social, and so in this sense objective. This is true both of economic and of moral values. The objective heating power of coal, for example, gives it "objective" value on the market. And the rules of ethics, of course, are objective in the sense that they must be acknowledged and followed by everybody. We cannot have an ethics for one man alone that is not also the ethics of other people. The rules of ethics demand general acceptance and conformity. Without this there would be complete ethical disorder, anarchy, and confusion. Thus moral values are subjective from one aspect and objective from another.

3. The Social Mind

There is nothing inexplicable or mysterious in all this. All mental processes are in the minds of individuals. There is no social "oversoul" which transcends individual minds. There is no social "consciousness" which stands outside of and above the consciousness of individuals. Yet social moral values are a product of the interplay of many minds -- including the minds of our long-dead ancestors. The individual is born into a world in which there already exists a Moral Law, which seems to stand above him, demanding the sacrifice of many of his impulses and immediate desires. There is, in brief, a realm of Social Objectivity, which seems to be set above the individual's own will and purpose.

This "social mind" is completely accounted for when all individuals (past as well as present) are completely accounted for. But it cannot be accounted for by considering these individuals separately. No individual is completely, or primarily, accounted for until his relations with the rest of society are analyzed. The individuals are in society, but society is more than the mere sum of the individuals. It is also their interrelations and interfluences. Men's minds function together, in a cooperative unity. Morality is the product of a cooperating society, the product of the interplay of many minds.

How this works out in the economic as well as in the moral realm has been brilliantly explained by the late Benjamin Anderson:

Economic value is not intrinsic in goods, independent of the minds of men. But it is a fact which is in large degree independent of the mind of any given man. To a given individual in the market, the economic value of a good is a fact as external, as objective, as opaque and stubborn, as is the weight of the object, or the law against murder. There are individual values, marginal utilities, of goods which may differ in magnitude and in quality from man to man, but there is, over and above these, influenced by them in part, influencing them much more than they influence it, a social value for each commodity, a product of a complex social psychology, which includes individual values, but includes very much more as well.

Our theory puts law, moral values, and economic values in the same general class, species of the genus, social value.... They are the social forces, which govern, in a social scheme, the actions of men.

It may be well to suggest rough differentiate which mark of these values from one another. Legal values are social values which will be enforced, if need be, by the organized physical force of the group, through the government. Moral values are social values which the group enforces by approbation and disapprobation, by cold shoulders and ostracism or by honor and praise. Economic values are values which the group enforces under a system of free enterprise, by means of profits and losses, by riches or bankruptcy. (7)

The only statement in the preceding quoted paragraphs which I might seriously question is that maintaining that social value influences individual values more than they influence it. But I would certainly agree that social value is more than a mere average or composite, and more than a mere resultant, of individual values. There is a two-way interaction, a two-way causation.

I hope the reader will forgive me if I stress once more the complex relation of the "individual" to "society." Society is not merely a collection of individuals. Their interrelations in society make them quite different from what they would be in isolation. Brass is not merely copper and zinc; it is a third thing. Water is not merely hydrogen and oxygen, but something quite different from either. What an individual would be like if he had lived completely isolated from birth (assuming he could have survived at all) we can hardly even imagine. If we did not have some experience of hydrogen and oxygen in their pure state, we could certainly not have deduced their nature from looking at water. We can hope to solve many social problems not by looking at them exclusively from either an "individualist" or a "collective" aspect, but by looking at each aspect alternately.

The complex two-way interaction of the individual and society is most impressively illustrated by the example of language. Language is a social product. It was not a gift to man from heaven. It did not suddenly spring into existence in a Tower of Babel. All its words and structure and meaning were contributed by individuals -- though very few, proportionately, by individuals in the present generation. Each of us now living grew up "into" a language already existing and functioning. That language has shaped each individual's concepts and values. Without it the individual could hardly think or reason at all. We think in words and in sentences -- in inherited, socially given, words and sentence structures. We improve and develop our thought by mutual exchange, by listening to words and sentences, talking words and sentences, reading each other's words and sentences. Language not only enables us to think as we do but, by the concepts that its words and sentences embody or suggest, almost forces us to think as we do. The individual is almost completely dependent on language.

And yet language is -- ultimately -- the product of the interplay and "interfluence" of individual minds. It would certainly be true to say that language has influenced any given individual more than that individual has influenced language. It might even be true to say that language has influenced the present generation more than the present generation has influenced language. But it would not be valid to say that language has influenced all individuals, past and present, more than they have influenced language. For it is they who created it.

And this applies also when we are discussing the moral tradition and moral values. The moral tradition in which we grow up exercises so powerful an influence that it is accepted by many people as "objective." And for any given individual it is objective, however subjective it may be in the sense that it originally developed and was formed by the interplay of individual human minds. Moral judgments do have objective binding force on the individual. And moral rules are objective not only in the sense that they call for objective actions but that they call for objective adherence by everybody.

4. The Solipsistic and the Shared

In brief, there is an element of truth on both sides of the subjectivist-objectivist controversy -- and an element of error on both sides. Subjectivists are right in contending that all moral judgments are in one sense subjective. But they are wrong when they go on to draw disparaging inferences from this -- to imply, for example, that they are "merely" subjective. For there is a profound difference between a subjective judgment, as any judgment is bound to be and a solitary or solipsistic judgment confined to a single individual. The latter might be merely the passing hallucination of an unbalanced mind. But a subjective judgment may be socially shared; it may be a judgment that is held in only slightly different form by the majority in a community, or even a judgment that is held generally and almost universally.

The Objectivists are right, on the other hand, in pointing out that all human acts have objective consequences. But they are wrong in assuming that these consequences are objectively "good" or "bad." They can only be good or bad in somebody's opinion.

The controversy between Objectivists and Subjectivists may take another form. There are "objectivists" who, like Kant, view morality as a matter of categorical obligation, independent of the human will, independent of consequences, inherent in the nature of things. And there are "subjectivists" for whom morality is merely the arbitrary opinion, emotion, or approval of some individual, not necessarily binding or valid for anybody else. We have already, in substance, examined both of these views. Neither can stand analysis.

To sum up: The individual's moral values are necessarily subjective, however he may have come by them. The moral values of others are for him necessarily objective facts to which he must adjust himself or with which he must deal. And there is a body of social moral values, of moral values accepted and shared by most of the people in the community (and even existing prior to those now living), which for each individual in the community is an objective fact that exercises tremendous influence on his own thought and conduct, and which he in turn may apply to influence the thought and conduct of others. Finally, moral rules require objective adherence from everybody.

Perhaps the confusion on this subject may be due to a deficiency in the traditional concepts and vocabulary. Moralists and scientists have assumed that whatever is not objective must be subjective, and vice versa. But may this not be equivalent to the assumption that whatever is not day must be night, or whatever is not black must be white? Just as there is a twilight zone between day and night (which cannot, except arbitrarily, be said to be either), and just as there are an infinite number of possible shades and colors between black and white, may there not be a twilight zone, or even a third category, between the objective and the subjective?

Behaviorists and logical positivists disparage or deny the subjective completely, and try to resolve everything into the objective -- or at least think it a waste of time to deal with anything except the objective. On the other hand, in the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley and others, the objective is absorbed entirely into the subjective. Even modern scientists recognize that the "objective" can only be known (or inferred) from the subjective senses, so that one of our most eminent contemporary authorities on scientific method refers to "verification" or "falsification" through laboratory experiments as an "inter-subjective" verification. (8)

5. The Multifaceted Nature of Value

The difficulties in which we seem to have become involved are, I suggest, the result of inadequate analysis. Nearly all philosophical discussion has hitherto assumed that whatever is not "objective" must be "subjective," and vice versa; that these categories are exhaustive, and that they are also mutually exclusive.

But must values necessarily be either "objective" or "subjective?" Must value, in other words, either be "in the object" or "in the subject") Stephen Toulmin has shrewdly suggested that such an assumption may involve the merely "figurative use" of the word "in," and that this may be no more than a "spatial metaphor," valuable enough in its own place, but not to be taken "too literally." (9)

There is a third possibility -- that value refers to a relation between an "object" and a "subject." This I take to be the view not only of a moral philosopher like R. B. Perry, (10) but of modern economics. Economists have traditionally divided value into "use value" and "exchange value." The Austrian school distinguished "subjective-use value" from "objective-exchange value." Though this latter correspondence, as Bohm-Bawerk (11) has pointed out, does not invariably hold, economic value reflects a relation between certain objective qualities of an object and human needs. It is because coal has the objective quality of giving heat, and that apples have the "objective" quality of edibleness and nutritiveness, that both have "subjective" value.

In brief, because values are relational, they can be either objective or subjective, individual or social, depending on the point of view from which they are regarded. There is no contradiction in this, any more than there is in saying that the same object may be to the left or to the right, above or below, depending on the position of the observer.

And this is the reconciliation of Objectivism and Subjectivism, not only as regards economic values, but as regards moral values and moral principles. Moral values are subjective from one point of view, objective from another. Ethics is valid for everybody, for all ages and for all peoples -- if only because (as Hume put it) of "the absolute necessity of these principles to the existence of society." (12)

The reader must keep in mind, however, that when we call value "objective" we are using that predicate in a special sense. We mean that a valuation is not necessarily peculiar to one individual, but that it can be shared by others -- even, in effect, by a whole society. But an "objective" value in this sense is not a physical property. Value, in fact, is not a property of an object at all. Nor are good and bad properties of objects or actions. They are relational predicates. They express valuations in the same way as do such words as valuable and valueless. They express a relation between the valuer and the thing valued. If the valuer is an individual they express a "subjective" value. If the valuer, by implication, is society as a whole, they express an "objective" value. The tacit assumption that good referred to a property of a thing or that right referred to a property of an action -- the failure to recognize that these words simply expressed valuations -- was the basic fallacy of G. E. Moore and the early Bertrand Russell. Moral philosophers have been taking half a century to grope their way out of that fallacy.

6. Can Value be Measured?

We come now to the final major problem of value in ethics. Each of us is constantly seeking to bring about what he regards as a more satisfactory state of affairs (or a less unsatisfactory state of affairs). This is another way of saying that each of us constantly seeks to maximize his satisfactions. And this again is but another way of saying that each of us is constantly seeking to get the maximum value out of life.

Now the word "maximum" or "maximize" implies that values or satisfactions can be increased or added together to make a sum -- in other words, that values or satisfactions can be measured, can be quantified. And in a sense they can be. But we must be careful to keep in mind that it is only in a special and limited sense that we can legitimately speak of adding, measuring, or quantifying values or satisfactions.

It may help to clarify the question if we begin by considering merely economic values, which seem most nearly to lend themselves to measurement. Economic value is a quality which we attach to commodities and services. It is subjective. But in our unphilosophic moments we are apt to regard it as a quality inhering in the commodities and services themselves. So regarded, it would belong to that class of qualities that can be greater or less, and can mount or descend a scale without ceasing to be the same quality -- like heat or weight or length. (13) Such qualities could be measured and quantified.

And probably most economists today still think, like the man in the street, that economic values are in fact "measured" by monetary prices. But this is an error. Economic values -- or at least market values -- are expressed in money; but this does not mean that they are measured by it. For the value of the monetary unit itself may change from day to day. A measure of weight or length, like a pound or a foot, is always objectively the same; (14) but the value of the monetary unit may constantly vary. And it is not even possible to say, in absolute terms, how much it has varied. We can only "measure" the value of money itself by its "purchasing power": it is the reciprocal of the price "level." But what we are "measuring" is merely a ratio of exchange. And a change in such a ratio -- e.g., a change in a money price -- can be the result either of a change in the market value of a commodity or of a change in the market value of the monetary unit, or both. And though we may guess, we can never know which value changed, or whether both changed, or precisely by how much each changed.

Even more, we can never measure precisely how much a given individual (even if he is ourself) values an object in terms of money. When a man buys something, it means that he values the object he buys more than he values the money he pays for it. When he refuses to buy something, it means that he values the money asked for it more than he values the object. (15)

Even when we are talking of exchange values, or of the relative valuations of an individual, in short, we can never know these more than approximately. We can know when an individual values sum-of-money A less than commodity B; it is when he actually pays that much for it. We can know when he values sum-of-money A more than commodity B; it is when he refuses to pay that much for it. If a man refuses $475 for a painting but accepts $500, we know that he values the painting (or valued it) somewhere between $475 and $500. But we don't know exactly where. He never values it at precisely the price he accepts; he values it at less: otherwise he would not have sold. (Of course he may believe that the "real" value of the painting is considerably more than what he is "forced" to accept; but this does not change the fact that at the moment of sale he values [for whatever reason] the sum received more than the painting he parts with.)

Psychic values can never be measured in any absolute sense, even when they are "purely economic." To the unsophisticated layman it may seem obvious that a man will value $200 twice as much as $100, and $300 three times at much. But a little study of economics, and particularly of "the law of diminishing marginal utility," will probably change his mind. For it is not merely true that a man who will pay, say, $1 for a lunch will probably refuse to pay $2 for double portions. The law of diminishing marginal utility works, though not so quickly and sharply, even with the generalized or "abstract" good called money. The diminishing marginal utility of added monetary income will be reflected in practice by a man's refusal to make proportionate sacrifices -- e.g., to work proportionately longer hours (though these of course will have an increasing marginal disutility) -- to earn it.

When we turn from the realm of strictly "economic" or "catallactic" values (or the realm of exchangeable goods) to the broader realm that comprises all values, including the moral, the difficulties of measurement obviously become greater rather than less. And this has posed a serious problem for all conscientious and realistic moral philosophers. In order for us to make the correct moral decision, it has been thought necessary that we be able to make a correct "hedonistic calculus" or at least that all values be "commensurable." In other words, it has been thought necessary that we be able to measure "pleasure" or "happiness" or "satisfaction" or "value" or "goodness" quantitatively. (16)

But this is not really necessary. The fact of preference decides. Values do not have to be (and are not) precisely commensurable. But they do have to be (and are) comparable. In order to choose between taking action A and taking action B, we do not have to decide that action A will give us, say, 3.14 times as much satisfaction as action B. All we have to ask ourselves is whether action A is likely to give us more satisfaction than action B. We can answer questions of more or less. We can say whether we prefer A to B, or vice versa, even if we can never say by exactly how much. We can know our own order of preferences at any given moment among many ends, though we can never measure exactly the quantitative differences that separate these choices on our scale of values. (17)

Those who think that we can make an exact "hedonistic calculus" are mistaken, but they are at least dealing with a real problem which those who talk vaguely of "higher" and "lower" pleasures, or who insist that values or ends are "irreducibly pluralistic," refuse to face. For when it comes to choosing between a "large amount" of a "lower" pleasure and a "small amount" of a "higher" pleasure, or among "irreducibly pluralistic" ends, how do we make our choice? Either these pleasures or ends must be commensurable, or they must at least be comparable in such a way that we can say which is greater and which less.

And the only common "measure" or basis of comparison is our actual preference. This is why some economists hold that our choices in the economic realm (and the same would of course apply in the moral realm) can be ranked but not measured, that they can be expressed in ordinal but not in cardinal numbers. (18) Thus, in deciding how to spend an evening, you may ask yourself whether you prefer staying at home and reading, going to the theater, or calling up some friends and playing bridge. You may have no trouble in deciding on your order of preference, though you would be hard put to it to say by exactly how much you prefer one to the other.

In the moral realm, both hedonists and antihedonists get into insuperable difficulties when they talk of "pleasures" and try to measure or compare them in any other sense than what I have called the purely formal or philosophic sense of "desired or valued states of consciousness." (19) But when we define "pleasure" in this formal sense, we see that it is identical with "satisfaction" or "value." And we see also that it is always possible to compare satisfactions or values in terms of more or less.

When we say, in short, that our aim is always to "maximize" satisfactions or values, we mean merely that we are constantly striving to get the most satisfaction or value or the least dissatisfaction or "disvalue" -- though we can never measure this in exact quantitative terms.

And this brings us back again to the great goal of social cooperation. Each of us finds his "pleasure," his happiness, his satisfactions, his values, in different objects, activities, or ways of life. And social cooperation is the common means by which we all forward each other's purposes as an indirect means of forwarding our own, and help each other to achieve our individual and separate goals and to "maximize" our individual values.

7. The Pushpin-vs.-Poetry Problem

We are now in a position to solve more fully a problem that we touched on in Chapter 5.

Bentham's famous dictum: "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry," was deliberately written as a shocker. One of those it shocked was John Stuart Mill, who tried to rescue Utilitarianism from its supposed philistinism by insisting on a qualitative difference between "higher" and "lower" pleasures.

What troubled Mill in ethics was the same "paradox of value" that baffled the classical economists. Why was "gold" so much more valued in the market than "bread," or "platinum" than "water," when bread and water had an infinitely higher "usefulness"? The classical economists were confused because they were unconsciously comparing "gold" and "bread" in general, and forgetting that what was exchanged on the market was definite quantities, specific '`nits of gold and bread. When something of vital importance, like water, is abundant, the marginal value of a small unit is very low; when something of much less total importance to humanity, like platinum, is very scarce, the marginal value of a small unit is very high.

This discovery of marginal-utility economics supplies the key to the solution of the value problem in ethics. A man does not choose between pushpin-in-general and poetry-in-general. He is not forced to choose between abstract classes of activities at all. And certainly he is not forced to make any exclusive or permanent choice among activities. When he is satiated with poetry he can turn for a moment to pushpin. When he has had his fill of golf he can turn to Goethe, and vice versa. So Bentham's dictum becomes defensible if amended to read: "Marginal satisfaction being equal, a unit of pushpin is as good as a unit of poetry." A man need not lose intellectual or moral stature if he occasionally turns to something trivial. Marginal value being equal, an hour of tennis is worth an hour of Tennyson.

Notes

1. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949), The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962), etc.

2. He was not the first, hut he was the most influential exponent of this view.

3. As do J. K. Galbraith, for example, in The Affluent Society, and untold numbers of utopian and socialist writers.

4. George Santayana, Reason in Science, Vol. V in The Life of Reason: (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), pp. 216-217.

5. Cf. Ludwig von Mises, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1962).

6. E.g., in the economic realm, an automobile that a salesman uses bot' to make his calls and for pleasure trips on his days off.

7. The Value of Money (New York: Macmillan, 1917, 1936), pp. 25-2 ( The two paragraphs preceding the quotation are also in the main a summary from the same source. See also the same author's Social Value (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). While my own direct indebtedness is chiefly to the concept of "social value" as embodied in Anderson's writing, h in turn acknowledges heavy indebtedness for it to C. H. Cooley and t John Bates Clark.

8. Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), passim.

9. The Place of Reason in Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 19502 p. 115andp. 117.

10. Cf. General Theory of Value (Longmans, Green. 1926; Harvard University Press, 1950), in which Perry refers to value as a "relational predicate": "We have thus been led to define value as the peculiar relation, between any interest and its object; or that special character of an object which consists in the fact that interest is taken in it" Sec. 52.

11. Cf. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest (South Holland III.: Libertarian Press, 1959), Vol. II, Positive Theory of Capital, pp. 159- 160.

12. David Hume, Natural History of Religion, 1755, Sec. xiii.

13. Cf. Benjamin M. Anderson, Jr., The Value of Money (1917, 1936 p. 5.

14. Anyway, for practical purposes, and for "molar" physics, whatever may be true of atomic or microscopic physics.

15. From the assumption that all but the "marginal" consumer would if forced, be willing to pay a little more for an object than the actual market price at any time, the economist Alfred Marshall deduced his famous doctrine of "consumers' surplus." The doctrine, however, confronts serious difficulties. It might be valid for any commodity or service considered in isolation, but it can hardly be valid for all commodities an, services considered together. A consumer who spends his whole income for his total purchases of goods and services has no net (psychic) "consumer surplus" left over, for there is nothing he could have paid in addition for any one good without being forced to forego some other. Of course both consumers and producers, both buyers and sellers, reap a net psychological advantage, or "psychic income" from the whole cooperative process a specialized production followed by exchange. But there is no meaningful way in which this gain can be quantitatively measured.

16. Cf. Hastings Rashdall, "The Hedonistic Calculus" and "The Commensurability of All Values," Chaps. I and II in The Theory of Goo and Evil, II.

17. Sometimes we can come pretty close. Thus a man before attending an auction may decide in advance that he will bid up to $500 for a given painting but no more. This means that he values the painting at only slightly more than $500, perhaps only $1 or $2 more. If he valued it at exactly $500, of course, it would be a matter of complete indifference to him whether he got the painting at that price or not.

Of course the market prices of goods are "social" valuations (though constantly fluctuating in relation to each other) and do bear exact quantitative relations to each other (as expressed in money); but these valuations and relations are never exactly the same as those in the mind of any specific individual.

18. Cf., for example, Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, and Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State.

19. For an example of the difficulties into which an honest and conscientious writer can get when he tries to discuss and compare "pleasures" in accordance with the vague and vacillating common usage of the term, see Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, especially the two leading chapters of Volume II: "The Hedonistic Calculus" and "The Commensurability of All Values." Rashdall avoids the vulgar error of antihedonists who insist on identifying the word "pleasure" with purely physical, animal, carnal, or sensual pleasures, but gets bogged down in confusion by failing to define "pleasure" formally as any desired state of consciousness and "displeasure" as any undesired state of consciousness.

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