PART 1. VALUE
CHAPTER 1. JUDGMENTS OF VALUE
1. JUDGMENTS OF VALUE AND PROPOSITIONS OF EXISTENCE
Propositions asserting existence, affirmative existential propositions, or non-existence,
negative existential propositions, are descriptive. They assert something about the state of the
the whole universe or of parts of the universe.
With regard to them, questions of truth and falsity are significant.
They must not be confounded with judgments of value.
Judgments of value are voluntaristic.
They express feelings, tastes, or preferences of the individual who utters them.
With regard to them, there cannot be any question of truth and falsity.
They are ultimate and not subject to any proof or evidence.
Judgments of value are mental acts of the individual concerned.
As such, they must be sharply distinguished from the sentences by means of which an individual
tries to inform other people about the content of his judgments of value.
A man may have some reason to lie about his valuations.
We may describe this state of affairs in the following way.
Every judgment of value is in itself also a fact of the actual state of the universe
and as such may be the topic of existential propositions.
The sentence, I prefer Beethoven to Lahar, refers to a judgment of value.
If looked upon as an existential proposition, it is true if I really prefer Beethoven and
Act Accordingly, and false if I in fact prefer lahar and, for some reasons, lie about my
real feelings, tastes, or preferences.
In an analogous way, the existential proposition, Paul prefers Beethoven to lahar, may be true
or false.
In declaring that with regard to a judgment of value, there cannot be any question of
truth or falsity.
We refer to the judgment as such and not to the sentences communicating the content of
such a judgment of value to other people.
2.
VALUATION AND ACTION
A judgment of value is purely academic if it does not impel the man who utters it to
any action.
There are judgments which must remain academic because it is beyond the power of the individual
Man is able to embark upon any action directed by them.
A man may prefer a starry sky to the starless sky, but he cannot attempt to substitute the
former state which he likes better for the latter he likes less.
The significance of value judgments consists precisely in the fact that they are the springs
of human action.
Guided by his valuations, man is intent upon substituting conditions that please him better
for Conditions which he deems less satisfactory. He employs means in order to attain ends sought.
Hence the history of human affairs has to deal with the judgments of value that impelled
men to act and directed their conduct. What happened in history cannot be discovered and
narrated without referring to the various valuations of the acting individuals. It is not the task
It is the task of the historian, qua-historian, to pass judgments of value on the individuals
whose conduct is the theme of his inquiries.
As a branch of knowledge, history utters existential propositions only.
But these existential propositions often refer to the presence or absence of definite judgments
of value in the minds of the acting individuals.
It is one of the tasks of the specific understanding of the historical sciences to establish what
content the value judgments of the acting individuals had.
It is a task of history, for example, to trace back the origin of India's caste system to
the values which prompted the conduct of the generations who developed, perfected and preserved
it.
It is its further task to discover what the consequences of this system were and how these
These effects influenced the value judgments of later generations.
But it is not the business of the historian to pass judgments of value on the system as
such to praise or to condemn it.
He has to deal with its relevance for the course of affairs.
He has to compare it with the designs and intentions of its authors and supporters and
to depict its effects and consequences.
He has to ask whether or not the means employed were fit to attain the ends the acting
individual sought.
It is a fact that hardly any historian has fully avoided passing judgments of value.
But such judgments are always merely incidental to the genuine tasks of history.
In uttering them, the author speaks as an individual judging from the point of view
of his personal valuations, not as a historian.
3. THE SUBJECTIVITY OF VALUATION
All judgments of value are personal and subjective. There are no judgments of value other than
those asserting, I prefer, I like better, I wish. It cannot be denied by anybody that
various individuals disagree widely with regard to their feelings, tastes, and preferences,
And that even the same individuals at various instants of their lives value the same things
in a different way.
In view of this fact, it is useless to talk about absolute and eternal values.
This does not mean that every individual draws his valuations from his own mind.
The immense majority of people take their valuations from the social environments into
which they were born, in which they grew up, that molded their personality and educated
them.
Few men have the power to deviate from the traditional set of values and to establish
their own scale of what appears to be better and what appears to be worse.
What the theorem of the subjectivity evaluation means is that there is no standard available
which would enable us to reject any ultimate judgment of value as wrong, false, or erroneous
in the way we can reject an existential proposition as manifestly false.
It is vain to argue about ultimate judgments of value as we argue about the truth or falsity
of an existential proposition.
As soon as we start to refute by arguments an ultimate judgment of value, we look upon
it as a means to attain definite ends.
But then we merely shift the discussion to another plane.
We no longer view the principle concerned as an ultimate value but as a means to attain
in an Ultimate Value, and we are again faced with the same problem.
We may, for instance, try to show a Buddhist that to act in conformity with the teachings
of his creed results in effects which we consider disastrous, but we are silenced if he replies
that these effects are, in his opinion, lesser evils or no evils at all, compared to what
would result from non-observance of his rules of conduct.
His ideas about the supreme good, happiness and eternal bliss are different from ours.
He does not care for those values his critics are concerned with and seeks for satisfaction
in other things than they do.
4.
THE LOGICAL AND SYNTACTICAL STRUCTURE OF JUDGMENTS OF VALUE
A judgment of value looks upon things from the point of view of the man who utters it.
It does not assert anything about things as they are.
It manifests a man's effective response to definite conditions of the universe as compared
with other definite conditions.
Value is not intrinsic.
It is not in things and conditions but in the valuing subject.
It is impossible to ascribe value to one thing or state of affairs only.
Condition invariably compares one thing or condition with another thing or condition.
It grades various states of the external world, it contrasts one thing or state, whether real
or imagined, with another thing or state, whether real or imagined, and arranges both
in a scale of what the author of the judgment likes better and what less.
It may happen that the judging individual considers both things or conditions envisaged
as equal.
He is not concerned whether there is A or B, then his judgment of value expresses indifference.
No action can result from such a neutral disposition.
Sometimes the utterance of a judgment of value is elliptical and makes sense only if appropriately
completed by the hearer.
I don't like measles means, I prefer the absence of measles to its presence.
Such incompleteness is the mark of all references to freedom.
Freedom invariably means freedom from, absence of, something referred to expressly or implicitly.
The grammatical form of such judgments may be qualified as negative, but it is vain to
deduce from this idiomatic attire of a class of judgments of value any statements about
their content and to blame them for an alleged negativism.
Every judgment of value allows of a formulation in which the more highly valued thing or state
is logically expressed in both a positive and a negative way, although sometimes a language
may not have developed the appropriate term.
Freedom of the press implies the rejection or negation of censorship, but, stated explicitly,
it means a state of affairs in which the author alone determines the content of his publication
as distinct from a state in which the police has a right to interfere in the matter.
Action necessarily involves the renunciation of something to which a lower value is assigned
in order to attain or to preserve something to which a higher value is assigned.
Thus, for instance, a definite amount of leisure is renounced in order to reap the product
of a definite amount of labor.
The renunciation of leisure is the means to attain a more highly valued thing or state.
There are men whose nerves are so sensitive that they cannot endure an unvarnished account
of many facts about the physiological nature of the human body and the praxeological character
of human action.
Such people take offense at the statement that man must choose between the most sublime
Things, the loftiest human ideals on the one hand and the wants of his body on the other.
They feel that such statements detract from the nobility of the higher things.
They refuse to notice the fact that there arise in the life of man situations in which
he is forced to choose between fidelity to lofty ideals and such animal urges as feeding.
Whenever man is faced with the necessity of choosing between two things or states, his
decision is a judgment of value no matter whether or not it is uttered in the grammatical
form commonly employed in expressing such judgments.