Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive

CHAPTER X

Chapter 10206 wordsPublic domain

VALUE AS GENERIC--THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VALUE

Economic value a species, coördinate with ethical, legal, æsthetic, and other values--Psychology of value, as manifested in individual experience--Values as "tertiary qualities"--When we reflectively break up the experience, values thrown from object to subject's emotional life, but this an abstraction from concrete experience--Feeling and desire in relation to value: hedonism; Ehrenfels and Davenport; Urban and Meinong--"Presuppositions" of value--Feeling and desire both _phases_ in value, but neither is _the_ worth-fundamental, and each may vary in intensity without affecting amount of value--Value and reality judgment: Meinong and Tarde; Urban--On _structural_ side, feeling, desire, and "reality feeling" are all significant phases in value--But real significance of value lies in its _functional_ aspect: the function of value is the function of _motivation_--Essence of value is _power_ in motivation--For concrete experience, this power a quality of the object--Positive and negative values--Complementary values--Rival values: two cases: qualitatively compatible, and qualitatively incompatible values--In first case, quantitative marginal compromise often possible: generalization of Austrian analysis--So-called "absolute values" ("absolute" here used as in history of ethics)--No sharp lines between different sorts of values, as ethical, economic, æsthetic--Different sorts of values do not constitute self-complete, separate systems--Generalization of notion of price--Suggestions as to analogues in the field of the social values 93