Showing papers on "Value (ethics) published in 1993"

From value chain to value constellation: designing interactive strategy

Abstract: In today's fast-changing competitive environment, strategy is no longer a matter of positioning a fixed set of activities along that old industrial model, the value chain. Successful companies increasingly do not just add value, they reinvent it. The key strategic task is to reconfigure roles and relationships among a constellation of actors - suppliers, partners, customers - in order to mobilize the creation of value by new combinations of players. What is so different about this new logic of value? It breaks down the distinction between products and services and combines them into activity-based "offerings" from which customers can create value for themselves. But as potential offerings grow more complex, so do the relationships necessary to create them. As a result, a company's strategic task becomes the ongoing reconfiguration and integration of its competencies and customers. The authors provide three illustrations of these new rules of strategy. IKEA has blossomed into the world's largest retailer of home furnishings by redefining the relationships and organizational practices of the furniture business. Danish pharmacies and their national association have used the opportunity of health care reform to reconfigure their relationships with customers, doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers, and with Danish and international health organizations to enlarge their role, competencies, and profits. French public-service concessionaires have mastered the art of conducting a creative dialogue between their customers - local governments in France and around the world - and a perpetually expanding set of infrastructure competencies.

Value Orientations, Gender, and Environmental Concern:

Abstract: A social-psychological model is developed to examine the proposition that environmentalism represents a new way of thinking. It presumes that action in support of environmental quality may derive from any of three value orientations: egoistic, social-altruistic, or biospheric, and that gender may be implicated in the relation between these orientations and behavior. Behavioral intentions are modeled as the sum across values of the strength of a value times the strength of beliefs about the consequences of environmental conditions for valued objects. Evidence from a survey of 349 college students shows that beliefs about consequences for each type of valued object independently predict willingness to take political action, but only beliefs about consequences for self reliably predict willingness to pay through taxes. This result is consistent with other recent findings from contingent valuation surveys. Women have stronger beliefs than men about consequences for self, others, and the biosphere, but there i...

The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science

Abstract: The great dream of philosophers and scientists has been to give a complete account of the order of things. The articulation of such a dream in the 20th century has been expressed in the idea of a unity of science. John Dupre systematically attacks the idea of scientific unity by showing how its underlying assumptions are at odds with the basic conclusions of science itself. In its stead, the author gives us a metaphysical interpretation much more in keeping with what science tells us about the world. The order presupposed by scientific unity is expressed in the classical philosophical doctrines of essentialism, materialist reductionism, and determinism. Employing examples from biology, that most "disordered" of sciences, Dupre subjects each of these doctrines to detailed and devastating criticism. He also identifies the shortcomings of contemporary approaches to scientific disunity, such as constructivism and extreme empiricism. He argues that we should adopt a "moderate realism" consistent with pluralistic science. Dupre's proposal for a "promiscuous realism" acknowledges the existence of a fundamentally disordered world, in which different projects or perspectives may reveal distinct, somewhat isolated, but nevertheless perfectly real, domains of partial order. This argument makes connections with discussions of science and value, especially in the work of feminist scholars. In Dupre's view, we have a great deal of choice about which scientific projects to pursue, a choice that can be informed only by value judgements. Such choices determine not only what kinds of order we observe in nature, but also what kinds of order we impose on the world we observe.

International organizations as teachers of norms: the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cutural Organization and science policy

Abstract: Most explanations for the creation of new state institutions locate the cause of change in the conditions or characteristics of the states themselves. Some aspect of a state's economic, social, political, or military situation is said to create a functional need for the new bureaucracy which then is taken up by one or more domestic groups who succeed in changing the state apparatus. However, changes in state structure may be prompted not only by changing conditions of individual states but also by socialization and conformance with international norms. In the case of one organizational innovation recently adopted by states across the international system, namely, science policy bureaucracies, indicators of state conditions and functional need for these entities are not correlated with the pattern for their adoption. Instead, adoption was prompted by the activities of an international organization which “taught” states the value of science policy organizations and established the coordination of science as an appropriate, and even a necessary, role for states. This finding lends support to constructivist or reflective theories that treat states as social entities shaped by international social action, as opposed to more conventional treatments of states as autonomous international agents.

Preferences for sequences of outcomes.

Abstract: Existing models of intertemporal choice normally assume that people are impatient, preferring valuable outcomes sooner rather than later, and that preferences satisfy the formal condition of independence, or separability, which states that the value of a sequence of outcomes equals the sum of the values of its component parts. The authors present empirical results that show both of these assumptions to be false when choices are framed as being between explicitly denned sequences of outcomes. Without a proper sequential context, people may discount isolated outcomes in the conventional manner, but when the sequence context is highlighted, they claim to prefer utility levels that improve over time. The observed violations of additive separability follow, at least in part, from a desire to spread good outcomes evenly over time. Decisions of importance have delayed consequences. The choice of education, work, spending and saving, exercise, diet, as well as the timing of life events, such as schooling, marriage, and childbearing, all produce costs and benefits that endure over time. Therefore, it is not surprising that the problem of choosing between temporally distributed outcomes has attracted attention in a variety of disciplinary settings, including behavioral psychology, social psychology, decision theory, and economics. In spite of this disciplinary diversity, empirical research on intertemporal choice has traditionally had a narrow focus. Until a few years ago, virtually all studies of intertemporal choice were concerned with how people evaluate simple prospects consisting of a single outcome obtained at a point in time. The goal was to estimate equations that express the basic relationship between the atemporal value of an outcome and its value when delayed. Although the estimated functional forms would differ from investigation to investigation , there was general agreement on one point: that delayed outcomes are valued less. In economics, this is referred to as "positive time discounting." Although plausible at first glance, the uniform imposition of positive discounting on all of one's choices has some disturbing and counterintuitive implications. It implies, for instance, that when faced with a decision about how to schedule a set of outcomes, a person should invariably start with the best outcome, followed by the second best outcome, and so on until the worst outcome is reached at the end. Because nothing restricts the generality of this principle, one should find people preferring a declining rather than an increasing standard of living, deteriorating rather than improving health (again, holding lifetime health constant), and so on. In the last few years, several studies have independently fo

Providing public assistance: Cognitive and motivational processes underlying liberal and conservative policy preferences.

Abstract: Previous research in a wide variety of policy domains (e.g., azidothymidine for AIDS patients, lowincome housing) has indicated that under no scarcity, liberals tend to help all claimants for assistance, whereas conservatives withhold assistance from people who are personally responsible for their predicament (Skitka & Tetlock, 1992). Three studies explore 6 explanations for this robust finding: deterrence, self-interest, punitiveness, mindlessness, value orientation, and avoidance of trade-off reasoning. The findings shed light on both the cognitive strategies and motivational priorities of liberals and conservatives. It was discovered that liberals are not mindlessly egalitarian, but try to avoid socially awkward value trade-offs that require placing monetary values on lives. By contrast, conservatives are motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders. The United States is still one of the most prosperous countries in the world. However, millions of people are destitute and rely on the generosity of the community for their survival. What obligations does the community have to these people? What responsibilities do these people have to the community? Answers to these basic questions depend largely on one's political point of view. In the 1960s, the Johnson administration declared war on poverty and the welfare state proliferated. In the 1980s and early 1990s, many political leaders concluded that the welfare state was a failure, and stressed the virtues of self-reliance and free markets. The political pendulum appears to swing between individualism and egalitarianism (albeit not with the clocklike regularity some suppose; cf. Schlesinger, 1986). Survey research reveals that attitudes toward social welfare are consistently correlated with ideologically patterned attributions for poverty (Sniderman, Hagen, Tetlock, & Brady, 1986). Conservatives blame poverty on self-indulgen ce and lack of moral standards and intelligence. Liberals see the poor as victims of unjust social practices and structures. These ideological differences in attributions for poverty predict a willingness to expand social programs. Liberals generally favor increased spending on social programs, whereas conservatives oppose such spending (Feather, 1985; Kluegel, 1990; Kluegel & Smith, 1986; Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986; Williams, 1984).

Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices

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Philosophy for Africa

Abstract: Has philosophy anything of value to offer Africa? Has Africa anything of value to offer contemporary philosophy? This text answers yes to both of these questions and deals with the question of human freedom and the problem of liberation in the context of postcolonial contemporary Africa.

The Selling of DSM: The Rhetoric of Science in Psychiatry

Abstract: Let me state my biases up front. I am a psychiatrist who has strongly supported the development of a psychiatric nosology that has value to the clinician, to research on the etiology and epidemiology of mental disorders, and, ultimately, to the patient. I have participated in the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition) and have a particular interest in the impact of the diagnostic manual on reimbursement. I believe that DSM-III, its revision, and the soon-to-be-published DSM-IV represent progress and a great improvement over what existed prior to 1980, when DSM-III was published.The authors of The Selling of DSM do not state their biases up front. It does become clear to the reader, however, that these professors of social work cast an extremely skeptical eye on current concepts in psychiatry, the medical or diagnostic model, and share (if not exactly, certainly closely) the

Recovering our sense of value after being labeled mentally ill.

Abstract: 1. People with mental illness must know that mental illness does not mean they can no longer lead full lives. Role models--successful people who have mental illness--are needed. 2. There is a great danger in labeling a person as an illness. Once people believe they are an illness, there is no one left inside to take a stand toward the illness; they give up control and others take responsibility for them. 3. "High functioning" and "low functioning" are not attributes that exist inside a person. They are value judgments that are put on a person. There are no high-functioning or low-functioning people. There are people whose contribution we are able to see and value and there are those whose gifts we have failed to see and have failed to value.

Educating for intelligent belief or unbelief

Abstract: One of the most enduring and controversial issues in American education concerns the place of individual beliefs and moral standards in the classroom. Noddings argues that public schools should address the fundamental questions that teenagers inevitably rasie about the nature, value and meaning of life (and death), and to do so across the curriculum without limiting such existential and metaphysical discussions to separate religion, philosophy or even history classes. Explorations of the existence of a God or gods, and the value and validity of religious belief for societies or individuals, she writes "whether they are initiated by students or teachers, should be part of the free exchange of human concerns - a way in which people share their awe, doubts, fears, hopes, knowledge and ignorance." Such basic human concerns, Noddings maintains, are relevant to nearly every subject and should be both non-coercive and free from academic evalution.

Democracy & democratic education

Abstract: A profound problem posed by education for any pluralistic society with democratic aspirations is how to reconcile individual freedom and civic virtue. Children cannot be educated to maximize both individual freedom and civic virtue. Yet reasonable people value and intermittently demand both. We value freedom of speech and press, for example, but want (other) people to refrain from false and socially harmful expression. The various tensions between individual freedom and civic virtue pose a challenge that is simultaneously philosophical and political. How can we resolve the tensions philosophically in light of reasonable political disagreements over the relative value of individual freedom and civic virtue? Instead of giving priority to one value or the other, this essay defends a democratic ideal ofconscious social reproduction, which consists of three principles:nonrepression, nondiscrimination, and democratic deliberation.

Kant and the Experience of Freedom

Abstract: The present volume, a collection of six previously published and four previously unpublished essays, focusses on the moral themes in Kant's aesthetics and on the role of feelings or the aesthetic dimension in Kant's ethics. The book as a whole aims to elucidate the following two revisionary historical theses: (1) On the traditional interpretation of the enterprise of modern aesthetic theory, its overarching aim has been seen as that of carving out and defending a concept and sphere of aesthetic and artistic autonomy, or of the independence of aesthetic experience and artistic creation from all constraints arising from elsewhere in human theory and practice, and Kant's derivation of his analysis of the judgment of taste from the initial moment of disinterestedness has been seen as the paradigmatic theoretical expression of this intention.' On my account, however, the fundamental challenge for modern aesthetic theory, beginning with both Shaftesbury in Britain and Baumgarten in Germany, has been to reconcile the obvious experiential or phenomenological independence of the aesthetic and the artistic with a more general conception of the sources of value in human affairs, or even-to put it as a paradox-to give a general explanation of the value of a sphere of individuality, and it is Kant's attempt-to use his terms-to reconcile the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment with the intellectual interest in the beautiful which should be seen as the theoretical paradigm for modern aesthetics. (2) In traditional accounts of the history of modern moral philosophy, of course, Kant has always been seen as the leading advocate of a rationalistic and rigoristic deontology according to which virtue lies solely in acting in accordance with a universal principle of pure reason that disregards all particu-

In Defence of Nationality

Abstract: The principle of nationality is widely believed to be philosophically disreputable and politically reactionary. As defined here, it embraces three propositions: national identities are properly part of personal identities; they ground circumscribed obligations to fellow-nationals; and they justify claims to political self-determination. To have a national identity is to think of oneself as belonging to a community constituted by mutual belief, extended in history, active in character, connected to a particular territory, and marked off from others by its members’distinct traits. Such identities are inevitably partly mythical in nature, yet they answer a pressing modern need, the maintenance of solidarity in large, anonymous societies. They are allied to no particular political programme. They do not require the suppression of minority cultures within the political community. They do not justify a secessionist free-for-all. Nor finally does recognition of the role of sentiments in constituting national communities commit us to a subjectivist view of social obligations. Philosophers should recognise the value of these loyalties even if they cannot be rationally grounded in a strong sense. [1]

The Moral Sense.

Abstract: The central problem for social science is to explain social order. How do people manage to live together? One can discern two ways of answering that question. The first view is normative and communal: people learn from their culture customs that provide an internal compass guiding them to act in ways that minimize conflict and ensure comity. The second view is rationalistic and individualistic: order is created by explicit and implicit agreements entered into by self-seeking individuals to avert the worst consequences of their predatory instincts. In the first view, order is natural and prior to any social contract or government institution; in the second, it is contrived and dependent on agreements and sanctions. Rules are obeyed in the first case because they have moral force, in the second because they convey personal advantage. In the first view, compliance is automatic and general; in the second, it is strategic and uncertain.The normative view has been under heavy attack for several decades for at least three reasons: it seems to imply a complacent functionalism; it appears to minimize or deny the value of conflict; and it lacks the theoretical power found in the assumption that people always seek their own interests. I believe that one can grant, up to a point, all of these objections and still be left dissatisfied with the alternative, namely, that social order is contrived, based on calculation, and dependent on individual assent.

Decision rules used by male and female business students in making ethical value judgments: Another look

Abstract: This study was conducted to corroborate findings that females invoke a decision rule that is significantly different from that of their male counterparts when making ethical value judgements. In addition, the study examines whether the same decision rule is used by men and women for all types of ethical situations. The results show that males and females use different decision rules when making ethical evaluations, although there are types of situations where there are no significant differences in decision rules used by men and women. The results do not suggest that any one particular decision rule is used by the majority of either males or females in different types of ethical judgements. There is a greater diversity in decision rules used by females than by males.

Why We Should Abandon the Misconceived Quest to Reconcile Public Entrepreneurship with Democracy: A Response to Bellone and Goerl's "Reconciling Public Entrepreneurship and Democracy"

Abstract: C arl J. Bellone and George Frederick Goerl (1992) build an intriguing case for public entrepreneurship. By strategically structuring an argument in the tradition of the bureaucracy/democracy debate, they attempt to legitimize the concept of public entrepreneurship by asserting that it can be reconciled with democratic politics and administration.1 Bellone and Goerl's argument presents the underlying values and characteristics of public entrepreneurship (autonomy, a personal vision of the future, secrecy, and risktaking) as being at odds with the values of democratic politics and administration (accountability, citizen participation, open policy-making processes, and "stewardship" behavior). Bellone and Goerl suggest that, although these value orientations appear incompatible, this should not be interpreted to mean that the conflict created by the different value orientations cannot be resolved. Indeed, Bellone and Goerl assert that public entrepreneurship can be squared with democratic principles if it is "civicregarding."

Personal and professional values underlying the ethical judgments of marketers

Abstract: This study explores the relative influences of two levels of value orientations, personal values and professional values, underlying the ethical judgments of marketing practitioners. The data were obtained from a mail survey of the American Marketing Association's professional members. The results generally indicate that a marketer's ethical judgments can be partially explained by his/her personal and professional values.

Value, Welfare, and Morality: Putting rationality in its place

Abstract: One kind of metaethical debate between realists and antirealists is about the character of ethical truth, with realists asserting and antirealists denying that truth in moral thought transcends our capacity to find reasons in support of our moral judgments. The antirealist in this kind of debate, no less than the realist, thinks that there is objective moral truth and knowledge. And the truth in question is not merely disquotational. Both parties think that a true moral claim corresponds, in some way or other, to the way the world is. Their disagreement, like that of their counterparts in mathematics, is about the nature of this correspondence. The antirealist sees it as a relation between the claim and the publicly available facts that could be adduced as good reasons to accept it, while the realist sees it as a relation to what he thinks of as the truth condition of the claim – a state of the world that may transcend our ability to detect its presence by way of reasoned argument. This issue is surely an important one, but it is posterior to the more fundamental question that has dominated metaethics in the last half-century. This is the question whether what lies at the heart of moral thought are beliefs capable of genuine truth or noncognitive attitudes that cannot be so assessed: feelings, emotions, desires, preferences, prescriptions, decisions, and the like. Let's use J. L. Mackie's terms “subjectivism” and “objectivism” to name the opposing camps in this older debate.

Aquinas on mind

Abstract: Aquinas' mature works, though theological in intent, contain much material which is philosophical in the sense that it is not in any way dependent on beliefs which are specifically Christian. His philosophical psychology, or philosophy of mind, was not taken seriously by secular thinkers, with one or two exceptions, from the 16th to the 19th centuries because of the dominance of ideas deriving from Descartes. In the present century many philosophers have come to regard the Cartesian system as quite exploded, and it can now be seen that Aquinas' philosophy of mind has a great contemporary interest and is indeed one of the best options in this area from any period. This book makes accessible those parts of Aquinas' system which are of enduring value. The kernal of the work is a close reading of the sections of "Summa Theologiae" which are devoted to human intellect and will and to the relationship between soul and body. It presupposes no knowledge of Latin or of medieval history, and relates Aquinas' system to a tradition of philosophy of mind inaugurated in the Anglo-American community by Wittgenstein and Ryle.

Principled positions : postmodernism and the rediscovery of value

Abstract: "Principled Positions" highlights the controversies which have come out of postmodern dialogues and takes the debate a stage further. Stuart Hall takes on Christopher Norris in this collection which attempts to put the value judgements back into postmodernism. Postmodernism has often been celebrated as liberating, even democratizing in its refusal to acknowledge the dictates of hierarchy and certainty. In cultural terms this has allowed outmoded canons of taste and conservative categories of high and low culture to be challenged and abolished; but it has also banished the vocabulary of evaluation, distinction and merit. In the postmodern cultural continuum, there is no such thing as good (or bad) art. The deconstruction of all "principled positions" creates a value vacuum which, in turn, leads to a state of ethical and political paralysis. The contributors to "Principled Positions" ponder these dilemmas and try to build bridges between the modernist absolutes of truth, value and justice and the anti-totalizing spirit of postmodernism. Behind this project lies a real concern to recover modernism's sense of value without lapsing back into the authoritarian practices which postmodernism has undermined.

Hard Issues, Core Values and Vertical Constraint: The Case of Nuclear Power

Abstract: Under what conditions are mass attitudes towards particular issues ‘vertically’ constrained by core cultural values? Vertical constraint is shaped by three related variables: the objective content of the issue, the way the issue is framed by elites and the individual's level of attentiveness to the controversy. Some issues are ‘easy’. They so permeate social discourse that people encounter, often without wanting to, many social agents offering shortcuts for the vertical, values-to-issue link. Most issues, however, are ‘hard’. Arcane in content and bereft of vigorous mediation, hard issues are more difficult for individuals to tie to core values. As the inferential connection between value and issue lengthens, and as social agents become fewer and more remote, an individual's ability to use values to interpret issues will increasingly depend on whether the decision makers, activists and other elites directly involved in the debate can create a connection and, of course, on whether the individual is paying attention. An analysis of the nuclear power controversy, a highly complex technical issue, reveals that a value-based interpretation favoured by elites and promoted by the media is faithfully reflected in how the mass public understands the issue. Furthermore, non-elites who are more attuned to political life are more polarized on the basis of these core values.

To Boldly go Where no Planners Have Ever

Abstract: The author presents an empirical example of the systematic distortion of information and the consequent impacts in a particular planning context. In so doing, she raises issues of professionalism, ethics, and democracy, Habermas's consideration of communicative action is of value in such analysis. She further reveals, however, that Habermassian thought tends to demonstrate a significant blindness to the role of power in such interaction. Consideration of Foucault's ideas, with regard to the manifold relations of power which characterise and constitute society, thus add an extra dimension to the work. In a strategic linking of the two the author attempts to demonstrate how communicative action can illuminate the analysis of power relationships in a manner useful to planning theory and practice. The paper concludes with a development of the Habermas-Foucault framework into a proposal for discursive democracy in an attempt to enable achievement of negotiated planning policies through a process of planning th...

Taking it Personally: A Note on Emotion and Autobiography

Abstract: `Don't take it personally' is advice commonly issued to researchers to protect us from painful experiences Such advice denies the value of our own emotional resources This note uses my own emotio

Cultural Absolutism and the Nostalgia for Community

Abstract: In recent years the liberal approach to human rights has undergone a twofold assault, from both the right and the left. From the right, liberal human rights are attacked by a new version of communalism that promotes the integrative protection of the human being in the community as against the socially alienating effects of individual human rights. From the left, liberalism is attacked by a collectivist approach to human rights based on notions of ascriptively-based privileges or disadvantages in society. In the international debates on the relevance of human rights, right traditionalism has combined with left collectivism; allegedly communitarian third world societies are considered victims of an imperialist liberal agenda of human rights emanating from the Western-dominated United Nations. The concept of cultural relativism is used by both traditionalists and communitarians as a defense of their "way of life" against the individualism and alienation that liberal human rights are thought to imply. But the relativism that is implicit in such arguments is actually a concept of cultural absolutism. Cultural absolutism is a philosophical position that declares a society's culture to be of supreme ethical value. It advocates ethnocentric adherence to one's own cultural norms as an ethically correct attitude for everyone except loosely-defined "Westerners." It thus posits particularist cultures as of more ethical value than any universal principle of justice. In the left-right/ North-South debate that permeates today's ideological exchanges, cultural absolutists specifically argue that culture is of more value than the internationally-accepted (but Western in origin) principle of human rights. Human rights are considered in international law to be rights held equally by every individual by virtue of his or her humanity, and for no other reason. Human rights are non-derogable claims against both society and the state that are not contingent upon performance of specific duties. This article will

Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare

Abstract: Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, were all significant figures in the Renaissance, long before Shakespeare took up the task of giving them new life on the stage. And when he did, Linda Charnes argues, he used these legendary figures to explore the emergence and ideological uses of a new kind of fame - "notorious identity " - an infamy based not on the moral and ethical "use value" of legend but on a commodification of identity itself: one that must be understood in the context of early modern England's emergent capitalism and its conditions of economic, textual, theatrical, and cultural reproduction. No other Shakespearean figure carries as much ideological and textual baggage as Richard III, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra. Charnes shows that by representing them as latecomers on the scenes of their own legends, Shakespeare reveals what's involved for the figures themselves in their experience of reiteration: what it is like to be subjected to the over-determining force of the notorious name. Ranging across the fields of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminist psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, deconstruction, and theories of postmodemity, the author practices a "theory without organs" - which she provocatively calls a constructive "New Hystericism" - retheorizing the discourses of reigning methodologies as much as those in Shakespeare's plays. Addressing a postmodern culture that fetishizes names and celebrity, the author moves from the notoriety of Richard III to that of Willie Horton, from Troilus and Cressida to Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, from Antony and Cleopatra to the manufacturing of Shakespeare's own "notorious identity" in mass culture and contemporary politics, unmasking in Shakespeare's notorious figures the symptoms of an early modern commodification of the powerful desire that we now know is the desire for signification itself.

Action Research as a Writerly Text: locating co‐labouring in collaboration

Abstract: In this essay the authors develop the metaphor of textual reading and writing in action research, focussing on two different types of texts: the readerly and the writerly. By examining the way in which each of these texts is written and read, three ideas are discussed: the value of understanding action research as a writerly text; the shift in authority from readerly to writerly texts; and finally, the way in which this metaphorical construction can more clearly help foster a deeper understanding of the nature of collaboration within action research projects.

How marvelous! Toward a theory of aesthetic value

Abstract: Aesthetics is often classified as a branch of value theory. This classification is curious and in some ways objectionable. Many important issues of aesthetics, as traditionally practiced, have no direct connection with notions of value or evaluation. This is as it should be, if aesthetics is the theoretical or philosophical examination of the cultural institution of art. For there is much to the institution besides evaluation, and one might argue that it is far more important to understand and appreciate works of art than to decide how good they are. It is arguable, also, that the interest we do have in evaluating works of art is a somewhat parochial feature of the cultural surroundings of the fine arts in Western society during the last several hundred years, that it is much less important in other contexts. We must not assume that all cultures in which people produce and enjoy or find satisfaction in what we call works of art even recognize anything much like our notion of aesthetic value. But there is no denying that this notion plays an important role in the practices surrounding the fine arts in recent Western culture, and for that reason alone it deserves attention. The notion of aesthetic value can look very questionable when we do attend to it, however. The worries are familiar. There is enormous variety among the works we take to be of high aesthetic quality, and our reasons for praising them, for pronouncing them aesthetically valuable, are astonishingly diverse. Some good or great works stimulate, some soothe, others are disturbingly provocative or upsetting. Some afford intellectual pleasures; others emotional experiences-fulfilling emotional experiences in some instances, distressing ones in others. Some works offer insight or illumination; others catharsis. Some provide escape from everyday cares; others help us to deal with them. Some require careful study and analysis; others wear their charms on their sleeves. Great works can be exuberant or gloomy; they can be intense, or serene, or painful, or funny. "Aesthetic value" appears to be an incredible grab bag. What justification is there for speaking of a single kind of value in cases of all of these sorts? The distinctiveness of aesthetic value, as well as its unity, threatens to evaporate under scrutiny. Formalists such as Clive Bell and Eduard Hanslick who postulate the autonomy of aesthetic value (or musical value) take a heroic course. Much of what we take to be aesthetically valuable about many works of art seems thoroughly intertwined with concerns of everyday life, with "practical" values of various kinds, with cognitive and moral and religious values. It just does not seem plausible that what is so wonderful aesthetically about much great poetry, for instance, has nothing at all to do with the insight we receive from it, or that the feelings one has in appreciating music aesthetically are entirely unlike and irrelevant to everyday emotions-even granting that to be informative or to elicit emotional responses is not thereby to have aesthetic value. Could it be that aesthetic value supervenes on or is otherwise dependent on the capacity to provide practical or cognitive or emotional benefits of various kinds? If so, it may be possible to preserve its unity; a single sort of value might supervene or depend on any of various other kinds of value. And the supervening or dependent value may itself be distinct from the "practical" and other everyday values that it supervenes or depends on. I will propose an account of aesthetic value