Value (ethics)

About: Value (ethics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 21347 publications have been published within this topic receiving 461372 citations.

Public Value Accounting: Establishing the Philosophical Basis

Abstract: Questions of how best to define the ends, justify the means, and measure the performance of governments have preoccupied political economists for centuries. Recently, the concept of public value—defined in terms of the many dimensions of value that a democratic public might want to see produced by and reflected in the performance of government—has been proposed as an alternative approach. This article develops three philosophical claims central to the practice of public value accounting: (1) when the collectively owned assets of government are being deployed, the appropriate arbiter of public value is the collectively defined values of a “public” called into existence and made articulate through the quite imperfect processes of democratic governance; (2) the collectively owned assets include not only government money but also the authority of the state; (3) the normative framework for assessing the value of government production relies on both utilitarian and deontological philosophical frameworks.

Ethical Decision Making: The Person in the Process

Abstract: Ethical decisions made by social workers are shaped by the decision maker and the process used to resolve ethical dilemmas. Although systematic guidelines for resolving ethical dilemmas offer social workers a logical approach to the decision-making sequence, it is inevitable that discretionary judgments will condition the ultimate choice of action. Social workers are influenced by professional roles, practice experiences, individualized perspectives, personal preferences, motivations, and attitudes. Through reflective self-awareness social workers can recognize their value preferences and be alert to the ways in which these values unknowingly influence the resolution of ethical dilemmas. Understanding which values or ethical principles were given priority from among competing alternatives can inform social workers about their value patterning. This article challenges social workers to view current ethical decisions as linked to other ethical decisions they have made in the past or will make in the future. An approach to developing keener insight into value patterning is presented.

The Slavery Debate in Antebellum America: Cognitive Style, Value Conflict, and the Limits of Compromise

Abstract: This article explores the relations among value conflict, cognitive style, and policy preferences in pre-Civil War America. Drawing on major historical works, prominent political figures were classified into 1 of 4 political positions: abolitionists, free-soil Republicans who would tolerate slavery in the South but prevent further spread, Buchanan Democrats who would permit slavery in new territories, and advocates of slavery. Results revealed (a) greatest integrative complexity among free-soil Republicans and Buchanan Democrats, with declines in complexity moving either leftward toward abolitionists or rightward toward slavery supporters; (b) integrative complexity was a positive function of endorsing values widely regarded as in conflict in that historical period (property rights, states' rights, and domestic peace vs. the threat of "Southern slave power" to free labor and democracy). The results are consistent with the value pluralism model and raise warnings against the tendency to view integratively simple reasoning as both cognitively and morally inferior to complex reasoning.

Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology

Abstract: systems of explanation that provide us with a scientific view of the various universes that we occupy and seek to understand. The notion, however, that data collection is itself value free, that facts are facts, is old-fashioned and naive; it oversimplifies the understanding of the scientific process and invests the extensive bodies of "fact" with a false sense of truth. It should not surprise those engaged in the search for understanding and knowledge that the kinds of data we seek-and therefore find-are conditioned by the particular problems we define and, in a more general way, by our view of the universe. Similarly, the kinds of data we collect and the particular viewpoint each of us selects skew the resulting theoretical systems. Science in general, or any scientific system in particular, is culture-based in that it reflects the particular values, the particular epistemological view, that a society accepts, sanctions, and uses as a basis for the behavior of its members. A clear example of this occurs in the history of human biology. The science of human biology-and its derivative, physical anthropology-is a product of medical, and more particularly surgical, interests. These inevitably emphasized the pathological in contrast to the normal. In fact, it is difficult to grasp the concept of normality within a population except in terms of the pathological whose very existence demands its recognition. Thus the valuable contributions of John Hunter during the eighteenth century derived from his collections and systematization of the abnormal in man, and it was this emphasis on the abnormal, the pathological, that channeled the discussions as it provided the data for the interpretations of racial differences, their origins, and their meanings throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. Only with the emergence of the concept of population and its linkage to genetics does a pathological view of human variability and change for the meaning of races lose its appeal and importance. There is then a complex interplay of data and theory in any science that affects both the kinds of data collected and the theory that results. Further, the exact nature of this interplay is situationally determined, that is, it is a function of the particular intellectual milieu that itself is a product of a time-centered sociocultural system. Thus, science, whatever the phenomena with which it deals, is a part of culture, and each science is part of a culture. Man's self-awareness accounts in only a very general way for his anthropological concerns. If one adds the awareness of differences occasioned by the group contacts that human mobility ensures, it is not difficult to recognize that the existence and consequent description of human differences-any of which could have severe social consequences-are continuing problems in the creation and maintenance of "thought systems" and/or culturally defined environments. Such a process was particularly noteworthy in the Western intellectual tradition not only because of the increased awareness of human differences that, at various times, more intense mobility and migration produced, but also because of the ability, through writing, to record such differences, a record that in its accumulation provided data that demanded some form of classification and systematization, which, in turn, raised the common problems of the classificatory level of modern science. Both the accumulation and use of the data concerning human differences led within the Accepted for publication 22 December 1969.

Current Concepts of "Normal Values," "Reference Values," and "Discrimination Values" in Clinical Chemistry

Abstract: The term "normal values" is seriously afflicted by sylleptic ambiguities and conceptual problems, and it is gradually being discarded from the lexicon of clinical chemistry. The neutral term "reference values" preferable on semantic and scientific grounds, and its use in clinical chemistry is rapidly gaining acceptance. The term "discrimination value" has been added to the lexicon of clinical chemistry. Use of the "discrimination value" for the results of a laboratory test in a specified clinical situation provides the optimal discrimination between the "healthy" and the "diseased," or between "those who need not be investigated further" and "those who do."