Value

Ancient Greek (Platonism)

Value is objective and grounded in the Forms, crowned by the Form of the Good, which is 'beyond being' and the source of both reality and knowability. Particular things are valuable insofar as they participate in these eternal patterns; to know the Good is to be reoriented toward it as the sun of the intelligible world. Apparent goods that harm the soul are not truly valuable at all.

Republic, Books VI–VII (the Good and the Divided Line); Symposium.

Ancient Greek (Peripatetic)

Goods are ordered: some are chosen for the sake of others, and all for the sake of the final end, happiness, which is chosen for itself alone. In exchange, Aristotle distinguishes a thing's proper use from its use in barter and holds that money makes disparate goods commensurable so that just exchange becomes possible. Value is thus tied both to a thing's function and to human need mediated by demand.

Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and V; Politics, Book I.

Classical political economy

Smith drew a sharp line between value in use and value in exchange, dramatized by the diamond–water paradox: water is supremely useful yet cheap, diamonds nearly useless yet dear. He anchored exchange value in labour — 'the real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it' — while price fluctuates around a natural level set by wages, profit and rent. Value, for him, is a social measure of the labour a thing can command.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I.

Scottish Enlightenment / empiricism

Value is not a matter of fact discoverable by reason but rests on sentiment: when we call an action virtuous we report an approving feeling in ourselves, not a quality in the object. Hume famously noted the unremarked slide from 'is' to 'ought', warning that no description of facts by itself entails a value. Reason is 'the slave of the passions'; it serves ends that feeling supplies.

A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Book III.

German idealism / critical philosophy

Kant distinguished price from dignity: whatever has a price can be replaced by an equivalent, but a person, as an end in himself, has dignity and admits of no equivalent. Only a good will has unconditional worth; instrumental goods are valuable relative to inclination, whereas moral worth is absolute and beyond all market comparison. To treat rational beings merely as means is to violate the one incomparable value.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Section II.

Historical materialism

Building on the classical labour theory, Marx held that the value of a commodity is the socially necessary labour time required to produce it, distinct from its fluctuating price and its use value. Under capitalism labour power itself becomes a commodity, and the surplus value workers produce above their wage is the source of profit. The 'fetishism of commodities' makes this social relation between people appear as an objective property of things.

Capital, Volume I (1867), Part I.

Austrian School / marginalism

Menger overturned cost-of-production theories by grounding value in subjective marginal utility: a good has value only when a person recognizes it as capable of satisfying a want, and its value equals the importance of the least urgent want it meets. Water is cheap because the marginal unit satisfies a trivial need, diamonds dear because each unit meets a keenly felt one. Value flows from consumers' judgments back to the 'higher goods' used to make them.

Principles of Economics (Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, 1871).

British marginalism

Independently of Menger, Jevons held that 'value depends entirely upon utility' and that exchange value is governed by the final (marginal) degree of utility, which diminishes as consumption grows. He sought to make economics a mathematical science of pleasure and pain, deriving prices from the calculus of utility rather than from labour embodied. Cost of production influences supply, but it is marginal utility that ultimately determines value.

The Theory of Political Economy (1871).

Genealogical critique

Values are neither eternal Forms nor market prices but human creations with a history that can be traced and judged. His genealogy exposes how 'good and evil' arose from a slave revolt in morality, inverting an older aristocratic 'good and bad'. With the 'death of God' inherited values lose their foundation, and Nietzsche calls for a 'transvaluation of all values' by which life-affirming spirits legislate worth anew.

On the Genealogy of Morality (1887); The Gay Science (1882).

Phenomenology / value ethics

Against Kant's formalism, Scheler argued that values are objective, non-formal essences grasped directly through feeling (Fühlen), not deduced by reason. They form an a priori hierarchy — from the agreeable, through the vital and spiritual, up to the holy — and moral error is a 'disorder of the heart' that ranks lower values above higher ones. Feeling, properly ordered, is a mode of value-cognition as reliable as perception is for colours.

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (1913–16).

Analytic philosophy / ethical non-naturalism

Moore held that 'good' names a simple, unanalysable, non-natural property; any attempt to define it by a natural fact (pleasure, desire, evolutionary fitness) commits the 'naturalistic fallacy'. His 'open question argument' shows that for any proposed definition we can still sensibly ask whether the thing is good, so the two cannot be identical. Value is known by a kind of intuition, and the greatest goods are personal affection and aesthetic enjoyment.

Principia Ethica (1903).

American pragmatism

Dewey rejected fixed, intrinsic values in favour of a theory of valuation as inquiry: we distinguish the merely 'desired' from the 'desirable' by testing which ends survive reflection on their means and consequences. Values are not given but formed and revised through experience, much as scientific hypotheses are. Ends and means form a continuum, so no end is beyond criticism and no value is exempt from intelligent appraisal.

Theory of Valuation (1939); The Quest for Certainty (1929).

Baden Neo-Kantianism

Rickert argued that value belongs to a realm distinct from both being and psychological fact: values do not 'exist' but 'hold' (gelten), and the cultural sciences are constituted by relating their objects to values. Because reality is an infinite manifold, only value-relevance lets the historian select what matters from what is merely there. This sharp separation of validity from existence shaped Weber's ideal of value-relevant yet value-free social science.

The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science (1896–1902); Science and History.