Where Ethics Has Gone.

Two words loom large these days in think-pieces about the state of the nation or the world: "values and "culture." It seems to be accepted that these words have the ring of principle and announce a serious moral intention on the part of those who use them. As instruments for introducing broad ethical concerns into public discussion, though, they have certain peculiarities that deserve more attention than they have received. For one thing, they have come into this wider use from the social sciences; and the use to which they are put there has been and remains quite different from the one they serve in such wider discussions. What I want to show is that this difference amounts to a conflict and that it is a conflict that results from trying to have things both ways--ways that really do not and cannot go together.

In the twentieth century and certainly in the nineteenth century, discussions of the kind I have in mind were carried on in language that was unambiguously ethical in the sense of expressing straightforward judgments of right and wrong. In saying this, I do not mean to idealize the discussions of yesteryear or to indicate agreement or disagreement with any of the judgments so expressed. My point is rather that almost everyone now speaks the language of "values" and apparently does so without any understanding of how different it is from the authentic language of ethics. A little semantic history may, therefore, be in order here. The origins of the current use of the term "values" were in economics--Adam Smith's "exchange-value" and "use-value," for example. From there it passed to sociology where it was used--most influentially, perhaps, by Max Weber--to designate all the things that people individually and in their various social groupings care about in some reasonably stable way. The crucially important fact about this usage is that, as so conceived, values are supposed to be empirical facts--the facts created by someone's valuing something. This way of conceiving the subject-matter of ethics made it acceptable to people working in the social sciences. The scientific character to which their work aspired required them to abstain from any moral or evaluative judgments of their own on the practices of the societies they studied. But if values come down to valuing, and if valuing can be treated as an empirical fact, then values can be studied without the social scientist's having to take a stand either for them or against them.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the word "value" sounds as if it did more than this--as though it named some property of an object or situation that makes it valuable and can justify or invalidate our preferences with respect to whatever they concern. Talking about values can accordingly make it appear that one is acknowledging certain "objective" ethical facts that hold for everyone and taking an ethical stand in the light of those facts. But if, as in economics, "values" are the creatures of our preferences and not the other way around, one can remain a relativist in ethical matters while speaking the language of values. Values are, after all, always someone's values, and because that someone can drop them or change them, they hardly constitute ethical facts in any meaningful sense. Values so understood are simply our own preferences writ large and not "objective" properties that ideally should constrain those preferences. They are, accordingly, made to order for people who find the idea of constraints of any kind--the ethical included--oppressive, but want, nevertheless, to sound as though they respected something other than their own preferences.

I.

Although the natural affinities of this kind of double-think are with the mentality that makes liberty in all its forms the supreme good and automatically shies away from anything that feels like a prior constraint on choice, the idiom of values has come to be much more widely shared. One encounters it, for example, in the statements of all the parties in the current culture-wars, both the people who routinely sneer at "family values" and the ones who plump for them although usually without telling us what they are. To account for how this has come about, one has to understand more about the special character of the language of the social sciences and how it has increasingly come to influence everyday language. It may, therefore, be helpful to recall briefly the circumstances in which the social sciences themselves came into being.