The essence of value

[Mystic]

What is the essence of value in your opinion? What is it's primary foundation?

[Alex K]

You mean value as in material value for trading, or as in "Values", ethical etc... ?

[Mystic]

You mean value as in material value for trading, or as in "Values", ethical etc... ?

I mean it in general. For example, if you see differences in the type of values, for example, value of family time vs value of ethics vs value of money, then state them, and state how the foundations are all different.

Or if you see a universal essence or foundation, you can state that as well.

[x2theone2x]

Everything in general is ultimately equally worthless; it isn't until you ask a question can value be placed on something. For example: For bartering, the highest valued item is blank, because... The parameters is bartering, and through such a parameter you can achieve a subjective value in most cases.

[Whateverist]

Value is negotiable.

What has value is anyone's guess.

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

What has the most value isn't necessarily something we already know.

Value is discovered, not arbitrarily chosen.


Okay, now you go.

[bennyboy]

I think value is ALWAYS a function of economy, but because much value is embedded in our DNA via instinct, its basis isn't always known to us. (I mean economy in terms of resources and energy, not money)


Obviously, there's evolutionary value in surviving, in helping offspring survive, in mating, in eating. In a more abstract sense, there's value in love, in loyalty, and in the ownership of rare resources. The funny thing about humans is how we attach instincts that developed in one context and apply it to new contexts, leading to behaviors that seem uneconomical. One example would be pet ownership, especially as a substitute for mating: here, the instinct for bonding is satisfied, but it has broken with its evolutionary link to species survival.

[Angrboda]

I think value is to biology what the arrow of time is to physics, it orients the difference between more successful adaptations and less successful ones such that the difference, in creatures that can abstract it, may be sought as a means of increasing one's reproductive fitness, the desirability of which drives our emotional appraisal of competing states (with more desirable ones appearing to yield more satisfactory emotional states).

In a sense, it's a feedback loop. Better adaptations yield cognitions that are more ardently sought, which drives the creation of more clones of the DNA that leads to organisms with more successful adaptations.

[mralstoner]

I have no idea what rasetsu just said, except that "emotional appraisal" is a perfect description for the foundation of human values (as the term "value" is used in philosophy).

[JuliaL]

Better adaptations yield cognitions that are more ardently sought, which drives the creation of more clones of the DNA that leads to organisms with more successful adaptations.

This.
But expanded in my worldview. I use the definition of life being a replicating system which focuses energy streams on itself to reduce its local entropy.
From:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life

[The] phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its basis in the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.

Natural selection acts on these living systems at any level of complexity, from virus to full ecosystem/cultural memeplex. At each level value can be thought of as a measure of the efficacy of any characteristic to allow better replication for that living system. Value and morals in the human sense are simply those characteristics that we, as humans, recognize as applying to us.
Moral for a rhinovirus may be the ability to cause its host to sneeze more and thereby disseminate more virons to other hosts.
Moral for a protestant sect (the religion itself considered as a living organism) may be the ability of an adherent to maintain belief in the face of the cognitive dissonance brought about by obvious inconsistencies.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Some people think, in terms of natural selection, that which most grows a kindred people’s ability to bear more thriving offspring (fruitfulness) has the most value. This way of thinking is not entirely correct because it confuses two meanings of the word “value”: usefulness and worth. People deem fruitfulness as worthy only if it aligns with their chosen goals. Someone need not find humanity’s fruitfulness the only source of worth in their life. For example, people do all kinds of things, like making art and playing music, that have no effect, one way or the other, on the overall survival of the human race. Are these things of no value? Of course not. People reckon worth based on how much they think something will make them happy.