Note: this post is about abstract and applied philosophy.
Value is that which people are drawn towards, and economically, which people are willing to trade other things of value for.
In Triessentialism, which I’ve described elsewhere, I’ve identified three four qualities of value, plus their opposites:
- Utility, which enables the pursuit of goals, and hassle, which impedes the pursuit of goals. Other writers attempting to quantify these have suggested measuring positive and negative “utils.”
- Enjoyment, the experience of having sensations and pseudo-sensations, and unpleasantness which is not enjoyed. Other writers attempting to quantify these have suggested measuring positive and negative “hedons”.
- Esteem, known in various cultures as status, honor, face, standing, etc., and disdain as a suggested general category for the negative. While some writers have lumped this in with hedons, I see esteem as something as different from experiences as magnetism is from gravity. Esteem, like magnetism, is polar; your esteem in your ingroup rises as it falls in your outgroup, and vice versa, someone beloved by your outgroup will be hated by your ingroup. This is obvious in the culture war, but less partisanly, with how punks and hippies reveled in being seen as weird or dangerous by upper and middle class society. I suggest measuring this in “estons.”
- Agency, the ability or authorization to cause or withhold action, and its opposite, constraint. People and mammals who do not feel their agency to choose will struggle against their constraints inversely to how inevitable or inescapable the constraint seems. I suggest measuring this in “freedons”.
I believe that the util/hedon dichotomy is an insufficient economic model of the world, and that Triessentialism’s util/hedon/eston/freedon model can rehabilitate the increasingly creaky Homo economicus idea.
As to their Triessentiality:
- Utility is the How, the Logical aspect of value
- Enjoyment is the What, the Physical aspect of value
- Esteem is the Why, the Emotional aspect of value
- Agency is the Moral aspect of value, at the center of the triple-circle Venn diagram of What, How, and Why.
These fundamental categories and the Venn nature of Triessentialism suggests three additional constructed categories of value as the junctions of What/How, How/Why, and Why/What.
note: I have edited this since posting. “Agency” replaces the earlier weaker word “choice”, and at the suggestion of Bing chat, “Enjoyment” replaces the clinical “experiences”. I have also reclassified the What and Why at the end.
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Notes -
This is unclear to me in several respects.
First, what exactly are we measuring? You seem to want to talk about what people want, but you include utility which usually means that on its own, I think. Second, are these four categories both exhaustive, and non-overlapping? You seem to assume so, but why do you think so? They are not at all obviously so to me. Third, you say that utils/hedons are inadequate, and that your schema remedies that. In what ways precisely? What deficits are there? What problems does this fix. Fourth, you connect it to another schema (which, as far as I can tell, has a similar lack of rigor), with no argument besides that those seem natural correspondences.
If I wanted to try to analyze value, what would I do? Well, first I would note that there are two fundamentally distinct things I could try to do.
First, I could analyze it purely in the abstract. One simple model of this are utility functions: ideal agents assign different values to different possibilities, and try to bring about the ones with higher value. This is fairly minimalistic in its assumptions. It doesn't lead to a four-factor model, it leads to a one-factor model.
Second, I could analyze it as it exists in humans. This would be a field of psychology, I suppose—in actual fact, how do people choose things, what do they value, etc? This will be extremely complicated, at least if you wanted a lot of specificity, but you might be able to make some sense of things, do some statistics, etc. These two methods won't always align—for example, humans seem to fall short of ideal agents with regard to the Allais paradox, for example, and we often have moral uncertainty.
What I wouldn't do is take a preexisting framework from elsewhere, and fabricate things to line up with them, unless I had a pretty solid justification that it was necessary that it be so, or pretty good empirical evidence.
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My Triessentialist classifications into What, How, and Why has the potential to give insight into comparative rankings of value amongst people-groups.
Now, that’s not to say that people don’t value their group’s “outvalues”! Everyone values all four values in most situations. That’s just human, or perhaps I should say, mammalian.
I’m saying that when one value is weighed as the cost of another value, such as giving up tasty food to lose weight, gain status, and retain health (gain utility and agency), people who categorically prefer one value will devalue the others in their economic calculations.
They’re also more likely to see agency in terms of their preferred value: enjoyment, esteem, or utility being the true end for which agency exists as a means.
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Problems can be classified on this four-axis model by how much or little they remove these four qualities of value from anything of value, or introduce the negative values. This is a step toward the creation of my universal problem-solving project.
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