3/ The Concept of Quality

Value has often been assimilated to the related concept of 'quality', on the assumption that seeking the value of a thing is equivalent to seeking its qualities. If we identify qualities in an action, such as 'goodness' or 'generosity', we might consider that we have thereby determined its value. To speak of traditionally recognised qualities—such as beauty, truth, and goodness—would be, on this view, to speak of values. As a result, the question 'What has value?' becomes analogous to asking 'What has truth value?' or 'What has aesthetic value?'

The assimilation of value with quality necessarily implies a theory of multiple kinds of value. If value is nothing more than quality, then, just as there are various kinds of quality (beautiful, good, and so on), there must also be various kinds of value. The effect of equating value with quality is that we come to speak of value in the plural, referring to 'values' rather than 'value'. It is this shift to the plural that warrants examination.

Bouglé aptly notes that anything can hold value: Value finds its place within the spheres of political economy, morality, art, and religion. It is not confined to any one of these areas. Indeed, it is a universal category with the capacity for highly varied applications. We can make value judgements about a piece of furniture just as readily as about a gesture, a ritual, or a poem ¹.
Ruyer likewise highlights the vast range of things that can hold value: We can use any adjectives or forms to approximate the realm of values, as values are infinitely numerous. The classical trinity of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good has contributed to overlooking this infinite variety. It is certainly partly responsible for philosophy's delay in recognising the broad generality of the concept ².

From this, however, Bouglé draws a quite different conclusion: namely, that there are multiple kinds of values: And this is why we say that there is a world of values. Whether aesthetic or moral, religious or economic, they all solicit our attention, appeal to our sympathies, and demand our efforts ³.
He suggests that the advancement of human civilisation entails a growing awareness of distinctions between various spheres of value: Men in primitive societies seemed to have little capacity to judge things and people from different perspectives: aesthetic, moral, religious, or economic. This ability grows with civilisation. The increasing complexity of civilisation makes such distinctions necessary, allowing each world of values to gradually gain its own autonomy. Art, morality, and technology each achieve independence in their own ways ⁴.
Though distinct, these spheres of value are interconnected: Does this mean that all relations between these various value systems cease? Far from it. At times, religion and art, or art and morality, for example, work together. In short, alongside the tendency towards dissociation, there is also a tendency towards conjunction within the world of values ⁵.

This view is shared by other thinkers who, upon recognising the multiplicity of valuable things, infer a corresponding multiplicity of values themselves, and go on to ask whether these values are interconnected or whether an irreconcilable conflict exists among them. Mehl favours the first solution: No value subsists by itself. There is no value that does not appeal to other values. There is no truth that is not intended to be good and salutary, no good that is not first true, no value that does not oppose the compartmentalisation of our existence into separate sectors ⁶. Ruyer shares this view, noting that the absence of truth degrades art, just as politics becomes catastrophic or religion turns into myth...

As we can see, conflating value with quality leads us to conceive of values in the plural, prompting the question of whether or not they are interconnected. They must be plural because each quality represents a specific value—aesthetic or moral, for instance—and the plurality of qualities thus yields a plurality of value types. This is the theory I will now attempt to show is unfounded.

1. The Evolution of Values, ch.1
2. Philosophie de la valeur
3. The Evolution of Values, ch.1
4. Ibid., ch.6
5. Ibid.
6. De l’autorité des valeurs, ch. III