In my view, a quality (or its negative counterpart, a defect) is not, contrary to appearances, inherently associated with any consideration of value.

A few examples: beautiful, fair, weak, cowardly, astonishing are all qualities (positive or negative). When we attribute qualities to a thing, I maintain that we are making a factual judgement, not a value judgement. The judgements 'Socrates is just' and 'That soldier is cowardly' are of the same kind—and share the same type of objectivity—as 'That vase is made of clay'.
I can establish empirically that a given soldier is a coward by observing him flee at the start of a bombardment; experience can be called upon in the same way as when verifying the material of the vase. Equally, the fact that Socrates is just and more moral than a tyrant is an observable fact—evident and beyond dispute. We can see it, just as we can see what the vase is made of.

What is not a fact, and is not self-evident, is the value of a quality such as justice or cowardice. This is where the genuinely problematic point arises: the problem of values.

To conclude: 'Socrates is just' is a factual judgement, whereas 'Justice has value' is a value judgement.

The meaning of the term 'quality' may now be clearer: qualities are, first and foremost, empirical properties like any other.
'Cowardly' or 'good' are empirical properties just as much as the 'melting point' or 'hardness' of a material. Qualities, however, while remaining empirical properties, do not present themselves as such, because we attribute to them something we do not attribute to properties of the 'classic' type (physical properties such as heavy, hard, or light): a value. Since value is not empirical or observable, we assume that qualities have nothing empirical or observable about them. Yet the value we attribute to certain properties is, in my view, grounded in nothing other than usage, custom, and mores; it is on this basis alone that we have dogmatically set qualities like justice and beauty apart from other properties.

In other words, qualities are properties to which human beings have perhaps mistakenly attributed a value. Had they not considered these properties valuable, they would remain what they in fact are—empirical properties, as indifferent as the hardness of a material and as ascertainable in their existence as the latter.

It would seem, then, that in assigning value to certain properties, we have called the certainty of their existence into question. This investigation suggests, however, that the existence of these qualities is just as certain as that of other properties—that is, we can determine whether a given act is good or not—while it is their value that remains uncertain.

We are therefore proposing a reconsideration of the traditional distinction between judgements of fact and judgements of value, since we are considerably extending the domain of facts by affirming that the entire field of qualities belongs to it. The effort made by sociology and history to exclude all consideration of quality—by refusing value judgements in order to remain within the realm of facts, held to be more objective—is therefore unnecessary.