Kant’s Cave: Christian Michel - What are values?

Christian Michel - What are values?

‘Value’ is one of those loaded words we encounter every day. Value pops up in conversations between mathematicians (‘the value of x’), priests and philosophers (‘moral values’), politicians (‘British values’), economists (‘value as distinct from price’), artists (‘is beauty a bourgeois value?’) ...

Across its countless uses, does the word refer to a common quality? If it exists, where is the ‘valueness’ in value – as there would be a Hegelian ‘redness’ in all the appearances of red in the world? Is value a subjective judgement, anything that floats my boat? Or do values exist independently of any valuer’s opinion, for instance residing in nature, or in God’s plan for it? Or are values constructed, arising from human practices, conventions, and rational agreements? If so, could we ever construct a set of values around which to reconcile humanity?

We live in a time when the most established values our parents and grandparents lived by – human dignity, individual rights, democracy, social justice, truth and beauty… – are contested or ignored. Does it mean that the notion of value itself is obsolete, or that we simply don’t understand it?

Christian Michel is a journalist, essayist, who teaches economics at City Lit and has been a frequent speaker at Kant’s Cave over the years.

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This event is sponsored by the Royal institute of Philosophy.
Lecture and discussion! See you there?
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