PART IV
A POSITIVE THEORY OF SOCIAL VALUE
CHAPTER X
VALUE AS GENERIC. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VALUE
We return, then, to the problem of the nature of value. Value is more than the total utility of a good, or the marginal utility of a good, to an individual, and it is more than a ratio of exchange. Economic value is a species of the genus value, which runs through other social sciences, as ethics, æsthetics, jurisprudence, etc. Sometimes these various values are so intermingled that it is impossible to tell them apart: thus, what kind of value did a human life have in early Germanic jurisprudence, when a wergeld was accepted as compensation for killing a man?
Ethical and legal values we recognize as something very different from the feelings of single individuals, and also as something very different from abstract ratios. In fact, the idea of quantitative ratios in connection with moral values is somewhat startling—though we do apply the "times judgment" pretty far, and say, "he's twice the man the other fellow is," or "this isn't half as bad as that." But we do not go into refinements, ordinarily, and try to make the ratios more exact, as by saying that the value of this noble deed is three and three eighths times as great as that. The quantitative measure of legal value is a more familiar idea. Thus, a man gets five dollars fine for a plain drunk, and twenty-five dollars for getting drunk and "cussin' around" (a scale of "prices" recently established in the court of a Missouri Justice of the Peace), or three years in the penitentiary for one crime, and ten years for another. Here we have quantitative measurements of values, but still it is rather strange to our thought to speak of a ratio of exchange between them. We have no occasion to exchange them ordinarily, even though it may happen that a criminal, in contemplating the chances of success in two alternative depredations, will weigh the penalties to which he would be liable in the two cases against each other; and, indeed, the law of supply and demand holds here also (though inversely applied, for we are dealing with negative values). If a particular crime (as "Black-Handing") increases rapidly, we increase the penalty on it to bring it to a stop. But this generalization of the idea of value ought to make clear one thing: exchange, at least in its ordinary meaning,[119] is not the essence of value. Exchange is a factor in estimating value only in economic life. And even there, values are often estimated without actual exchange, and the art of accountancy has arisen for that purpose.
An exhaustive study of this generic aspect of value lies, of course, outside the scope of this book. Ehrenfels, Meinong, and others,[120] have made fruitful investigations in the psychology of value, with primary reference to the problems of ethical value, while Gabriel Tarde, approaching the subject with a sociological, rather than psychological or ethical interest, has also made some illuminating suggestions. The most comprehensive work in English, from the psychological point of view, is by Professor W. M. Urban, whose Valuation appeared in 1909. His interest is also chiefly in ethical, rather than economic, value. Reference has been made in an earlier footnote[121] to Simmel's views. There is, in fact, a rich literature on the subject. The theory of economic value to be developed in this volume, however, is relatively independent of many of the theories treated in this literature, since, as will appear later, the question I wish to raise is, not so much as to the fundamental nature of value, in its psychological aspects, but rather, as to what individual values (and in what relations) are significant for the explanation of the particular sort of value with which the economist is concerned. The exposition which follows will be clearer, however, if a psychological theory of value be premised, and the discussion of social economic value will gain from a consideration of ethical and other forms of value, in their sociological aspects, as treated by some of the writers named. The rest of this chapter will be concerned with the problem of value as it presents itself in individual psychology, and later chapters will treat the problem of social value.