Values are positive and negative.[137] A "fearful sight" repels us, has a negative value, tends, to the extent of its strength, to make us withdraw. A bad act, an ugly woman, a cruel man,—here we have negative values. Little need be said further with reference to this point. They alike are motivating forces, the positive values attracting us, the negative values repelling us.
The question of the relations among values we shall discuss rather briefly, not that it is unimportant, but that much of it is familiar. Values may be complementary—as when several objects are all essential to one another if any of them are to be of use. Values may depend on other values, as the value of the means depends on the value of the end, which is its essential "presupposition." Values may antagonize each other, and here two cases are to be distinguished, which differ so much in degree that the difference may be regarded as qualitative. Values may be in their nature quite compatible, so that nothing in their character prevents the realization of both, but there may not be room enough for both, owing to the limitation of our resources,—as when the young lady of our illustration had only six seats at her dinner, and so was obliged to exclude some of her friends. But the values may be qualitatively incompatible. We may be unable to realize them both because the one involves a different sort of self from the self that could realize the other. This is the typical case in ethical values, where the presuppositions, especially in ethical crises, involve the whole personality. In case of such conflicts, say between the value of Sabbath observance and the allurement of Sunday baseball in the case of an orthodox "fan," we may have, as before indicated, a mere mechanical haul and stress, in which one or the other wins by sheer force, to the very considerable discomfort of the uneasy victim. But the conflict may lead to a reëxamination of the presuppositions of each value, to a process of bringing each into more organic relation to the whole system of values. In this process, other values may be called into play, may reënforce one or the other of the two alternative values. And, after such a process, both values may be different from what they were. There may emerge some higher value which comprehends them both, or one may be reduced to a minor place, and the other may prevail. Values are no more permanent than any other phase of the mental life. Constant transformations, even though not always fundamental transformations, take place.
There is another case which is so familiar to economists that it need merely be adverted to. Where objects of value are indivisible, we must take one or the other, if there be a conflict. But, in the case of qualitatively compatible objects, a different situation is the rule. We may have part of one, and part of the other, and the question arises as to how much of each. Here the Austrian analysis gives us an answer, which, when we generalize it, despite its antiquated psychology, may be accepted with little modification.[138] The law of "diminishing utility" as we increase the increments of each object, holds, and the problem is that of a marginal equilibrium. The young lady of our illustration would certainly have her chum if she have only one dinner, but if she have a number of dinners, the "marginal utility" of her chum's presence may sink so low that she may find the presence of some one hitherto excluded more valuable at the sixth or seventh dinner. And, indeed, our conception of qualitatively incompatible values must not be made too absolute. Human nature is accommodating and practical, and a little wickedness may be tolerated by a good man for the sake of a value which would not induce him to tolerate more. He may find the "final increment" of his Sabbath observance lower than the "initial increment" of his Sunday baseball.
Two antagonistic values may cohere in the same object. Our fearful sight may also be an interesting sight. And the initial increment of the interest may outweigh the initial increment of the fear. But, as the interest is partially satisfied, the fear may grow, until it finally overcomes the interest, and we flee. Indeed, it may be laid down as the law of negative values that as the "supply" increases (cæteris paribus) the negative value rises—the obverse of the law of "diminishing (positive) utility"—a doctrine recognized, in one of its aspects, in the economic doctrine of "increasing (psychic) costs."
A further point is to be noted in the case (especially though not exclusively) of these qualitatively incompatible values, where a quantitative compromise of the sort described is worked out between them. The personality itself may change, through a growing familiarity with the negative value. It may cease to be a negative value, and may become positive. And if, as may happen, this change takes place quickly, in the course of a moral crisis, our process would be, first, a gradually increasing negative value, as the "supply" of the objects of negative value is increased; next, a sudden shift from a high negative to a high positive value, as the personality changes, and we come to love what we have hated; then a gradual sinking of the new positive value as the supply is still further increased.[139]
The case of the conflict between qualitatively incompatible values is the typical case of the conflict between "duty and pleasure," between "obligation and inclination," etc. Certain values present themselves as "categorical imperatives," as "absolute universals," and refuse, or tend to refuse, any compromise. Our analysis would tend to cast doubt on the "absolute absoluteness" of these values (taking absolute in the sense in which it has been used in the history of ethics, as distinguished from the sense in which I have earlier used it in this book[140]). The most significant thing about these "absolute" values from the standpoint of our present inquiry, seems to be the resistance which they offer to the "marginal process." They seem to insist that their objects be taken in toto or not at all. They tend to universalize themselves, attaching to the remotest possible increment of the "supply" quite as strongly as to the initial increments. They refuse to place their objects in a scale of "diminishing utility." Such values are those which have been so fortified by habit and education that they are vital parts of the personality, and that any compromise where they are involved seems treason to the inmost self. If we wish to make precise analogies between our social and our individual values, we shall find here the nearest approach in the individual field to those fundamental legal values which determine the inmost character of the state, and which present themselves as "practical absolutes" in the legal value system, e.g., democracy, or personal liberty—or fundamental sociological values, like the "color line."
It will be noted, further, that our analysis draws no hard and fast lines between the different sorts of value, ethical, economic, esthetic, religious, personal, etc., in the sphere of the individual's psychology. Such lines do not exist. There are shadings, gradations, quantitative differences which become distinct enough to justify a classification of values. But values never become, on the functional side, so fundamentally different in character that there can be no reduction of them to the "common denominator" of power in motivation. And especially is that a false abstraction which would separate the different sorts of value, ethical, economic, etc., into separate, water-tight systems, and let each system have its own equilibrium and its own interactions, uninfluenced by the other systems. The fact is, simply, that ethical and esthetic values may constantly reinforce economic values, economic values reinforce ethical values, or economic and ethical or other values may oppose each other, and marginal equilibria are constantly worked out between them. Or, better, among them, for, while in the consciousness of the moment we may have only two opposing values in mind, and may have our equilibrium apparently between just two, yet in fact the whole system of values is constantly tending toward equilibrium, ethical, religious, economic, esthetic, all asserting themselves, and finding their place in the scale, and getting their "margins" fixed,—extensive margins and intensive margins. But this is so obviously merely a generalization of well-known economic laws, that further detail is needless. One point may be mentioned, however. Price is to be generalized in the same way as value. Since this equilibrium among values holds, then any object of value may be used to measure the value of any other. If the presence of her chum at the fifth dinner is in equilibrium with the presence of some hitherto excluded friend, for our young lady, then the one is the price of the other, and measures her value. A material good which one takes in return for an immoral act is the price of that act. And if, in a moment of fundamental ethical crisis, a man surrenders a cherished purpose about which his whole life has been built, to the allurement of some dazzling temptation, it is much more than a metaphor to speak of "the price of a soul."[141]
The Austrian analysis was essentially faulty, then, not so much in its hedonistic psychology—for it can be freed from that[142]—as in its abstraction of the economic from other aspects of the individual's value system. Equilibria among economic values will not explain even the individual's economic behavior—do not by any means constitute a self-complete system. This abstraction has been noted before.[143] The other abstraction of the Austrians, the abstraction of the individual from his vital, organic connection with the social whole, we shall treat more fully later.
So far, we have kept pretty strictly within the field of "individual psychology" and "individual values." But we shall find, when we come to the field of the social values, that essentially the same laws hold. On the functional side, the analogy between the individual mind and the social mind is a very close one, and the correspondences on the structural side are numerous also. While we shall not try to find analogies in the social field for all these laws of individual value, it is not because of any difficulty that the problem presents, but rather, because it is unnecessary for the vindication of our thesis to do so.