Value

The sub-field of philosophy that wonders about the nature of value is called Axiology, from the Greek axia, which means something like “worth” or “of equal value.”

The sub-field of Axiology of most interest to philosophers is ethics or morality (in academic Philosophy, those words are typically used pretty interchangeably), which examines the nature of moral value.  Ethics is concerned with questions like “What makes acts right or wrong?”  “What is it to be a good person?” and (as TV comedy writer and amateur ethicist, Michael Shur, explores in his wonderful book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question), “Am I obligated to return the shopping cart to the cart corral in the supermarket parking lot?” 

But there are other sub-fields of Axiology, most notably Aesthetics, which explores the nature of artistic value, with questions like, “What is art?”  “What is beauty?”  “Is it okay to value works of art by morally-problematic people, like Picasso, or Woody Allen, or Kanye West?”

Many people contend that ethical judgments are subjective, mere matters of taste, like preference for ice-cream flavor.  But there’s a lot more support for the position that morality has at least some objective basis—(for instance, everyone has to agree that it’s always wrong to torture an innocent human baby just for the fun of it)—than there is for the view that aesthetic judgments are anything other than expressions of subjective preference (“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and all that.)

The ancients had classical standards for art and beauty but ever since Dadaism in the early 20th century, those have essentially gone out the window.

Nevertheless, it seems hard argue that the natural world—especially when a soft “Simpson’s sky” illuminates multitudes of flowering trees set against a backdrop of snow-covered mountains across a scintillating body of water—isn’t objectively beautiful.  

And when you get to savor this beauty while out on two wheels, that’s for real.