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It is important for liberals to make sense of claims about degrees of overall freedom because freedom is a fundamental value for liberals. Freedom is a fundamental value for liberals because liberals (at least implicitly) assume freedom to have non-specific value, or value as such. Freedom has non-specific value (value as such) not only if it has intrinsic value but also if it has non-specific instrumental value (e.g. as a means to social or economic progress) or non-specific constitutive value (e.g. as a part of the value of autonomy). Assertions or assumptions of freedom’s non-specific instrumental or constitutive value are made by many representatives of the liberal tradition, including J. S. Mill, Hobhouse and Hayek.

The first part of this chapter discusses two opposing concepts of the value of language (viewed as an aspect of culture): its intrinsic value (which is argued to be important) versus its instrumental value (which is the usual way that it is regarded). The chapter goes on to address the specific issue of constitutional jurisprudence in Canada on the right to use French or English before federal and some provincial courts. It is suggested that the singular lack of generosity exemplified in leading cases is explained by the court's failure to recognize the intrinsic value of use of the mother tongue in a judicial setting.

This chapter examines the most prominent arguments for political engagement's importance to democratic polities, including those put forward by Alexis de Tocqueville, and shows that each presents circumstantial and ultimately inconclusive evidence. It first considers the benefits that political engagement offers to individuals and communities before discussing how essential those benefits are to the health of liberal democracy. It then evaluates defenses of political engagement's intrinsic and instrumental value and proceeds to build a case for the importance of political engagement that can stand up to critical scrutiny. It contends that were should avoid very low political engagement because it might badly undermine a democracy's claims to political legitimacy. Instead, we should care about the increased, voluntary political engagement that might ensue if political institutions were more responsive, political education were more effective, and if our attention deficit democracy could be treated through liberal means.

This chapter uses the main principle to explain why economic rights should be regarded as human rights. Property rights, contract rights, and other economic rights are a solution to the productive investment CAP. Property and contract rights are not defined a priori, but should be defined in a way that they will, as a practice, do the best job of equitably promoting life prospects. The chapter uses the main principle to explain the moral appropriateness of (1) the contours of property rights to both tangible and intangible property; (2) exceptions to contracts, including unconscionability, implied warranties, strict liability, mandatory disclosure, bankruptcy; (3) the replacement of caveat emptor with caveat venditor in win-win contracts; (4) market economies; (5) negative income tax; (6) voluntary consent to economic and other transactions; (7) prohibitions on slavery contracts; (8) minimum wage legislation. The chapter contrasts his account with fair starting-point theories of justice, including Ronald Dworkin’s theory. He also contrasts his account with Richard Posner’s account of the common law in terms of economic efficiency.

A preliminary analysis of personal value is presented. Chapter 4 also considers some influential views on the notion of personal goodness. The first, and most important, is G. E. Moore's famous attack on the very notion of something being good‐for a person. Another examined approach is a competitor to the position defended in this work. On this alternative value‐for and good‐for are understood in terms of the de facto attitudes of its beneficiary (i.e. the person whose personal value it is). In discussing these views this chapter takes the opportunity to clarify the author's own analysis on several important points.

This chapter is a sustained argument against the Moorean claim that the value of a bearer is intrinsic if and only if this value supervenes entirely on the intrinsic properties of the bearer. This chapter addresses both halves of this biconditional separately, and argues that neither side is true. Whether a bearer’s value is intrinsic, this chapter concludes, has nothing to do with the intrinsicality or extrinsicality of the properties upon which this value supervenes.

In making progress with the justification of punishment it is important to distinguish between the immediate aims of punishment and the deeper philosophical commitments which underpin its justification. The immediate aims of punishment can usefully be separated into things of intrinsic value and things of instrumental value. Different theories justify punishment by appealing to these different values. Retributivists think that punishment is to be justified in virtue of the fact that the suffering of offenders is good in itself. Instrumentalists think that punishment is to be justified in virtue of its good effects – most importantly in reducing the crime rate. This debate is to be distinguished from the debate between consequentialism and non-consequentialism. Retributivists are commonly associated with non-consequentialism and instrumentalists are commonly associated with consequentialism. But these associations are philosophically weak. Retributivists may be consequentialists and instrumentalists may be non-consequentialists.

‘Value Taxonomy’ has two objectives. First, it presents a range of approaches to classifying values. In doing so, it brings to the fore key notions and distinctions that play important roles in value theory in general, but especially in this work, such as intrinsic/final value, final/non-final value, intrinsic/extrinsic value, and relational/non-relational value; derivative and non-derivative value; attributive and predicative use. In value theory, the nature of the value-making features functions as a gateway to how we should understand many of the above distinctions. The chapter considers therefore some advantages and disadvantages of this approach. Second, ‘Value Taxonomy’ introduces some of the key issues in formal and substantive value theory, respectively, for a reader who is not familiar with contemporary value theory.

We have a rough understanding of what it means for a value to be fulfilled—we attain a goal, cultivate a relationship, inhabit a way of being, uphold an ideal, and so on. This chapter explains how this rough idea of fulfillment should be filled out and how we can use it to think about improving overall value fulfillment. Values bring with them various standards of success and living up to these standards is the essence of value fulfillment. Revising our standards (or sometimes our values themselves) can help us do better at fulfilling multiple values through changing circumstances. This chapter also considers the relationship between value fulfillment and virtue, and the problem of adaptive values (values that have adapted to serve others’ interests).

Presenting pragmatic Confucian democracy as encompassing both Schumpeterian and Deweyan models of democracy, each focused on political institutions and a way of life respectively, this chapter argues that democracy as a social experience has both instrumental and intrinsic values and, to the extent that Confucian democracy is a kind of democracy, it too has and ought to have both instrumental and intrinsic values. Once introduced and justified as a political system on instrumental and consequential grounds, democracy attains its noninstrumental value as it gets consolidated as a way of life, in the course of which democratic institutions, rights, and practices are socially mediated by and negotiated with existing Confucian values, habits, mores, and moral sentiments. It is through such a complex process of social and cultural negotiations that democratic institutions, rights, and practices (i.e., a democratic way of life) can be made intelligent to and further cherished by citizens.

In his recent work in social epistemology, Alvin Goldman argues that truth is the fundamental epistemic end of education, and that critical thinking is of merely instrumental value with respect to that fundamental end. He also argues that there is a central place for testimony and trust in the classroom, and an educational danger in overemphasizing the fostering of students’ critical thinking. This chapter takes issue with these claims and argues that (1) critical thinking is a fundamental end of education, independently of its instrumental tie to truth, and (2) it is critical thinking, rather than testimony and trust, that is educationally basic.

This chapter is devoted to getting clear on what a desert thesis for blame might come to. A desert thesis for blame, it is argued, need not commit to the proposition that a wrongdoer must be harmed in proportion to the wrong done, or in like manner to the harm she has caused. A minimal desert thesis is proposed according to which it is good that in response to a wrong done, a wrongdoer is harmed, and so it is permissible to harm her. This, however, does not distinguish a desert thesis for blame from a desert thesis for punishment. So what is distinctive of the harm in blaming? Blaming is liable to harm, it is argued, by virtue of the burdens of the conversational engagement with those holding responsible. These burdens impair the blamer's ability to sustain friendships. They impose on her personal freedom, and are emotionally unsettling. Thus, a desert thesis especially suited for blame contends that the harms that it is good for a wrongdoer to undergo are those that are distinctive of blame.

The chapter presents main conceptual distinctions underlying much of modern philosophical thinking about value. The introductory section is followed by an outline of the contrast between non-relational value (impersonal good, or good, period) and relational value (good for someone, or—more generally—good for some entity). In the third, the focus is on the distinction between final and non-final value, as well as on different kinds of final value. The last section considers value relations, such as being better/worse/equally good/on a par. Recent discussions suggest that it might be necessary to considerably extend traditional taxonomies of value relations.

“Humean” approaches to epistemic normativity, which explain epistemic normativity as a species of instrumental normativity, are articulated and criticized. A “teleological” conception of belief, on which belief requires a desire to believe nothing but the truth, is considered. It is argued that belief is not normally accompanied by the desires required by the Humean’s account. Objections, in defense of Humean approaches, are considered.

This chapter considers whether public policies impinge on the values of education by focusing on the experience of three Southern Cone countries: Argentina, Brazil and Chile. It first provides an overview of some theoretical arguments underpinning the impact of public policy on the instrumental values of education before discussing educational development in Argentina, Brazil and Chile. It then analyses the interrelationships between education and social, employment, urban and language policies. It also looks at the link between education and poverty alleviation in the three countries and concludes by outlining more concrete indications of the current challenges to the global governance of education. While prosperity and welfare expansion appear to have had a positive effect on the educational development of Argentina, Brazil and Chile, a number of contradictions has also consolidated inequality.

This chapter provides a defense of the instrumental value of scientific knowledge and understanding as well as a defense of the use of public funds in support of scientific research, including space science. It motivates a more sophisticated understanding of the “spinoff” justification for space exploration by drawing on research in philosophy of science which connects social progress to scientific progress, and scientific progress to scientific exploration. This establishes the instrumental value of scientific (including space) exploration. It then uses a framework derived from Mark Brown and David Guston to argue that democratic states have obligations to provide wide-ranging and substantial support for scientific research, including space research. Finally, it provides an overview of various space research projects, identifying the ways they contribute to democratic governance. It also contains a discussion of the crewed vs. robotic exploration debate.

Chapter 8 addresses the Content Problem of Legal Normativity, arguing that the content of the only first-order motivating reason to which the practices constituting something as a system of law are reasonably contrived to give rise is an objective motivating reason to obey law as a means of avoiding being subject to coercive sanctions. It rejects one possible solution to the Content Problem, arguing that there is nothing in objective norms of practical rationality that would encourage us, even presumptively, to obey a norm simply because it has the status of law. Since there is nothing else in these practices reasonably contrived to give rise to an objective motivating reason with different content, neither the How Problem nor the Content Problem can be solved without assuming it is a conceptual truth that some mandatory legal norms governing non-official behavior provide objective motivating reasons to comply in virtue of being backed with the threat of a coercive sanction.

Theunissen explores Kant’s legacy. As she reads him, a crucial dimension of Kant’s view that human beings are absolutely valuable is that human beings are of value independently of the good they do or stand to do. Absolute value is importantly a benefit-independent form of worth. The author brings out Kant’s significant departure from ancient (and in particular Socratic) conceptions of value according to which there is a conceptual connection between goodness (or value) and benefit. The author uncovers the sense in which contemporary readers are likely to inherit Kant’s elision of benefit with instrumental value, something that is regarded as a lowly and even morally worrisome form of worth. She gives reason to resist this identification.

The aim of this chapter is to render the Sustainability Principle more precise. To what extent can it be motivated by axiological claims about the moral value of sustainability? The position articulated in this chapter is somewhat complex. If sustainability had been valuable in a noninstrumental sense, then this would have been an excellent explanation for why long-term depletion of significant natural resources is wrong. However, the best argument for ascribing noninstrumental value to the environment does not warrant the conclusion that sustainability is valuable in a noninstrumental sense. This leaves us with an alternative explanation for why we should accept the sustainability principle: Long-term depletion of significant natural, social, or economic resources is wrong because it indirectly reduces the well-being of millions of present and future sentient beings. It is thus the instrumental value of sustainability that ultimately motivates the sustainability principle.