Some values people refuse to trade away at any price, and that changes negotiations
Ask someone whether they would take one life to save many, and many will refuse no matter the arithmetic. Philosophers call such commitments protected or sacred values. They sit at one extreme of a larger question ethics keeps returning to: what makes anything worth having at all?
In ethics, value means how much something matters, used either to work out which actions or ways of living are best or simply to describe how significant different actions are. Values are broad preferences about what ought to happen, like the belief that people deserve respect and dignity. They come in moral, ideological, social and aesthetic varieties, and it is still argued whether a trait such as altruism is built in, or whether acquisitiveness is a vice or a virtue. The wider study of value is called axiology.
A classic split separates instrumental from intrinsic value. A radio is instrumentally good because it gets you music; something intrinsically valuable is worth having for its own sake. The categories overlap: understanding science can be rewarding in itself and useful for reaching other goods. Philosophers add the idea of intensity, illustrated with a whimsical example of someone whose ultimate goal is eating waffles, where each waffle keeps its worth even while nobody is eating it.
Protected values are those a person will not trade for any benefit. When two of them collide, such as refusing to kill versus defending one's family, the result is called a tragic trade-off. Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca trace such values to duty-based, Kantian norms: people care about taking part in a deal, not just its results. Because of that, sacred values can block the give-and-take of businesslike bargaining in long-running disputes, and from a strictly utilitarian view they look like biases.
Philosophic value differs from economic value, which rises and falls with the supply of money. Still, one view treats price as a reflection of personal valuation: you buy when owning a thing matters more to you than what you give up for it. Ludwig Wittgenstein doubted absolute values could ever be pinned down, calling talk about life's meaning expression rather than fact. The psychologist S. H. Schwartz took an empirical route, looking for universal values tied to biological needs, social coordination and group survival.
Source: Value (ethics)
