The Objectivity of Value

It is trendy in some religious circles to bemoan what is termed "relativism" or "subjectivism" in values, meaning the notion that values depend principally upon individual human opinions. Values such as good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsity, etc. possess an independence from the processes of individual estimation.

One of the areas most overlooked by such critiques, however, is the area of commodity values. The very same people who decry the relativity of values in other areas seem to make an exception for commodities. The value of a commodity, we are told, is simply a matter of what people are willing to exchange for it. If someone is willing to pay $20 for a chair, then the chair is worth $20 (assuming they were not hoodwinked in some way, of course). Similarly, the labor that is sold as a commodity to employers by their employees has whatever value is freely agreed upon. Assuming there is no compulsion, the value of any commodity is entirely relative to the free opinions of those involved in its exchange. "Subjective value theory" is, in this sense, the poster child for relativism in values.

A rejection of this type of relativism, on the other hand, would insist that value is an objective feature of the commodity. The value of a chair has to do with the the value of the materials and labor that produced it. The value of labor has to do with the amount of producing it can do with certain materials in a given amount of time. If a person given $5 worth of materials can make a $20 chair an hour, her labor has a value of $15/hr. If her boss, after selling the chair for $20, turns around and pays her $10/hr, that leaves $5/hr that she gave to the boss in work but for which she was not paid in return. This is why "profit" has famously been defined as unpaid wages. She gives more value in labor than she receives in wages, and such exploitation is a basic feature of the capitalist mode of production. To understand the situation in this way, however, requires that we view value as being grounded in the objectivity of the real conditions under which it occurs.

The worry of popular evangelicals is not precisely that rendering value subjective will lead to greater immorality. Rather, the worry is that it makes it difficult or impossible to realize or know when something evil is happening. The subjectivization of value hides the objective features of what is occurring. In the same way, the subjectivization of value in economics obscures and occludes the objective features of exploitation under which laborers suffer.