Values deal with the central Socratic question: How should we live?

- A question that is also

reiterated by Williams Bernard (1985). This question deals with human motivation more than mere
normative expectation or mathematical expectation. Ethical deliberations cannot be totally
inconsequential to actual human behavior (Sen, 1990, p. 3-4). i

Values can be identified and discerned at various levels. Thus:

 Ideologically, values are meanings, beliefs, convictions and principles we live and share, create and
cultivate, use and diffuse in everyday life.
 Philosophically, values are ideas, ideals, ends, means, principles, doctrines, standards, rules, and
judgments that we derive from various schools of thought that we espouse.
 Organizationally, values are vision, mission, goals, objectives, money, capital, scarce resources,
talents, skills, knowledge, organizational routines, patents, intellectual property rights, markets
and opportunities, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders that we consider useful and
valuable for our business.
 Legally, values are rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness endorsed by the Preamble, the
constitution and its interpretations, governments and bureaucracies, law and order, product
safety, security and privacy, freedom and independence, and freedom from oppression and
suppression.
 Ethically, values are legacies of behavioral standards and constraints, codes of conduct, ethical
theories, normative and non-normative principled behavior norms, mores and customs derived
from the ethical theories, industry injunctions and benchmarks, and socially value-based best
practices.
Morally, values are our beliefs and experiences, meanings and convictions, heritage and
traditions that we have derived from our family and school upbringing, college and university
education, and work and corporate training and challenges.

i Amartya Sen (1990: 2) comments on the surprising feature of modern economics to make it value-free or non-ethical.
Historically, he observes, the evolution of modern economics has largely been an offshoot of ethics. The subject of economics
was for long considered as a branch of ethics. At the very beginning of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle relates the subject
of economics to human ends or ethics. Aristotle in his Politics connected both politics and economics to ethics. Adam Smith
(1976), the father of modern economics, was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Until recently,
economics was taught at Cambridge as part of moral science. Kautilya, an advisor and minister of the Indian emperor
Chandragupta, the founder of the Mauryan Dynasty (and grandfather of Ashoka), wrote around 400 BC his Arthashastra
(“Instructions on Material Prosperity”) that includes four distinct fields: a) metaphysics, b) ethics (as the science of right and
wrong), c) the science of government, and d) the science of wealth. This book also dealt with related engineering problems.
In fact, modern economics has a definite logistic and engineering approach as evidenced in the writings of William Petty,
David Ricardo, Augustine Cournot, and Leon Walras. However, modern “positive” economics has distanced itself from ethics,
thereby impoverishing itself seriously (Sen, 1990, p. 7-14).