1. The scale of values is the classification and dimension attributed, in order of priority, to a series of personal factors that characterize the behavior and choices of an individual. This scale can vary throughout life and the situations that are presented to each one, with which there is no scale model that is more accurate than another.
Grammatical category: noun fem.
in syllables: esca-la + de + val-ores.
Value scale
lilen gomez
Professor in Philosophy
In Antiquity, values were associated with virtues, as qualities that make a person “excellent”. Already in modern times, the question of values has been widely addressed within the field of humanities and, particularly, within sociology —a discipline that has given rise to a sociology of values, as a specific area. From the point of view of the social sciences, values play a role in the regulation of daily life, through the constitution of a ethos shared, that is to say, of a common sense that orders the perceptions and guides the behaviors of the members of a social group. However, although all individuals estimate certain values, these are not always shared by all of them. In this sense, within each society conflicting value systems coexist, proposing different scales of values, to the extent that different values are ranked.
The systems or scales of values are the result of the historical and contextual conditions of each society, which is why they are considered epochal, since they change according to the time and place in question. Thus, for example, the traditional values of a people, associated with the customs that they practiced in the past, in many cases, come into conflict with the modern values that people assume in today’s society.
Subjectivity of values
Values can be considered subjective to the extent that they are not valid by themselves, but rather depend on the various conceptions that human beings have over time. From an objectivist perspective, on the contrary, the values are considered as ideal and independent of the estimate of the individuals. From this distinction, it is possible to distinguish two general positions about the status of values, on the one hand, subjectivism and, on the other, axiological objectivism.
There are different criteria by which something is considered valuable. Depending on the characteristics of the values, human beings establish scales or hierarchies between them. Some of these characteristics are, for example, the durability over time of the values, that is, that adherence to them lasts for a lifetime or that they are momentary; their integrality, that is, that they are conceptually indivisible; its flexibility or the ability to adapt the value in question to a given situation; its satisfiability; or its applicability to the facts of daily life.
Systems models and value scales
Not all human beings share the same values, but the valuation processes imply a complex dimension of personal, intellectual and affective, and historical conditions. Consequently, there is no single scale of values, but their hierarchical orderings change according to changes in social contexts. From the framework of the humanities and social sciences, different scales of values have been proposed.
An example is the scale of values developed by the German philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928), according to which values are ordered based on the perceptions we have of them as superior to, equal to, or inferior to other values. In turn, these are classified into three categories: the values of what is pleasant and what is unpleasant, vital values (healthy and sick), and spiritual values (aesthetic, legal, intellectual and religious).
For his part, the Polish-American social psychologist Milton Rokeach (1918-1988) has proposed a scale of values based on the conceptualization of value as the belief that people have about what final states and what behaviors are desirable, having a character prescriptive on the latter. The hierarchical ordering of the values will depend on the relevance that each subject gives to the different axiological orientations: moral, personal, social and competence.
A third example is the scale of values formulated by the Italian-Argentine philosopher Francisco Leocata, ordered according to economic, sensitive-affective or vitality, aesthetic, intellectual, moral and religious values.
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