Values and the Explanation of Behaviour

Abstract

1. The explanation of a man's behaviour in terms of his values is a procedure frequently resorted to in historiography, in everyday discussion, and in the informal psychology of literature (especially in plays and novels). Nor has this useful procedure of workaday life been abandoned by the social scientist : it is, for example, commonly met with in readings in sociology, and in individual and social psychology. An analysis of the conceptual role of values in the explanation of behaviour is therefore quite obviously a question of substantial interest for philosophers, if only because the problem is a meeting-ground of the traditional interests of philosophical value-theory with concerns in the philosophy of the social sciences, as well as with issues in philosophical psychology.1 In the reasoned analysis of the springs of human action, one expects to find an appeal to values primarily in two contexts-in deliberation and decision-making on the one hand, and in the explanation of human behaviour upon the other.2 These two facets of values are of course closely connected. The connection between them is effected by the mediating principle that in maintaining that X (e.g., honesty) is one of N's (e.g., Smith's) values we are prepared to claim that N would take his subscription to X into due account in making relevant choices, with the result that the outcome of these choices, viz. N's actions, significantly reflect-and are thus in some measure explicable in terms of-N's commitment to X. But just how are we to conceive of the holding of a value as being reflected in action ? This key question must be answered if appropriate light is to be thrown upon the explanatory role of values. We are concerned to consider the role of values in the explanation of actions. This is not to say that values cannot be invoked in the explanation of certain other sorts of things, such as habits (' Smith is a free-and-easy spender because liberality is one of his values ') or even of values themselves (' Smith values economic justice because justice-i.e., justice-in-general-is one of his values '). But such value-explainable items will of course be, in their turn, hooked up with human behaviour, that is, with actions.