What Is Value? And Why Do We Fight About It?

You’ve probably had this experience: you’re in the middle of an argument with a friend, and suddenly you realize you’re not arguing about the same thing at all. Maybe you think the movie you just watched was a masterpiece, and your friend thinks it was boring nonsense. You could list reasons all day, but neither of you budges. Or maybe the argument is bigger—about whether something is fair, or whether someone did something wrong, or whether a joke went too far.

Philosophers have a name for these kinds of disagreements. They call them value disputes. And one philosopher, a man named Alain Locke, spent his life trying to understand what values actually are and why they cause so much trouble.

Where Do Values Come From?

Locke noticed something strange about the way we talk about values. When we say something is “good” or “beautiful” or “wrong,” we talk as if those qualities are in the thing we’re talking about—as if the movie itself contains beauty, or the action itself contains wrongness. But Locke thought this was backward. He thought values don’t live in objects at all. They live in us.

Here’s the idea: values are feelings first and thoughts second. When you call something beautiful, you’re not making a logical deduction. You’re having a particular kind of emotional experience—let’s call it the “beauty feeling”—and then your mind turns that feeling into a judgment. Locke called these feeling-qualities the raw material of all value. Every value, he said, is “an emotionally mediated form of experience.” That’s a fancy way of saying: we feel our way into what matters.

Locke believed there are several basic types of value, each with its own distinctive feeling. Religious values come from a feeling of awe or exaltation. Moral values come from a feeling of tension or conflict—that inner tug-of-war between what you want and what you should do. Aesthetic values come from a feeling of harmony or repose—the quiet satisfaction of something that feels right. Logical values come from a feeling of agreement or fit—the click of a puzzle piece sliding into place.

This might sound abstract, but think about times you’ve actually experienced these things. The hush that falls over a room during a beautiful piece of music—that’s the aesthetic feeling. The knot in your stomach when you know you should tell the truth but it’s going to hurt someone—that’s the moral feeling. The almost physical relief when a confusing idea finally makes sense—that’s the logical feeling.

Why Values Change

Here’s where it gets interesting. If values are rooted in feelings, then values can change when feelings change. And they do, all the time. Locke called this transvaluation—the process of valuing the same thing in a completely different way.

Think about a song you used to love but now find annoying. The song didn’t change. Your feeling about it changed, and therefore the value changed too. Or think about something more serious: a family tradition that once felt meaningful to you but now feels empty or even wrong. The tradition is the same. You’re different.

Locke thought this was not just normal but inevitable. Values, he said, depend on social and cultural forces that are always moving. A value that makes perfect sense in one time and place can seem bizarre or even harmful in another. This is why people from different cultures—or even different generations within the same culture—can look at the same thing and see completely different values in it.

The Danger of Absolutes

So far this might sound like Locke is saying “anything goes”—that values are just feelings and there’s no way to say one is better than another. But that’s not what he thought. He thought the real danger was the opposite: pretending that our values are absolute, universal truths that everyone should accept.

Locke identified three barriers to getting along with people who value things differently. The first is absolutism—the belief that your values apply to everyone, everywhere, at all times. The second is uniformitarianism—the demand that everyone in your group should have the same values. The third is dogmatism—refusing to examine your own values critically or consider that you might be wrong.

Sound familiar? It’s easy to spot these tendencies in other people. Harder to spot them in yourself. But Locke thought they were the root of most serious conflict between groups of people. When you believe your values are absolute, you don’t just disagree with people who value differently—you see them as wrong, or broken, or even dangerous.

This part gets complicated, but here’s what Locke was driving at: he wanted a way to take values seriously without turning them into weapons. He wanted to say that values matter—they really do guide our lives and give them meaning—without saying that only one set of values is correct.

The Trick of Finding Equivalence

Locke’s solution was to look for what he called functional equivalence. The idea is simple: two things can look completely different but do the same job. A spoon and a chopstick look different. But if you’re eating soup, they both perform the same function. If you get fixated on the difference in appearance, you miss the similarity in purpose.

Locke thought this was true of values across cultures. A religious ceremony in one culture and a secular community festival in another might look completely different. But if you ask what function they serve—bringing people together, marking important transitions, creating a sense of belonging—you might find they’re doing the same thing.

He called this cultural equivalence: the discovery that underneath different forms, many values serve similar human needs. Once you see this, it becomes harder to dismiss another culture’s values as simply wrong. You might still prefer your own. But you can recognize that the other group isn’t crazy—they’re just using different tools to solve similar human problems.

Locke added two more principles. Cultural reciprocity means that when cultures meet, the exchange should go both ways. It’s not about one culture teaching the other how to be civilized. It’s about genuine mutual learning. And cultural convertibility means that values can be borrowed and adapted across cultures—but gently, not by force. You can’t just transplant one culture’s values into another and expect them to take root.

A Concrete Case: The New Negro

Locke wasn’t just sitting in an armchair thinking about values in the abstract. He was a real person living through real history, and his ideas grew out of his experience. Born in Philadelphia in 1885, he became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, studied at Harvard and Oxford, and spent most of his career at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

In 1925, Locke published a book called The New Negro that became a kind of manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance—an explosion of African American art, music, and literature. And in that book, you can see his philosophy of values at work.

Here’s the situation: Before the Harlem Renaissance, most African American art was what Locke called representative. Its job was to show white America that Black people were civilized, cultured, worthy of respect. Artists felt they had to put the “better foot forward”—to create positive stereotypes to fight against negative ones. Locke thought this was a trap. Art made to fight political battles, he argued, isn’t free. It’s still responding to the oppressor’s terms.

The “New Negro” artists did something different. They stopped trying to represent the race and started trying to express themselves. They wrote and painted and sang as individuals, not as representatives. And here’s the strange thing Locke noticed: when they did this—when they stopped trying to be universal and instead became deeply, honestly particular—their work actually became universal. The most specific, personal art turned out to have the widest appeal.

Locke had a name for this transition. He called it moving from folk art to high art or classical art. The spirituals—the songs enslaved African Americans created in the fields and churches of the South—started as folk art. They were rough, local, tied to specific experiences of suffering and hope. But over time, they transcended their origins. They became part of the musical heritage of all Americans, and eventually of the world. Why? Because, Locke said, they were “fundamentally and everlastingly human.” The particular suffering of one group, honestly expressed, turned out to speak to everyone.

What Is Race, Anyway?

All of this led Locke to a question that might seem simple but turns out to be very hard: What is race? And is “Negro art” actually a useful category at all?

Locke’s answer was surprising for his time. He argued that race is not biological. There is no set of genes that makes someone “Black” or “white.” The scientific racism of his day—which claimed that races were natural biological categories with different inherent abilities—was, in Locke’s words, “bad science” and “an ethnic fiction.”

But Locke didn’t think this meant race wasn’t real. He thought race was real in the same way that language is real, or money is real, or a football team is real. It’s not a natural fact. It’s a social fact. People create it together, they maintain it through their beliefs and practices, and it has real effects in the world even though it doesn’t have a physical reality.

Locke called this social race or ethnic race. On this view, a race is a group of people who share a particular cultural history, a set of characteristic ways of living, valuing, and expressing themselves. Different races might be mixed up biologically—in fact, they almost always are—but they’re distinct culturally.

This might sound like it solves problems, and in some ways it does. If race is culture, then cultures can learn from each other, borrow from each other, and change over time without anyone “betraying” their race. But it also raises a difficult question: If race is just culture, why do we still treat it as if it’s something deeper? And why does it still cause so much pain?

Locke was honest about this. He knew that even after you debunk a bad idea, the damage it caused doesn’t magically disappear. People have been treated terribly because of race. Institutions have been built on racist foundations. You can’t just say “race isn’t real” and expect everyone to feel better.

The Puzzle That Remains

So here’s where Locke leaves us. Values are real—they shape our lives and give them meaning. But they’re not absolute. They come from feelings, not from the fabric of the universe. Different groups can have different values, and those differences are real, not just mistakes. Yet we still need some way to get along, to find common ground, to live together without fighting all the time.

Locke thought the answer was something he called cultural pluralism—not melting everyone into one culture, and not walling cultures off from each other, but letting them interact, borrow, learn, and change. He thought the trick was to stop seeing different values as threats and start seeing them as experiments in how to be human.

This is still a live debate. People today argue about whether values can be objectively true or whether they’re all relative to culture. They argue about whether we should try to find universal values that everyone should share, or whether that’s just another form of domination. They argue about whether some values really are better than others—whether, for example, a culture that respects human rights is genuinely superior to one that doesn’t.

Locke didn’t have final answers to these questions. But he had a way of approaching them that might still be useful. He thought the first step was always to ask: What feeling is this value rooted in? What function does it serve? And can I recognize that someone else’s very different values might be serving a similar function for them?

It doesn’t make disagreements disappear. But it might make them less violent. And for someone who lived through the racism of early 20th-century America, that was not a small thing.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Value	A feeling-based judgment about what matters, which guides how we think and act
Value-mode	The basic type or category of value (aesthetic, moral, religious, logical) determined by the kind of feeling you’re having
Transvaluation	The process of valuing the same thing in a completely different way because your feelings about it changed
Cultural equivalence	The discovery that different cultures’ values often serve the same human functions, even if they look different on the surface
Cultural reciprocity	The idea that when cultures interact, the exchange should be mutual and two-way, not one group dominating another
Social race / ethnic race	Locke’s term for race understood as a shared cultural history and way of life, rather than as a biological category
Absolutism	The belief that your values apply to all people in all times and places, which Locke saw as a major cause of conflict
Functional equivalence	Two things that look different but do the same job—Locke used this to find common ground between different value systems

Key People

Alain Locke (1885–1954): The first African American Rhodes Scholar, a Harvard-trained philosopher who taught at Howard University and became a leading voice in the Harlem Renaissance. He argued that values come from feelings, that race is a cultural not biological category, and that different cultures can learn from each other without losing their distinctiveness.

Things to Think About

Think of a value you hold strongly—something you believe is truly right or wrong. Can you identify the feeling that might be underneath it? If that feeling changed, would the value change too?
Locke said that art made to prove a point (like “our race is worthy of respect”) is less powerful than art made to express individual experience. Do you agree? Can you think of examples where making a political point made art stronger, or weaker?
If race is a social category, not a biological one, what does that mean for how we should treat racial identity? Should people stop identifying with racial groups? Or does calling race “made up” ignore real differences in people’s experiences?
Locke thought we could find common ground between different value systems by looking at what function they serve. Try this with something you strongly disagree with someone about—maybe politics, religion, or even taste in music. Can you find a function the other person’s values serve that you might respect even if you don’t share them?

Where This Shows Up

School debates about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” are really about whether values are absolute or relative, and whether protecting people from certain ideas is more important than exposing them to everything.
Social media arguments often involve people treating their own values as universal truths and attacking anyone who values differently—exactly the absolutism Locke warned against.
Multicultural education and diversity initiatives in schools and workplaces are practical experiments in Locke’s idea of cultural pluralism: can different groups coexist without one dominating the other?
Arguments about cultural appropriation—when someone borrows from another culture’s art, clothing, or practices—raise exactly the questions Locke asked about what makes something “Negro art” and who gets to use it.