Value commitments, value structures and ways of evaluation

Value commitments are constraints on the permissible ways of evaluating feasible options. Such commitments may be moral principles but they need not be so. Professional obligations, economic interests, political loyalties, personal ideals and projects and aesthetic values can all impose constraints on the way feasible options are evaluated in a given decision problem and, hence, may all qualify as value commitments.

Only rarely will a value commitment be so powerful as to restrict ways of evaluating feasible options in a given decision problem to a single way. If Jones has borrowed money from Smith and faces the question of paying her back, he may have the choice of repaying in cash, repaying by check or not repaying at all. Assuming that Jones endorses the obligation to repay his debts as a value commitment, he is constrained to rank repaying by cash over not repaying and repaying by check over not repaying. But his obligation does not constrain him in any way regarding the choice between check and cash. It is not that his value commitment ranks the two options together. Rather it leaves open the way that repaying by cash and by check are to be ranked vis-à-vis one another.

For this reason, it is not useful in systematic discussions to think of value commitments as applying directly to the determination of what ought and what ought not to be done even though moral principles and other value commitments are often couched in the language of the obligatory or permissible character of acts.