Value (ethics) in the context of "Important"

In sociology, socialization (or socialisation) is the process through which individuals internalize the norms, customs, values and ideologies of their society. It involves both learning and teaching and is the primary means of maintaining social and cultural continuity over time. It is a lifelong process that shapes the behavior, beliefs, and actions of adults as well as of children.

Socialization is closely linked to developmental psychology and behaviorism. Humans need social experiences to learn their culture and to survive.

Value theory, also called axiology, studies the nature, sources, and types of values. It is a branch of philosophy and an interdisciplinary field closely associated with social sciences such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

Value is the worth of something, usually understood as covering both positive and negative degrees corresponding to the terms good and bad. Values influence many human endeavors related to emotion, decision-making, and action. Value theorists distinguish various types of values, like the contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value. An entity has intrinsic value if it is good in itself, independent of external factors. An entity has instrumental value if it is useful as a means leading to other good things. Other classifications focus on the type of benefit, including economic, moral, political, aesthetic, and religious values. Further categorizations distinguish absolute values from values that are relative to something else.

In metaphilosophy and ethics, metaethics is the study of the nature, scope, ground, and meaning of moral judgment, ethical belief, or values. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics (questions of how one ought to be and act) and applied ethics (practical questions of right behavior in given, usually contentious, situations).

While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, metaethics addresses questions about the nature of goodness, how one can discriminate good from evil, and what the proper account of moral knowledge is. Similar to accounts of knowledge generally, the threat of skepticism about the possibility of moral knowledge and cognitively meaningful moral propositions often motivates positive accounts in metaethics. Another distinction is often made between the nature of questions related to each: first-order (substantive) questions belong to the domain of normative ethics, whereas metaethics addresses second-order (formal) questions.

A virtue (Latin: virtus) is a trait of excellence, including traits that may be moral, social, or intellectual. The cultivation and refinement of virtue is held to be the "good of humanity" and thus is valued as an end purpose of life or a foundational principle of being. In human practical ethics, a virtue is a disposition to choose actions that succeed in showing high moral standards: doing what is said to be right and avoiding what is wrong in a given field of endeavour, even when doing so may be unnecessary from a utilitarian perspective. When someone takes pleasure in doing what is right, even when it is difficult or initially unpleasant, they can establish virtue as a habit. Such a person is said to be virtuous through having cultivated such a disposition. The opposite of virtue is vice.

Other examples of this notion include the concept of merit in Asian traditions as well as De (Chinese 德).

Civic virtue is a concept that refers to the set of habits, values, and attitudes that promote the general welfare and the effective functioning of a society. Closely linked to the concept of citizenship, civic virtue (virtus) represents, therefore, the disposition of citizens to put the common good (bonum commune) before special interests. The identification of the character traits that constitute civic virtue has been a major concern of political philosophy. The term civility refers to behavior between persons and groups that conforms to a social mode (that is, in accordance with the civil society), as itself being a foundation of society and law.

Human behavior is the potential and expressed capacity (mentally, physically, and socially) of human individuals or groups to respond to internal and external stimuli throughout their life. Behavior is driven by environmental and genetic factors that affect an individual. Behavior is also driven, in part, by thoughts and feelings, which provide insight into individual psyche, revealing such things as attitudes and values. Human behavior is shaped by psychological traits, as personality types vary from person to person, producing different actions and behavior.

Human behavior encompasses a vast array of domains that span the entirety of human experience. Social behavior involves interactions between individuals and groups, while cultural behavior reflects the diverse patterns, values, and practices that vary across societies and historical periods. Moral behavior encompasses ethical decision-making and value-based conduct, contrasted with antisocial behavior that violates social norms and legal standards. Cognitive behavior involves mental processes of learning, memory, and decision-making, interconnected with psychological behavior that includes emotional regulation, mental health, and individual differences in personality and temperament.

Importance is a property of entities that matter or make a difference. For example, World War II was an important event and Albert Einstein was an important person because of how they affected the world. There are disagreements in the academic literature about what type of difference is required. According to the causal impact view, something is important if it has a big causal impact on the world. This view is rejected by various theorists, who insist that an additional aspect is required: that the impact in question makes a value difference. This is often understood in terms of how the important thing affects the well-being of people. So in this view, World War II was important, not just because it brought about many wide-ranging changes but because these changes had severe negative impacts on the well-being of the people involved. The difference in question is usually understood counterfactually as the contrast between how the world is and how the world would have been without the existence of the important entity. It is often argued that importance claims are context- or domain-dependent. This means that they either explicitly or implicitly assume a certain domain in relation to which something matters. For example, studying for an exam is important in the context of academic success but not in the context of world history. Importance comes in degrees: to be important usually means to matter more within the domain in question than most of the other entities within this domain.

The term "importance" is often used in overlapping ways with various related terms, such as "meaningfulness", "value", and "caring". Theorists frequently try to elucidate these terms by comparing them to show what they have in common and how they differ. A meaningful life is usually also important in some sense. But meaningfulness has additional requirements: life should be guided by the agent's intention and directed at realizing some form of higher purpose. In some contexts, to say that something is important means the same as saying that it is valuable. More generally, however, importance refers not to value itself but to a value difference. This difference may also be negative: some events are important because they have very bad consequences. Importance is often treated as an objective feature in contrast to the subjective attitude of caring about something or ascribing importance to it. Ideally, the two overlap: people subjectively care about objectively important things. Nonetheless, the two may come apart when people care about unimportant things or fail to care about important things. Some theorists distinguish between instrumental importance relative to a specific goal in contrast to a form of importance based on intrinsic or final value. A closely related distinction is between importance relative to someone and absolute or unrestricted importance.

In ethics, intrinsic value is a property of anything that is valuable on its own. Intrinsic value is in contrast to instrumental value (also known as extrinsic value), which is a property of anything that derives its value from a relation to another intrinsically valuable thing. Intrinsic value is always something that an object has "in itself" or "for its own sake", and is an intrinsic property. An object with intrinsic value may be regarded as an end, or in Kantian terminology, as an end-in-itself.

The term "intrinsic value" is used in axiology, a branch of philosophy that studies value (including both ethics and aesthetics). All major normative ethical theories identify something as being intrinsically valuable. For instance, for a virtue ethicist, eudaimonia (human flourishing, sometimes translated as "happiness") has intrinsic value, whereas things that bring you happiness (such as having a family) may be merely instrumentally valuable. Similarly, consequentialists may identify pleasure, the lack of pain, and/or the fulfillment of one's preferences as having intrinsic value, making actions that produce them merely instrumentally valuable. On the other hand, proponents of deontological ethics argue that morally right actions (those that respect moral duty to others) are always intrinsically valuable, regardless of their consequences.

Social alienation is a person's feeling of disconnection from a group – whether friends, family, or wider society – with which the individual has an affiliation. Such alienation has been described as "a condition in social relationships reflected by (1) a low degree of integration or common values and (2) a high degree of distance or isolation (3a) between individuals, or (3b) between an individual and a group of people in a community or work environment [enumeration added]". It is a sociological concept developed by several classical and contemporary theorists. The concept has many discipline-specific uses and can refer both to a personal psychological state (subjectively) and to a type of social relationship (objectively).