Protected values are values that people are unwilling to trade off no matter what the benefits of doing so may be. For example, some people may be unwilling to kill another person, even if it means saving many others individuals. Protected values tend to be overgeneralizations, and most people can in fact imagine a scenario when trading off their most precious values would be necessary.
From the perspective of utilitarianism, protected values are biases when they prevent utility from being maximized across individuals.
Read more about Protected Values: Protected Values As Deontological Rules
Famous quotes containing the words protected and/or values:
“Wasn’t marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?”
—Edna Ferber (1887–1968)
“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)