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:
“Free competition exists inside shelters of law, custom, insurance, political approval, and carefully protected status.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
—R.D. (Ronald David)