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:
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“With all of its bad influences, T.V. is not to be feared.... It can be a fairly safe laboratory for confronting, seeing through, and thus being immunized against unhealthy values so as to be “in the world but not of it.””
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)