Positive and Negative Value
There may be a distinction between positive and negative philosophic or ethic value. While positive ethic value generally correlates with something that is pursued or maximized, negative ethic value correlates with something that is avoided or minimized.
Negative value may be both intrinsic negative value and/or instrumental negative value.
Read more about this topic: Value (ethics)
Famous quotes containing the words positive and/or negative:
“Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has “cast up” in my time or is like to—this art by which even the “poor” can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn’t it be acting favourably on the morality of the country?”
—Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866)
“The negative cautions of science are never popular. If the experimentalist would not commit himself, the social philosopher, the preacher, and the pedagogue tried the harder to give a short- cut answer.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)