Protected Values

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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 anyone even if it means saving many more or cloning for the sake of medical advances.

From the perspective of utilitarianism this is a bias when it means utility will not be maximized across individuals. Protected values tend to be overgeneralizations, and most people will admit they can think of a scenario when trading off their most precious values is necessary if asked to do so.

[edit] Protected values as deontological rules

According to Jonathan Baron and Mark Spranca protected values arise from rules as described in theories of deontological ethics. This implies that people are concerned with their participation in transactions rather than just the consequences of it. Absoluteness has been described as the defining property of protected values. The term absolute applies to the fact that such values are considered non-tradable and that people want them to trump any decision involving a conflict between a protected and a compensatory value. Compensatory values can be defined as part of a pair of values were a change in one value can be compensated by a change in the other value. These values are prevalent in the theories of consequentialism and utilitarianism. Furthermore Baron and Spranca propose five other concepts as being properties of protected values, due the fact that these values arise from deontological prohibitions. Quantity insensitivity is included because the quantity of consequences is irrelevant for protected values. For instance is the act of destroying one species as bad as destroying a hundred. Agent relativity is also a property because protected values are not agent general. This means that the participation of the decision maker is important, not the consequences in themselves. In addition the actions required or prohibited by protected values are seen as moral obligations. They are universal and independent of what people think. Two other properties are also described as important. For one, the property: denial of trade-offs by wishful thinking. In this lies that people may resist the idea that anything must be sacrificed at all for the sake of their value. They deny the existence of trade-offs and believe that their values do no harm. Finally the emotional aspect of anger is relevant. Because people see the violation of a protected value as a moral violation they tend to get angry when thinking about an action that harms such values.