Calculated Futures: Theology, Ethics, and Economics

2. The facts About Values

47 If efficiency is the true end of economics and friendship with God that of Christian theology, then are their first principles “the individual will to create value” and the “journey to discover virtue” respectively? That is to say, economists assume that the basic form of action is an individual who chooses, and in so choosing produces value. Whereas theologians assume that value cannot be produced for the good can only be discovered; it is discovered by seeking God above all things. the basic form of human action then is not the acting will, but the reception of gift within the context of a journey. that very journey will require the cultivation and reception of virtues . The cultivation of virtue is what theologians call “natural” or “moral” virtue. The reception of virtue is what they call “infused” or “supernatural” virtue. The latter comes as a gift and not as an accomplishment. the former can be acquired but, when the latter is received, even the nature of the moral virtues is reordered to its true end. For Christian theology, this gift is received through the church, particularly through the Word and Sacraments that allow — 2 — tHe FaCts aBout values  / D. Stephen Long and Nancy Ruth Fox us to participate in the life of Christ. Values or virtues? This is one of the important questions a conversation between economists and theologians must address. a headline in The New York Times read “Market Puts Price Tags on the Priceless” (Mansnerus, 1998, 1). The article discussed the supply of, and demand for, children in the marketplace of adoption. such an article raises the question—does everything have a price, or are some things priceless? Economists are often accused of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. they can tell us what the costs are for our policies, but they cannot tell us why some policies might be better than others—despite the costs incurred. theologians, however, are often accused of proclaiming the value of everything while overlooking the price incurred for living out those values. they denounce the market’s propensity toward putting a price tag on everything without recognizing that moral and theological positions will always require someone to pay. But bringing theologians and economists into a conversation about value is an arduous task. although they both invoke this term, it is unclear that they define and use it with sufficient commonality so that they can fruitfully converse with each other. in fact, some theologians have argued that the moral life cannot be spoken of in terms of values at all. As Stanley Hauerwas has put it, “Used cars have value, people shouldn’t.” Rather than value, these theologians seek to recover the language of virtue, a language that was rendered obsolete as sociologists and religious ethicists turned to the language of value. in this chapter, we investigate the different ways in which economists and theologians define and use the term value. section 1 is a brief overview of the evolution of the economist’s concept of value. section 2 discusses the language of value from a theological perspective. Section 3 presents a critique of the economist ’s concept of value. section 4 presents an alternative to the language of value in the language of virtue. Section 5 examines the The Facts about Values /  propriety of market exchange; and section 6 suggests that such propriety does not yet answer the underlying theological questions. section 1 the evolution of the economist’s concePt of vAlue nAncy fox Any misunderstanding about the economist’s definition of value should be easily cleared up by a study of adam smith, who made the distinction between “value in use” and “value in exchange” over two hundred years ago. He defined value in use as “the utility of some particular object” and value in exchange as “the power of purchasing other goods which possession of that object conveys” (Brue, 1994, 80). Economists since that time have, more or less, accepted smith’s distinction and have concentrated—for the two centuries since—on explaining how value in exchange is determined. the model of supply and demand, which alfred Marshall developed in 1890, is invoked to explain the value of everything from cars to apples to body organs to babies. economists have focused for so long on a theory of value of exchange (as opposed to use), that they have essentially eliminated the distinction between the...