Argument from Values: Because Justice Demands It
Political arguments often reach a point where facts give out and values take over. You can agree on all the statistics about drug addiction rates, treatment costs, and enforcement effectiveness — and still disagree profoundly about whether recreational drugs should be legalised, because the disagreement is ultimately about the relative weight of individual freedom and social protection. The argument from values is the formal structure behind this kind of reasoning. It is not a fallacy. It is unavoidable. But it carries special risks that make careful attention essential.
The Scheme
Douglas Walton and his colleagues formalise the argument from values as follows:
- Value premise: Value V is something that ought to be promoted (or preserved, or respected).
- Factual premise: Policy/action A promotes (or threatens) value V.
- Conclusion: Therefore, A ought to be supported (or opposed).
The scheme appears throughout ethics, law, and politics. "Privacy is a fundamental value. Surveillance undermines privacy. Therefore, mass surveillance should be restricted." "Human dignity must be upheld. Torture violates human dignity. Therefore, torture is impermissible." "Economic growth is essential for social welfare. This policy promotes growth. Therefore, we should adopt this policy."
In each case, a value does genuine argumentative work. The conclusion is not derived from facts alone — it requires the value premise to bridge from descriptive to normative. This is entirely legitimate. As philosopher Hilary Putnam argued, the sharp fact/value dichotomy that dominated 20th-century philosophy was always illusory. Most serious reasoning about human affairs involves both facts and values inextricably intertwined.
The Hierarchy of Values
One of the most important features of value-based argumentation is that values come in hierarchies and clusters. Different contexts, traditions, and frameworks organise the same values differently. Freedom, equality, security, prosperity, tradition, justice, community, dignity — all of these appear across cultures and ideologies, but their relative weight, their interpretation, and their application to specific cases varies enormously.
In practical reasoning, when two values conflict, the argument from values must do double duty: it must not only establish that a given value is relevant and at stake, but also that it outranks or takes priority over competing values in this particular context. "Yes, privacy matters — but security matters more." "Yes, tradition has weight — but justice matters more here." These ranking arguments are where much political and ethical debate actually lives.
Political philosopher Isaiah Berlin's concept of value pluralism is directly relevant here. Berlin argued that genuine values — freedom, equality, security, community — are not always reconcilable. Sometimes they genuinely conflict, and the resolution is not a matter of logical deduction but of judgement. This doesn't mean "anything goes"; some resolutions are wiser or more defensible than others. But it does mean that arguments from values rarely produce conclusions with the necessity of mathematical proofs.
When Values Actually Agree
A common misconception is that people who reach different policy conclusions must have different values. In practice, they often share the same values but differ on facts about how policies affect them. Both sides of the minimum wage debate typically invoke the values of worker welfare and economic opportunity — they disagree about whether raising the minimum wage promotes or undermines those values in practice.
This distinction matters enormously for productive discourse. If a disagreement is factual, then evidence can in principle resolve it. If it is genuinely evaluative — two parties actually weighting the same values differently — then evidence has less direct purchase, and the conversation needs to address the values themselves. Treating a factual dispute as if it were a value dispute (or vice versa) derails the conversation before it begins. See also the false dilemma: many political debates present value clashes as forced either/or choices when in fact both values can be substantially accommodated.
Value Claims Are Not Self-Justifying
A central weakness of many value-based arguments is that they treat the value premise itself as requiring no justification — as self-evident, universal, or beyond question. "Of course freedom matters." "Obviously human life has dignity." But in cross-cultural, inter-generational, or simply deeply contested debates, these premises are not obvious at all.
The critical questions for the argument from values include:
- Is the claimed value actually widely shared? Or is it specific to a particular tradition, culture, or ideological framework that the other party does not share?
- Is the factual link between the action and the value real? Does the proposed policy actually promote or threaten the named value, or is that claim contestable?
- What other values are at stake? Identifying only one value while ignoring competing values that the action also affects is a common rhetorical move. It may not be dishonest — some values really do dominate — but it needs to be made explicit and argued for.
- How is the value being interpreted? "Freedom" means very different things in libertarian and social-democratic frameworks. Making the interpretation explicit prevents the equivocation that often makes value debates feel like ships passing in the night.
- Why should this value take priority here? When values conflict, the priority claim needs its own argument.
Manipulation via Values: Glittering Generalities
The argument from values becomes a rhetorical tool rather than a rational one when it invokes value terms primarily for their emotional resonance rather than their argumentative content. This is the mechanism behind glittering generalities: abstract, positively charged terms — "freedom," "justice," "the people," "our values," "common sense" — that function as applause lines rather than premises.
"We must defend our values" sounds like an argument but specifies nothing. Which values? Against what threat? By what means? When value language becomes sufficiently vague, it no longer constrains conclusions at all — any policy can be dressed in the language of freedom, justice, or tradition. The emptier the value invocation, the more suspicious you should be about what is being hidden beneath it.
The converse also applies: loaded language uses value-charged terms to smuggle conclusions into descriptions. Calling a policy "Orwellian" or "revolutionary" invokes a cluster of negative or positive associations under cover of description. This is not the same as the argument from values — it doesn't make the value premise explicit — but it exploits the same mechanism of value response.
Practical Reasoning and Values
The argument from values is deeply intertwined with practical reasoning: the form of reasoning that moves from goals and circumstances to actions. In practical reasoning, values define the goals; facts about the world determine which actions are available; and the argument connects them. Walton treats both as part of the same general family of goal-directed argumentation.
The difference is emphasis. Practical reasoning focuses on goal achievement: what action should I take to reach my goal? The argument from values focuses on normative justification: why does this value make this action obligatory or impermissible? In practice, these often run together — we justify our goals by appeal to values, and we evaluate actions by their consistency with those goals and values.
In Democratic Discourse
Liberal democratic theory has always struggled with the role of value arguments in public life. John Rawls famously argued that political arguments in the public forum should be based on "public reason" — reasons that can be accepted by all citizens regardless of their comprehensive moral or religious doctrines. On this view, arguing that a policy should be adopted because your religion requires it violates the norms of democratic discourse; arguing from shared values of justice and equal dignity does not.
Critics of Rawls — including Jürgen Habermas and many communitarians — have challenged this picture, arguing that the boundary between public and non-public reasons is impossible to draw consistently, and that deep value pluralism is a feature of democratic life that cannot be sanitised away. The ongoing debate is, in a sense, itself an argument from values about what democratic values require.
What the debate shows is that value-based reasoning in politics is inescapable — the only question is whether it is done explicitly and examined critically, or tacitly and unreflectively. Making the value premises of your arguments visible is not a sign of weakness. It is a precondition for honest disagreement.
Sources & Further Reading
- Walton, Douglas N., Chris Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno. Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Berlin, Isaiah. "Two Concepts of Liberty." In Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford University Press, 1969.
- Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.
- Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Harvard University Press, 2002.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Value Pluralism
- Wikipedia: Argumentation scheme