A POSITIVE THEORY OF SOCIAL VALUE CHAPTER X VALUE AS GENERIC. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VALUE We return, then, to the problem of the nature of value. Value is more than the total utility of a good, or the marginal utility of a good, to an individual, and it is more than a ratio of exchange. Economic value is a species of the _genus_ value, which runs through other social sciences, as ethics, aesthetics, jurisprudence, etc. Sometimes these various values are so intermingled that it is impossible to tell them apart: thus, what kind of value did a human life have in early Germanic jurisprudence, when a _wergeld_ was accepted as compensation for killing a man? Ethical and legal values we recognize as something very different from the feelings of single individuals, and also as something very different from abstract ratios. In fact, the idea of quantitative ratios in connection with moral values is somewhat startling--though we do apply the "times judgment" pretty far, and say, "he's twice the man the other fellow is," or "this isn't half as bad as that." But we do not go into refinements, ordinarily, and try to make the ratios more exact, as by saying that the value of this noble deed is three and three eighths times as great as that. The quantitative measure of legal value is a more familiar idea. Thus, a man gets five dollars fine for a plain drunk, and twenty-five dollars for getting drunk and "cussin' around" (a scale of "prices" recently established in the court of a Missouri Justice of the Peace), or three years in the penitentiary for one crime, and ten years for another. Here we have quantitative measurements of values, but still it is rather strange to our thought to speak of a ratio of exchange between them. We have no occasion to exchange them ordinarily, even though it may happen that a criminal, in contemplating the chances of success in two alternative depredations, will weigh the penalties to which he would be liable in the two cases against each other; and, indeed, the law of supply and demand holds here also (though inversely applied, for we are dealing with negative values). If a particular crime (as "Black-Handing") increases rapidly, we increase the penalty on it to bring it to a stop. But this generalization of the idea of value ought to make clear one thing: exchange, at least in its ordinary meaning,[119] is not the essence of value. Exchange is a factor in estimating value only in economic life. And even there, values are often estimated without actual exchange, and the art of accountancy has arisen for that purpose.