“A science that observes the laws of causation, and so is value-free, threatens human freedom and man’s religious, ethical, and legal responsibility. The philosophy of values raised to that challenge, in the sense that it opposed a sphere of values, as a realm of ideal valuations, to a sphere of being that was only causally understood. It was an attempt to assert the human being as a free, responsible creature, indeed not in itself, but at least, in its valuation, what one called value. That attempt was put forth as a positivistic substitute for the metaphysical.”

— Carl Schmitt

"The Tyranny of Values" (1959)

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Carl Schmitt 36

German jurist, political theorist and professor of law 1888–1985

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“The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 44.

“Any liberal system must proceed from the assumption that freedom is one and indivisible and that elementary human freedom in all spheres of life must go hand in hand with political, religious, economic and spiritual freedom. The strategy of collectivist thinking has always been to split up this most essential and most universal of human values as a means of making inroads into the free system itself.”

Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) German politician

The Economics of Success (D. van Nostrand & Co., 1963), pp. 291–292

“The capacity for the accomplishment of religious virtuosos — the “intellectual sacrifice”— is the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man. That this is so is shown by the fact that in spite of (or rather in consequence) of theology (which unveils it) the tension between the value-spheres of “science” and the sphere of “the holy” is unbridgeable.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Source: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), p. 154; Essay: "The prestige and power of the “Great Powers."

“If beings are grasped as will to power, the “should” which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a “should” does not determine being. Being determines a “should.” “When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values.””

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

VIII, 89

p. 32
Nietzsche (1961)

“Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Introduction (1969)

“From what can "ought" be derived. The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature -n novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“To be sure, one value comes with every positive-law statute without reference to its content: Any statute is always better than no statute at all, since it at least creates legal certainty. But legal certainty is not the only value that law must effectuate, nor is it the decisive value. Alongside legal certainty, there are two other values: purposiveness and justice. In ranking these values, we assign to last place the purposiveness of the law in serving the public benefit.”

Gustav Radbruch (1878–1949) German politician

"Statutory Lawlessness and Supra-Statutory Law" (1946)

“Values are goals which behavior strives to realize. Any activity that is oriented towards an end is a value-oriented action. To the ancient Greeks, their culture was guided by an attainment of ‘the good life.’ In the early days of Christianity, the ‘good life’ was shifted from this lifetime into the next. Newtonian science and the modern era brought values under rational scrutiny, and a desire for empirical order. Modern capitalism introduced the value of ‘good’ as more production per capita, and ‘better’ as even more production. There is nothing in the sphere of culture which would exempt us from the realm of values—no facts floating around, ready to be grasped without valuations and expectations”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 80 as cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. Saybrook Graduate School. p. 11.

“Humanities and science are not something mutually contradictory but complimentary. One should realize the fact that science is devoid of values especially moral and ethical values. Science is a system of philosophy without ethics. Science devoid of ethical judgment becomes an ally of everyone – of the good as well as the bad and is of service in changing the world into a paradise or reducing it to a veritable hell.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: Philosophy of Education, p. 86.

“Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1959)

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