"Men value things in three ways: as useful, as pleasant or sources of pleasure, and as excellent, or as intrinsically admirable or honorable"
About this Quote
Adler’s line has the tidy confidence of a classroom diagram, but its real bite is moral. By sorting “value” into the useful, the pleasant, and the excellent, he’s not just describing how people appraise objects; he’s quietly ranking the ways a culture justifies its choices. Utility and pleasure are the categories modern life can measure, market, and optimize. “Excellent” is the one that resists spreadsheets, the stubborn remainder that forces you to talk about virtue, dignity, and ends worth pursuing even when they’re inconvenient.
The phrasing “Men value things” signals a mid-century, Great Books-era ambition: build a common vocabulary for judgment across politics, commerce, and personal life. Adler’s intent is diagnostic and corrective. If you can name the categories, you can catch yourself when you smuggle one in as another: calling a moral compromise “practical,” dressing up indulgence as “self-care,” or treating what is merely profitable as if it were noble.
“Intrinsically admirable or honorable” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a rebuke to the idea that all value is preference and all preference is equal. In Adler’s context - a philosopher committed to classical ethics and liberal education - this triad echoes Aristotle’s distinctions between the expedient, the pleasurable, and the good. The subtext is a warning: a society fluent only in usefulness and pleasure will still hunger for excellence, but it will outsource it to brands, celebrity, or ideology. Adler is trying to keep “honor” from becoming just another consumer feature.
The phrasing “Men value things” signals a mid-century, Great Books-era ambition: build a common vocabulary for judgment across politics, commerce, and personal life. Adler’s intent is diagnostic and corrective. If you can name the categories, you can catch yourself when you smuggle one in as another: calling a moral compromise “practical,” dressing up indulgence as “self-care,” or treating what is merely profitable as if it were noble.
“Intrinsically admirable or honorable” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a rebuke to the idea that all value is preference and all preference is equal. In Adler’s context - a philosopher committed to classical ethics and liberal education - this triad echoes Aristotle’s distinctions between the expedient, the pleasurable, and the good. The subtext is a warning: a society fluent only in usefulness and pleasure will still hunger for excellence, but it will outsource it to brands, celebrity, or ideology. Adler is trying to keep “honor” from becoming just another consumer feature.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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