A Sociological Assessment Devoted to the Resource of Value Judgments

Value judgments are the most important norms that determine human behaviors and that appoint the direction of the expected behavior in a society. Values that live sometimes as a norm, sometimes an objective, and sometimes a principle play a great role in establishing and regulating of the social life. This role shows itself in change processes, too. Because along with the change of values in a society, it is seen that human relations being in the first place, many things from institutions to stratification features change also. In this respect, values ruling in social area inform us about the course of social life. Also, an individual’s values both express his/her pursuits and their importance and show the direction of his/her wishes and demands. Thus, values play a descriptive role and reflect the identity and character of both the individual and society. Sociology put the values into the base of social and cultural structure, but mostly concentrates on their effect on human behaviors. In this article, after covering the discussions stemming from different perspectives devoted to the resource of value judgments, the resource of values in sociological terms is tried to be explained. Sociology is a social science discipline that avoids single reasoned methodology, and that follows multi-reasoned methodology in its studies, and that takes functional relations among phenomenon into account. Because of this property of sociology, in value judgments’ showing up, functional interaction processes between assessing subject and assessed object, and cultural environment are seen as important. Thereby, in this study, it is emphasized that value judgments arising as a product of assessment process cannot be independent from sociology’s explanation.

Keywords

Values, Values judgments, Source of values, Sociology