Value

The word value has several meanings:

• emotionally, it means the things that we act to protect, e.g. we value our own children, our own home.

• moral value is the closest to this that we can express in symbols like words, and it has some legal expressions, e.g. moral rights to creative works, but is generally considered intangible.

When people talk about "the spirit of" an agreement or institution they are trying to invoke its moral value. Whether this invocation is itself moral or not depends on the situation and the values of the invoker - a faction consists of people who will generally accept one view of this, and unite to defend that view against others. This type of valuation is usually quite irrational because it isn't meant to be challenged, it's more of a challenge in and of itself to say "that is amoral" or "that is immoral" for instance.

• local value is the value of things for their physically closeness to us and their ability to protect what we value emotionally, e.g. local food sources are more trustworthy to us because we know that we are not exposing our children to more harm than they would normally encounter in their environment (note that this applies in both very pure and very polluted environments). It is also important to preserve local economy and rare local food stuffs, e.g. w:Slow Food movement
• ecological value is a vague concept probably referring to ecological yield or natural capital or environmental standards
• social value is a vague concept probably referring to social capital or labour standards or human rights
• price value or exchange value is the most commonly used sense of the word, and the one most often abused in advertising, e.g. a fast food value meal which is usually doing great damage to moral and local values. A better term is price premium which acknowledges that there is a price at which people will over-rule moral or local values.
• use-value is a term from anarchist economics implying that there is no exchange value, and that one must look at any product or service only in terms of what processes it enables - an early service economy analysis which led in part to industrial ecology and Natural Capitalism theories recently.