The distinction between moral values and others is not an easy one. There are easy extremes: the value that one places on his neighbor's welfare is moral, and the value of peanut brittle is not. The value of decency in speech and dress is moral or ethical in the etymological sense, resting as it does on social custom; and similarly for observance of the Jewish dietary laws. On the other hand the eschewing of unrefrigerated oysters in the summer, though it is likewise a renunciation of immediate fleshly pleasure, is a case rather of prudence than morality. But presumably the Jewish taboos themselves began prudentially. Again a Christian fundamentalist who observes the proprieties and helps his neighbor only from fear of hell-fire is manifesting prudence rather than moral values. Similarly for the man with felony in his heart who behaves himself for fear of the law. Similarly for the child who behaves himself in the course of moral training; his behavior counts as moral only after these means get transmuted into ends. On the other hand the value that the child attaches to the parent's approval is a moral value. It had been a mere harbinger of a sensually gratifying caress, if my recent suggestion is right, but has been transmuted into an end in itself.
It is hard to pick out a single distinguishing feature of moral values, beyond the vague matter of being somehow irreducibly social. We do better to recognize two largely overlapping classes of moral values. Altruistic values are values that one attaches to satisfactions of other persons, or to means to such satisfactions, without regard to ulterior satisfactions accruing to oneself. Ceremonial values, as we might say, are values that one attaches to practices of one's society or social group, again without regard to ulterior satisfactions accruing to oneself. Definitions appealing explicitly to behavioral dispositions rather than thus to hidden motivations would be desirable, but meanwhile a vague sketch such as this can be of some help if we do not overestimate it.
It is clear from the foregoing examples of prudential taboos, hell-fire, repressed felony, and child training, that two members of a society may value an act equally and yet the value may be moral for the one and prudential for the other. But we like to speak also of the moral values or moral code or morality of a society as a whole. In so doing we may perhaps be taken to mean those values that are implemented by social sanctions, plus any further values that are moral values for most of the members individually.
(W. V. Quine, "On the Nature of Moral Values," in Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankena, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt, ed. Alvin I. Goldman and Jaegwon Kim [Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978], 37-45, at 39 [italics in original; endnote omitted])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 