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A Viability Theory of Value

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Theories of value have traditionally explained value through labour, utility, exchange, price, capabilities, or public purpose. While each captures important aspects of economic life, none provides a general account capable of explaining labour, ecological systems, institutions, unpaid care, financial extraction, and long-term sustainability within a single conceptual framework. This paper argues that the limitation arises because previous theories have attempted to define value directly rather than deriving it from a more fundamental account of adaptive systems. Building on the concept of viability, the paper develops a theory in which value is defined as the normative significance of changes in the reproductive capacity of adaptive systems. Labour, ecological systems, institutions, care, knowledge, and governance are analysed as complementary mechanisms through which reproductive capacity is created, maintained, restored, transferred, extracted from, or destroyed. From this foundation, the paper develops a unified framework for analysing value across economic, ecological, institutional, and social domains. The framework also provides normative foundations for rights, taxation, non-monetary recognition, economic planning, and National Capacity Accounting by evaluating institutions according to their effects on reproductive capacity and future adaptive possibility. The paper argues that economics requires a theory of value grounded in reproduction rather than production, in future possibility rather than present exchange, and in viability rather than persistence. More fundamentally, it argues that value is not a primitive concept requiring direct definition but one that can be derived from the conditions that enable adaptive systems to continue generating viable futures.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15226846
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6911936119
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