CONCEPT
Orders of Worth
Boltanski and Thévenot's framework of six competing value systems — inspired, domestic, civic, market, industrial, and projective — by which modern societies justify worth.
Orders of worth names the plurality of value systems that coexist and compete in modern societies. Developed by Boltanski with Laurent Thévenot in On Justification (1991), the framework identifies six distinct grammars of evaluation: the inspired order valuing creative genius; the domestic order valuing tradition and hierarchy; the civic order valuing collective welfare; the market order valuing competitive exchange; the industrial order valuing efficiency and productivity; and (added later) the projective order valuing networking and adaptability. Each order establishes its own tests of worth, and most practical disputes involve conflicts between orders. AI disrupts the tests by which worth has been evaluated across multiple orders simultaneously.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from Boltanski and Thévenot's observation that when people justify decisions in everyday disputes — at work, in families, in civic life — they invoke not a single moral system but a plurality of them, each with its own characteristic vocabulary, its own paradigmatic figures, its own tests of worth. The genius