Value theories investigate how people positively and negatively value things and concepts, the reasons they use in making their evaluations, and the scope of applications of legitimate evaluations across the social world. When put into practice, these views are meant to explain our views of the good.

At the general level, there is a difference between moral and natural goods. Moral goods are those that have to do with the conduct of persons, usually leading to praise or blame. Natural goods, on the other hand, have to do with objects, not persons. For example, to say that "Mary is a morally good person" might involve a different sense of "good" than that in the sentence "A tummy tuck is good."

Ethics tend to be more interested in moral goods than natural goods, while economics tends to be more interested in the reverse. However, both moral and natural goods are equally interesting to goodness and value theory, which is more general in scope.