Design involves choice. Choosing involves acting. Choosing can be capricious, but a person usually believes the choices he makes to be capable of justification. Sometimes he thinks his choices right; sometimes he comes to think them wrong. "Right" and "wrong" in this context are customarily held to be "value terms", of which the right is to be preferred to the wrong. Choosing constitutes a "critical step" in the human activity called designing. Such a step may in practice be extremely complex. This complexity is apt to obscure the issues involved in the decision-taking situation. Psychological involvement adds its own quota of confusion. I intend, therefore, to look in an abstract way at the concrete problems of designers working in the field. This method of proceeding, since it avoids immediate concern about a particular situation, is less likely to divert attention from the principles elucidated. In addition the increase in simplicity may be paralleled by an increase in comprehension. In any event, if the simple is obscure, the complex can hardly be expected to be clear. Of course, as Nelson Goodman once pointed out, attempting to make the obscure obvious is apt to be unappealing: failure brings confusion, and success banality. But in a field as obscure as that of value theory the attempt at clarification is unlikely to be wholly successful. Some areas of interest will doubtless remain.