When was the last time someone looked at you as if you were irreplaceable? When did you do that with another person?
These questions are not rhetorical. They are the starting point of Robert S. Hartman's intellectual and human project: a philosopher who built a science of value not to measure people's performance, but to understand why some had lost the ability to recognize human value—and what consequences that blindness had when it reached power.
Hartman's work, which he developed over decades, has a practical application today in the Hartman Value Profile (HVP). But to understand what this test measures—and what it reveals—it is useful to return to its philosophical root.
Three Ways to See a Person
Hartman identified three ways we can perceive the value of something—or someone:
The Systemic view: a person's value comes from the role they occupy, the category they belong to. The title, the position, the contract. This view orders the world and makes large-scale cooperation possible. But when it dominates, it turns people into interchangeable functions.
The Extrinsic view: a person's value comes from what they produce, what they contribute, what they manage. It is the view of performance, efficiency, and results. Essential in the world of work and economics. But when it dominates, the person becomes a resource that is optimized, replaced, and discarded when they cease to be profitable.
The Intrinsic view: a person is perceived as unique, irreplaceable, of a value that cannot be compared or measured in equivalents. Their value is not based on what they belong to or what they produce: their value is based on what they are. This is the view Hartman called the fullest—and the most difficult to maintain.
The Natural Order of Value
Hartman had a central axiological conviction: for people, the natural order of value is I > E > S. The Intrinsic dimension must preside over the Extrinsic, which must preside over the Systemic.
When this order is inverted—when S > E > I, or when E > I > S—predictable consequences appear:
- The bureaucratized system that treats people as functions (S dominant over I).
- The organization that optimizes performance without considering wellbeing (E dominant over I).
- Leadership that applies rules without seeing the people behind them.
Hartman did not formulate this as a moral critique. He formulated it as an axiological reading: when the order of value is inverted, the organization—or the person—tends to make flawed decisions.
What the Hartman Test Measures
The Hartman Value Profile (HVP) evaluates, among other things, a person's capacity to perceive value in its three dimensions: how much they enrich (see more value than there is), how much they impoverish (see less), how much they partialize (see only from one dimension).
Leadership that enriches the Intrinsic dimension sees people with more value than the immediate situation reveals. It sees potential, uniqueness, what has not yet been expressed. This is the leadership that develops, trusts, and retains.
Leadership that impoverishes this dimension sees people with less value than they have. It classifies, discards, undervalues. Sometimes unknowingly.
Dignity as Capacity
The word dignity comes from the Latin "dignus": worthy, valuable, deserving. It refers to that which has value in itself. Dignity, understood in this way, is not only something that is granted: it is also something that is exercised—or not exercised—by recognizing that value in others.
Dignity as capacity means the ability to see another as irreplaceable. To respond to them from their uniqueness, not from their function. Not to reduce them to what they produce or the category they belong to.
This capacity can be measured. And it can be developed.
In the organizational context, this development is not abstract: it has direct consequences on the quality of leadership, on talent management, on the ability to retain the people who matter most to retain, and on the health of teams.
Focus Values System makes this measurement available to organizations—not as a philosophical exercise, but as a practical tool for talent evaluation and development.