The paradigm that we used in this study is, inevitably, both judgmental and evaluative and it therefore makes it interesting to
discuss our results in relation to axiology and to previous results that have explored the relationship of value to brain activity. We agree with DW Gotshalk [21] that ‘‘beauty is a value’’, that it commonly evokes desire and that whatever is desired has value, although we tend to place beauty more in the perceiver than in the object, without denying that objects may have characteristics that qualify them as beautiful to one or many subjects. This essentially implies that there must be an intimate link in the cortical processing that is linked to value, desire and beauty. It is therefore interesting to note that the activity in A1 of mOFC that we report here is almost co-terminous with the activity reported in previous studies of the neural correlates of desire [22] and of value judgments [13]. This in turn not only reflects what is well known about the relationship of value, judgment, beauty and desire in axiology and philosophical discourse generally but also implies that there might be a value assigning system in the brain that is either supra-modal, that is to say not linked to value within any particular domain, or has specializations within it related to different values (see below).