How does the value of a whole (person, society) relate to the value of its parts (timeslices, individuals)? Utilitarians have traditionally treated the parts as axiologically fundamental, and held that we may simply sum the intrinsic values of the parts to obtain the intrinsic value of the whole. But this presupposes what we may call ‘value atomism’, or the claim that the contributive value of a part depends only on its intrinsic (non-relational) features. The value of a part is, in other words, taken to be independent of what else exists. In this paper, I wish to challenge this ‘independence assumption’, and explore the prospects for an holistic axiology that takes extrinsic or relational properties into account. We may thus take value holism to be the claim that the contributive value of a part cannot be assessed in isolation; it depends on how the part stands in relation to the whole, and in particular on what other parts there are. To speak even more generally: value holists treat the whole as axiologically fundamental, and hold that parts get...