Values typically come in pairs. Most obviously, there are the pairs of an intrinsic good and its contrasting intrinsic evil, such as pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, and desert and undesert, or getting what one deserves and getting its opposite. But in more complex cases there can be contrasting pairs with the same value. Thus, virtue has the positive form of benevolent pleasure in another’s pleasure and the negative form of compassionate pain for his pain, while desert has the positive form of happiness for the virtuous and the negative form of pain for the vicious. Of each pair we can ask how its elements relate to each other, and the simplest answer is that they do so symmetrically, so that, for example, a pleasure of a given intensity is exactly as good as a pain of that intensity is evil, or benevolence exactly as great a virtue as compassion. But there is no necessity for this. Values can equally well be asymmetrically related, and in several ways. In this paper I ask, of a series of pairs of value, when asymmetries between their elements are plausible, what bases these asymmetries have, and whether there are any patterns among them. I start with the simplest case, that of pleasure and pain. Utilitarians typically treat these values as symmetrical, so a given quantity of pleasure exactly cancels the disvalue of an equal quantity of pain; this is Jeremy Bentham’s view and is also suggested by Henry Sidgwick.1 But G.E. Moore disagrees. In Principia Ethica he says that while pleasure has “at most some slight intrinsic value,” pain is “a great evil,” adding that “[t]he study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, . . . if . . . pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to believe that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry.”2 A similar view has recently been defended by Jamie Mayerfeld. One of his two main claims about happiness and suffering is that...