Are values "totally" different from person to person?
Yes and no, of course
As I gear up to teach the first non-specialized applied ethics course I’ve taught in surprisingly many years, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the challenges of teaching ethics. One of those challenges is the common belief that values differ widely between people.
As an ethicist, my knee-jerk reaction to this claim is something like that of a porcupine sensing danger: I want to stick my spines out. The danger here is moral/ethical1 relativism, which—if we’re not very careful with it2—makes ethics into a puddle of opinions that you wade into at your own peril. Moral “argument” becomes a matter of expressing more or less stridently what we like or don’t like but not really getting anywhere because we’re essentially talking past each other. You can’t get ethics off the ground if everybody thinks differently about value!, my inner porcupine shouts.
My porcupine takes it for granted that ethics is worth doing, which is why I get prickly at the casual assumption that relativism is true. I operate from the position that, like language use, we may have some dialect differences, but on the whole we manage to get along just fine most of the time. Ethics is real, the system works. Most folks agree about a lot of moral matters: murder is wrong, peace is good, pain is bad, you should keep your promises, etc.
One reason we think ethics is “totally” different from person to person is that we don’t always agree on the harder cases. But that’s because they’re hard. Think of it this way: those hard cases are like arguing whether teal is a species of blue or green (only with a lot more at stake). It wouldn’t be hard if there weren’t some reasonable case to be made for both sides.
A distinction (you saw that coming, right?)
But I realized recently in an exchange with
that another reason people think values vary widely among people is that there are distinct categories of value that my inner porcupine had been lumping together. Yael comes from a psychology background, and thinks about values a little differently in the context of her counseling practice. As she explained to me,“our definitions of ‘values’ are serving different functions. When you talk about values in the ethical sense, that's about collective standards of right and wrong. But in ACT [acceptance and commitment therapy], we're focused on values as personal qualities of action that help someone be their best self in any given moment, things like ‘playfulness’ in parenting or ‘curiosity’ in conflict. These aren't necessarily ethical positions, but they're meaningful guides for how that person wants to show up in the world.”
I do love a useful distinction! Let’s label the different types of value for easier handling: let’s call them ethical/moral values, and personal values. Moral values are the ones about ethics, the domain of right and wrong, good and bad, virtue, justice, how to live well and get along with one another, etc. Personal values are modes of living around which we shape our identities and guide our choices: the things that matter to us.
Moral values, then, are interpersonal, meant to be “collective standards” that we use to hold one another accountable. The “right and wrong” component of them purports to hold some authority that we don’t get to wiggle out of just by saying we don’t care: if I claim that “murder is wrong” I mean to assert that you shouldn’t do it even if you want to. I’m directing you not to. I venture most of us feel the prescriptive pull of moral assertions. We know how to play the ethics game, even when we’re not sure what’s right. Most people do care about getting things right—suggesting that most people do take ethics seriously. (To which my snarky porcupine says, See? Nobody really believes relativism if they actually think about it.)
But the porcupine needs to understand that alongside the practice of taking ethics seriously, we also do have pretty wide variation among personal values. Some of us care about playfulness, curiosity, assertiveness, tidiness, sports, education, the arts, etc. We build our lives and identities around qualities, activities, and concerns that matter to us, and we combine them in zillions of different ways. And we think that’s fine—more than fine, good. It takes all kinds to make a world! Values like those I just listed seem to be optional in a way moral values aren’t. I don’t have to care about golf or hunting; you don’t have to care about keeping your space tidy or playing the piano. We can all choose how much cream to put in our coffee.
Why isn’t this distinction more obvious?
Because our values are things we care about, however, it’s hard to separate the optional ones from the not-so-optional ones. In both cases, we use our values prescriptively from an internal point of view. Personal values may be optional “from the outside,” so to speak, but “from the inside,” that’s not how we treat them on a day-to-day basis.3 We use all our values as guides for decision making and often don’t need to distinguish between the moral and the personal.
So I suspect people do what my porcupine was doing, only in the other direction: the porcupine was lumping all values into the moral category, sliding over the completely permissible variations in personal values; I’m realizing ordinary folks probably lump all values into the personal category, sliding over the central importance of and significant agreement we have in our moral values. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re relativists about morality.
Of course, as an ethicist, I’m keenly aware that what I’ve just said is barely skimming the surface of many complexities. There are plenty of questions still to be asked. A tricky one is how to deal with the overlap or gray area between moral and personal values. Some personal values are also moral, like social justice or animal welfare on a big scale, or virtues like open-mindedness or perseverance on a smaller one: we make some moral values a central part of our lives. How do we tell which of our values are “merely” personal in the sense of being optional, and which are really moral? Are there things I ought to care about? I think the answer is yes, and as I’ve said, we do agree on many of them (like the value of human life, which prohibits murder and genocide, which almost everyone agrees are wrong even when they argue about whether some given event falls into those categories). We definitely don’t always live up to our moral values very well for various explanatory reasons, and we’re still wrestling with the hard cases. We do make progress, though, even though there’s more work to do. That’s what philosophical ethics is for.
Some people make a distinction between the terms “moral” and “ethical,” but I’ve never been able to see the sense in that—it looks like a distinction without a difference. So, like most philosophers I know, I use these terms interchangeably.
It may be that some careful and sophisticated form of relativism is true; there is live philosophical debate among scholars. But in most real-world discussions among ordinary folks, these details are not typically on the table. What’s normally at issue is whether we can have productive moral discussions at all. That’s the level I’m operating on here.
Our personal values—and possibly the way we weigh our moral ones against one another when they conflict—can change, though they’re more like firmware than software. They operate prescriptively in ordinary times, but occasionally we enter a period of deep reflection and review in the face of some big change, and then sometimes we make big shifts in the way we live our lives.
My father, who thrived on thinking like this, would have loved this post. So much good stuff in here. I appreciated the distinction between moral and personal values, and I am hesitant to wade into this, because I worry I'm stating the obvious--probably much like a first-year feels : ). But I can't help wondering if there can also be tension/conflict not in the moral value itself, but in the *how* of the moral value--how it gets lived out. And so that is contextually and situationally-based. For instance, every child should be kept safe. That one seems like a moral value that many would agree with--but what does safe mean? And more to the point, what does it look like? For a person with a tendency to be a helicopter parent, it means hovering and trying to prevent any suffering/damage. But a parent with a tendency toward being a lighthouse--a beacon to return to--it might be letting the child go out into the world (even a world that brings storms) and to be a presence they can return to. Safe is the value, but it looks completely different in both cases. Maybe this is all obvious, and I'm missing the point : ). But, you got me thinking! As ever, and for that I am grateful--for this and all you do.