- Like plans, values are necessary because of our bounded rationality. We are unable to calculate, in each conversation, at each moment, what to reveal and what to conceal. Instead, a person adopts the general value of being honest, because theyâve decided this is a good thing to aim at, in general. So we formulate values as guidelines for ourselves, because to live without them would mean continuous, difficult calculations. (Bratman)
- Some values only apply in extremely particular situations, for instance, a electric blues guitarist may have the value of âcrispy licksâ, a mother of âletting her child get bumped around a bitâ, an improviser of âmaintaining a loose awareness of the shape of the roomâ, etc.
- Which is not to say that being guided by goals and values are exclusive to one another. Someone might go into a salary negotiation with a goal â a concrete outcome they hope to achieve â but even with a goal, they still have ways they want to approach it. Someone may want to be courageous in their salary negotiation, or fair-minded.
[1]. These are value-statements as they are more often understood in philosophy. For instance, by Anderson, Chang, Velleman, Korsgaard, and much of the value theorists in the philosophy of action. I believe the space of value-statements and the space of directives is coextensive, which is why I feel free to make use of the term "value" as I do. I don't, in the end, think I am leaving anything out by adopting my more restrictive definition, and where Anderson uses the separate terms "value" and "ideal", I think she has overlooked that every value is an ideal and vice versa. There is a bijective relationship between, on one hand, statements about what's important in life and, on the other, statements about how we hope to act. This is why I think the word "value" is appropriate. This bijective relationship sheds light on the perception of value, and how such perceptions can change how we live. It may seem that values like freedom, wisdom, or happiness are too abstract to map to improvisational directives which guide our daily lives. Or, perhaps that values like cryptographic security or the rule of law are too specific. I believe this is an illusion, and everything that deserves the name "values" does map to an improvisational directive held to be part of the good life in a choice context. And furthermore to say that someone has a value is the same as saying someone would want to follow the directive in a choice context. But to establish this is out of scope for this essay. Part of the problem is terminological: I believe that words like "freedom" or "happiness" are used as shorthand for a longer kind of phrase which would more clearly work as an improvisational directive.
[2]. Although not directly about value realism, Boydâs âHow to Be a Moral Realistâ is great on this; Gibsonâs (âThe Senses Consideredâ) account of perception is also relevant.
[3]. The kind of thing James J Gibson called a perceptual invariant.
[4]. Charles Taylor calls this an epistemic gain; David Velleman, an advance in self-understanding; Ruth Chang, finding a more comprehensive value. In other writing, I've called it sorting out how you want to approach things.
[7]. I think people would mostly try to live by their values even without the positive feelings and sense of meaning that comes with living by values, although it would be much harder for these people to know when they were living by their values and when not.
[6]. One difficulty in using the word "value" is that, in my sense, a value is quite distinct from a norm. If norms are notions of good behavior that are socially enforced, then this makes them strategic for agents to comply with. It means they are complied with for those strategic reasons, rather than because they are part of someone's concept of living well, and this puts them outside the definition of values used here. I believe many influential philosophersâincluding Nietzsche, Foucault, Kant, and Humeâused the term 'value' in a way that also covers norms. And the relevant literatures in economics and sociology, one often sees the construction "values and norms" without an attempt to pry the two apart.
[7]. I believe it's due to about 600 years of religious and philosophical misunderstandings. Some of these have to do with the internal/external divide Descartes, some have to do with facts vs values and the role of feelings with values (Hume), and some have to do with the smashing together of values and norms by the church and various philosophers from Augustine to Luther. (The greeks and nonwestern societies are not so confused about them.) [See the meaning crisis videos, or Taylor/Dreyfus]
- Finally, there's a game we call , where each player collects social visions by completing sentences like "Everyone should be more ___" and collects meaning nuggets by completing sentences like "I find it meaningful when I'm able to be ___". People share what they wrote in the blank, and others guess which sentence they were completing.
Imagine you're playing with a particular friend, and they share a word like "honest", or "embodied", or "creative." With that friend in particular, which sentence do you think they were completing? If you can make such a guess, that means you know that, for some people, being creative is a social vision, and for others it's a meaning nugget. Which means they are not the same thing!
- My essay , is about how it feels to be very aware of your meaning nuggets (in the section "Realm of Appreciation") compared to being aware of your social visions (in the "Realm of Expectations"). These things feel very different!Four Social Worlds đľď¸ââď¸đłđđ
The identification of norms and values is made more complex because they often come bundled together. A person may make a choice because they want to be a gentleman, or a good scientist, and such complex motivations bundle up a mix of norms and values. For example, the person may conceive of a good scientist as someone with deep curiosity and a high citation count. They may conceive of a good man as someone who is kind and proper. And their notions of kindness and properness themselves may be such bundles. Their kindness may contain elements of conformance, intended as a show for others (such as empathic sounds) and other elements of value. If they want to sort out where they are complying with (or setting) norms, and where they are expressing values, they may need to clarify much within their own thoughts.
My assertion, which can only be verified by the reader through their own introspective exercises, is that the process of unbundling described above can often succeed: it can proceed to the point where the norms that make up a bundle are mostly separable from the values, and their separate epidemiologies and developmental circumstances can be traced. As an exercise, I recommend attempting to unbundle a word like masculinity or kindness for yourself, going at least four levels deep.
(Elsewhere I use other terms: I call meaning nuggets "values", and call social visions "ideological commitments", "norms to promote", or just "expectations".)
- (*) They are called ideals in Anderson 1993, although she also uses several other terms. The term virtue has a long tradition, from Aristotle to MacIntyre. (I avoid that term because virtue is, in current usage, usually conceived of as high-minded and morally significant, and my use here is comparatively practical, and not necessarily moral.) Charles Taylor's terms of strong evaluation is closer to my meaning, but doesn't roll off the tongue. Velleman, Chang, and Putnam all seem to sometimes use the term value roughly as I do.