This is a continuation of
Here, we'll cover three more aspects of values: they are attention-directing, importance-recognizing, and good-life constituting. Then, with this more rigorous definition of what values are, we will examine how reading human life in terms of values has explanatory power, yet differs from reading life in terms of preferences, feelings, goals, etc.
Values are Attention-Directing
In the previous section, we covered values as if they were just guidelines about how to act. But they are also ideas about what is salient in different contexts. To see this, note that the guideline "be honest with friends" seems to be about how to act, but it can be rewritten:
Similarly, the guideline "be sensual while biking" can be rephrased:
It is this formulation of a value—as a directive for attention—that we actually use improvisationally. Because of this, we can see that values need to be rather precise. They need to point to something specific to pay attention to in the relevant contexts. For this purpose, “being honest“ is a bit vague. Here are alternative formulations which would be more useful:
So, with the concept of values I am laying out here, a "value" like "being honest" is just a shorthand for one of the articulations above. To have a value, a person must have a substantive interpretation of honesty as a specific path of attention, relevant to certain contexts.
This has many implications. I will mention a few without going into details:
- There can be no short, complete list of universal human values. Attempting such a list tends to (a) lead towards vague terms ("community", "success", "connection") that lack this attention-directing aspect; (b) ignore the millions of more specific values which only small groups of people have discovered.
- Two people who value "honesty" may differ substantially in what they attend to, and thus have a great deal to teach one another.
- One interpretation of honesty, H, may be supported by relationship R, environment E, or group practice P. But another interpretation H', may have different requirements.
Values are Importance-Recognizing
So far, I have used the term "value" to refer to guidelines about how to act and what to attend to. But in philosophy, it common to say that value statements are about what is important or good in the world—e.g., which objects, events, or qualities are of value. I believe these two are linked: if you speak about a value one way, it seems to be about your own actions; speak about it another way, and it's about the world.
Consider the attention-directing sentences we developed above. We can rewrite them, this time as statements about what's valuable in the world[1]:
So developing a value means learning what's important in a context. In everyday speech, this kind of learning is called appreciation. While perception indicates the apprehension of facts, theories, or patterns in the world, appreciation means apprehending the value of things. To say we appreciated something means we noted its importance. A perception forms a new belief about the universe, whereas an appreciation forms a new belief about what’s important, exciting, or good. Appreciations are indications of what to attend to.[2] And we have more specific terms: there is admiration (when we learn a value by watching someone who does it well), inspiration (when we couldn't see what was important in a situation, and then we suddenly do), and reconciliation (when we are torn between conflicting ideas of what's important, and then find a more comprehensive value).
It is common to view these kinds of learning (appreciation, admiration, inspiration, reconciliation) as fluffy and personal—as less reliable than the perception of facts or theories. Some people doubt that there can be anything objective or reliable about whether things are important, exciting, or good.
But that is a mistake. To show why, we can start with basic values for animals, as eloquently outlined by JJ Gibson:
If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different. Terrestrial surfaces, of course, are also climb-on-able or fall-off-able or get-underneathable or bump-into-able relative to the animal... The human species in some cultures has the habit of sitting as distinguished from kneeling or squatting. If a surface of support with the four properties is also knee-high above the ground, it affords sitting on.
It seems that, for animals, certain paths of attention really are valuable. As Gibson noted:
This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver.
To take his argument further, we can imagine how an ambulatory machine—a robot—could have appreciations.
Imagine a robot that wanders the world, and looks for patterns. It looks for a certain type of pattern in particular. First, it looks for coherent patterns that can be attended to[3]: something that holds true despite moving around in the environment and interacting with it. For instance, the robot might discover that sand is made of grains. Confronted with sand it can always look for the grains and find them. It might also discover that sand blows around in the wind. You can think of it as filling a bag with these possible patterns, each in the form of a question ("is it made of grains?", "does it blow in the wind?") and an ambulatory way of attending that addresses the question.
Next, it checks how useful it is to attend to these patterns across different contexts. Maybe it doesn't get too far with the "is it made of grains?" pattern. Later, it comes across a more generally useful question like "can it be balanced?": something might be balanced more perfectly atop another thing; it might be aligned over a center of gravity. The robot might discover many contexts in which attending to balance is helpful, including in its own navigation. The robot might learn to walk better by attending to balance. It might learn to construct ladders it can climb on. And so on.
It might get even further, hitting upon a notion like freedom. Some things have freedom to move around and other things are constrained. There are degrees of constraint. It gathers questions like "is it free?" or even "is it freeing?"
When it finds a pattern/question that's useful in many contexts, it calls that discovery an appreciation. It has appreciated the usefulness of directing its attention towards certain things in certain contexts. We could say it believes a sentence like "what's important in walking is balance", or that it has discovered the importance of balance while walking.
When this robot appreciates balance and freedom, I believe it's right to say it has discovered something that's of real importance. This is not so far away from discovering a value like honesty. Values are ideas about what is important and worthy of attention. What is valuable. And appreciating a new value can be a real discovery.
Values are Good-Life-Constituting
One thing we've not yet covered is the difference between appreciating the importance of something in abstract, versus adopting it personally, as one of the values you intend to live by. Appreciation is only the first step of having a value. The second step is recognizing that, for you, living by this value is part of living well.
In this regard, to say I have a value is different than saying I recognize a value. Just exactly like having a plan is different than recognizing a plan, and having a goal is different than recognizing a goal. Having a plan isn't just recognizing that a plan is advisable; having a goal isn't just recognizing that an achievement would be nice.
Consider a plan like {"wait 10 minutes", "go to the store", "buy milk"}. Just having these instructions is not enough to say you have a plan. The instructions become a plan when you believe you'll do them. So, having a plan means having some instructions and believing you'll do them. Similarly, having a goal means knowing a goal-state and believing you'll realize it.
It's similar with values: there are attention-guiding instructions, plus a kind of belief. To have a value, you must believe following it is part of a good life for you, and thus that you'll try to keep it in mind in the relevant contexts.
In both of the stories above, there is a moment where the value is adopted because it is seen as a meaningful or good way to live, in itself. This is what it means to say the value has become part of a person's sense of the good life. It is after this point that the person can be said to have the relevant value.
This doesn't imply that every agent has a worked-out conception of the good life, and that each value either fits in or doesn't. But as we build our lives, we weave together a network of values and contexts which go together. We always have a set of values that come to mind for a context, and sometimes we recognize a new value as a clear upgrade[4] over the way we have previously approached things in that context (or, equivalently, what we have previously attended to or held as important). When we recognize such a clear upgrade, we can't help but go forward with the new value in mind, as our best way of living. This is what it means to say that the value has become part of the person's sense of the good life.
To qualify as such a clear upgrade, a new value must be experienced as intrinsically rewarding—as constituting a good life, rather than just as leading to one. If you merely believe that being honest with friends may lead to a good life (perhaps because your friends will like you better if you are honest) but that other routes (like being flirty) may also win them over—then you do not value being honest itself. Being honest cannot count as a clear upgrade with friends, as it may not always lead to them liking you.
However, if you come to believe being honest is its own reward: that a good life includes being honest with friends, regardless of outcome[5], and that it is in itself meaningful to do—in that case you have come to value honesty. You now hold that honesty constitutes a good life, not just that it leads to one. This is why, in the second story, being honest with your friend only becomes a value when it ceases to be merely strategic, and becomes part of your general vision.[6]
When a person has adopted values in this way, they will improvise their life around them, attempting to live out their general vision of a good life. Following their values may lead them to achieve goals, satisfy preferences, or work to feel good. Those who value choosing ambitious goals or doggedly pursuing them will spend their time making goals and working towards them; those who value self-care or surrounding themselves with comfort and beauty will orient towards good feelings or they will develop tastes and surround themselves with tasteful things; and those who value curiosity or getting to the fact of the matter, will try to move towards truth, clarity, or knowledge as far as they are able.
In such cases, it may appear to an outsider that the person's conception of the good life is about achieving certain goals, satisfying certain preferences, or having certain feelings. But an alternate interpretation is that their involvement with goals, preferences, or feelings comes because of their value-set. A careful observer might be able to tell the difference: Does the person care more about making and pursuing goals in general, than about achieving a specific goal? Are their goals mainly vehicles for protecting or expressing what they value? Could other values come to replace their goal-pursuit if they seemed like a better way to live? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, this suggests that the person's conception of the good life is made of values, not goals. A similar analysis could be used regarding feelings, preferences, the quest for knowledge or clarity, etc, to see if the person's conception of the good life can be described mainly in terms of values.
ADD: Goal-driven behavior can even be read, in general, as a type of value-expression. If you are pursuing a goal or making one, you may be doing it because you have an idea that goal-making or goal-pursuit is itself constitutive of the good life, or that focusing on and working towards this particular outcome is part of a good life, etc. A value like aiming high may lead you to spend more time in goal-making. A value like being diligent may lead you to spend time in goal-pursuit.
🍁 Conclusion: How to Read a Life
In the many fields which focus on human beings, one great challenge is that there are so many ways in which a human life can be read. We can read a life as directed by various plans, goals, and fears. Or we can read it as reactions to a stream of emotions or states. Or as an attempt to satisfy preferences.
In general, these different readings spawn entirely different social sciences, psychotherapeutic theories, lifestyles, and political ideologies!
Social Sciences
- Econ — preferences
- Psych — drives, traits
- Decision theory — desires, beliefs
Ideologies
- Social Justice — oppressions
- Liberalism — preferences
- Conservatism — roles
Therapies
- ACT — values
- CBT — beliefs
- psychoanalysis — drives
- mindfulness — states
We can, of course, read a life as an attempt to live by values. The same act which might be read as about goals (such as starting a company or writing a book), can instead be read as about values (such as trying to live in an entrepreneurial or bold or self-expressive way).
This reading explains more of our daily experience: our inner conflicts; our sense of the meaninglessness of some environments; the way choice feels like weighing what's important in a context; our sense of a landscape of things to appreciate; the way appreciation feels like a real kind of learning; the fungibility of our goals; our experience of regret; and the wisdom we find in others, the feeling that they can show us what's important.
And values-based readings of a person have advantages as abstract models, too: They are compact, in the sense that a one value like being bold can explain both major life changes and individual utterances. They are articulable, so that it's possible to reconcile observed behavior and a person's self-understanding. Perhaps most importantly, they have a place in the world, as opposed to merely in the person, and as such the discovery of value can be modeled whereas preferences are often seen as arbitrary and as arising spontaneously.
Taken together, these form a strong argument for adopting a values-reading of life. But there's an even stronger one: When we understand a life, not as preference- or goal- or norm-driven, but as primarily a story of appreciations, and of attempts to honor and live out the resulting values, we have an endearing, hopeful, and widely-inclusive way to view a person. A value-driven agent is not presumed to be self-interested, and wants to refine and grow their values.
It takes some practice to interpret people's actions in terms of values, and to see where those values might find their full expression. There are group activities for practicing this in the
And from this foundation, there are many more things to learn, which weren't covered here:
- The social life of values, including their relation to friendships, mentoring, forms of solidarity, religions, ideologies, transmitted wisdom, role models, cultural practices, language, etc.
- Questions about values in nonhuman entities like teams, corporations, AIs, markets, or law;
- The story of how our culture got confused about values and appreciations: why are we so fuzzy about our values, as opposed to our plans and goals?[7]
- The details of how values become reasons, and how reasons lead to choices, and what this all has to do with the experience of free will.
- Finally, an explosion of new values-based visions: design practices, political and economic institutions, psychotherapeutic techniques, social sciences, etc—many of which are just being born.
Hopefully this post was enough to get you started.
[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, Boyd’s “How to Be a Moral Realist” is great on this; Gibson’s (“The Senses Considered”) 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 philosophers—including Nietzsche, Foucault, Kant, and Hume—used 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]