In A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives, the author ponders the question of whether our values are freely chosen or inherent in whom we are based on our genetic makeup. Further, the author acknowledges that it is a difficult and complicated subject but notes that, “there is a good deal of evidence that human beings are not primarily driven by genetically determined instincts but are rather free to make their own choices.” (7) I agree with the author on this point and further agree when he makes the point that values are, “. . . personal evaluations and beliefs that propel us to action, to a particular kind of behavior and life.” (7) So, how do humans come to make choices that inform their behavior? According the to author, the way we come to “know” things also informs the architecture of our values and that there are four ways we come to “know” something: sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition. In addition to these basic mental modes (10) the author also contends that we use two other “synthetic mental modes” (10) that combine the basic modes in a variety of ways. Specifically the author notes authority and science as the synthetic modes.
My appreciation and agreement with the author’s assessment of how we create our own values is informed by the internship I had last summer working with the Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley, California. Over the course of six weeks I was able to work with teachers from across the country as they studied different ways to regulate their emotions to improve their practice in the classroom. While I did not know it at the time, I can say without a doubt that all four mental modes were explored as a way to better know and understand the values the teachers promoted as important for their daily practice in the classroom. In addition, the synthetic mental modes of authority and science also came into play.
I enjoyed reading your response to A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives because of the clear and concise summary of the article and the application of the claims in the article to your daily life. Your internship experience with teachers regulating emotions in the classroom provided great evidence and insight into the connection between values and knowledge. I agree with you that these modes are used to understand values from both your life experience and mine. An example from my life experience is learning from the mode of authority, my parents. They taught me many things, such as basic math, but also taught me values such as family support. After reading your response, I wondered from your internship experience or other life experiences, did you feel there were any other ways of gaining knowledge or value beside from the 6 stated? This is a question the author struggled with in the article asking and responding, “Are the four basic modes of values truly complete? Are there really no others? Possibly, but not likely. People endlessly dispute this kind of thing, but if they reflect carefully they will discover that most of the argument is over words, not the underlying concept the words are supposed to represent (12).” This is a very hard question to answer and so far I can’t from my experience think of any other modes.
Benny, I really appreciate your question about the other modes other than the six outlined in the reading. It was on my mind when doing the values assessment exercise. Now I have even greater wonder about values, how we as individuals arrive at them, and how we prioritize them as we live our lives. I could quickly complete part of the exercise because I could list my bottom one or two and my top one or two easily. It was the two or three in the middle that gave me pause. So, I began to think about the point in the article where Lewis notes,”Sense experience, emotion, logic, intuition, authority, and “science” are mental modes or techniques through which we form our values, but by adopting and emphasizing one over the other we also turn them into dominant personal values in their own right.” (13) So, we can start with one of the six modes that Lewis offers as a way to think about how we arrive at any number of values we possess, but it’s the modes we choose more frequently that helps us understand what is most important to us or in other words, what we value. Although Lewis goes on to say, “. . . we habitually rely on all the modes and it is hard to sort out . . .” (15) he does provide a framework as a place to start. This helped me understand what was happening for the teachers during my summer internship. They had hundreds of ways to evaluate what they “valued” in the classroom but as I think about where they landed and how they prioritized, they did come back to the basic six ways we come to know something.