Where Do Values Come From? Why Does It Matter?

After getting the article started Lewis asks about where our values come from (6). The answer is everywhere. Right? Even in Lewis’s example of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s value judgment, I debate whether or not he is calling for emotion and not a mixture of emotion and intuition (13). And even deeper, where did those emotions come from? Most likely, they come from an accumulation of all the subjective experiences of a lifetime. Perhaps I feel similar to the friend he cites toward the end of his paper:  “Anybody who tries to count the ways we choose values does not know what values are” (17).  And I think Lewis answers this objection flippantly and not thoroughly enough to convince me.

The most important thing about values is the values themselves, not necessarily how we get to them. Lewis argues that “human beings cannot separate the way they arrive at values from the values themselves” (13), but the evidence he gives is two Jedi warriors from a science fiction movie. I do not know where or when I came to believe in the value of treating people with respect. For me that process has dissolved into the value itself. The counter argument will be that my belief in that value would not be strong without the process in which I obtained it and strengthened it. This is true, but it does not make the categorization of the value relevant or even possible. Over 21 years, the process has become an incalculable amalgamation of everything I know. Is it emotional? Sure. Is it intuitive? Yes. Is it everything? Absolutely.

The point is Lewis showed me nothing to convince me that a value can have a different property depending on its categorization. As long as the intensity of the experience is the same, it does not matter whether I was told by an authority figure about the destructive power of hatred or whether I oppose it based purely on emotion.