Category: Unit 02

My ordered list of life values:

1. Family
2. Friendship
3. Loyalty
4. Enjoyment
5. Health
6. Personal Development
7. Personal Accomplishment
8. Integrity
9. Security
10. Wealth
11. Wisdom
12. Leadership
13. Creativity
14. Service
15. Community
16. Prestige
17. Location
18. Power
19. Independence
20. Expertness

Two of my top five values are friendship and family.  To me these two these are very similar because I consider my family my friends and my closest friends my family.  This weekend I spent some time in Las Vegas with friends.  This activity shows the importance of two of my top values, friendship and enjoyment.  I believe it is important to be happy and to enjoy life.  Almost every day of the week I spend my whole day either in class or at work and a good amount of my free time working on school work, so I find it very important to take some time every now and then to do something extra enjoyable with friends and or family.  After returning home today I was feeling very tired and sick.  Another one of my top five values is health.  Because I was feeling ill today I took some time to take a very long nap, make some healthy food, and take some vitamins to help my immune system.  These activities all represent my top five values very well.  After reflecting on today I found it very interesting how no matter what I am doing, I am almost always pursuing my values even without thinking about it.

I think that one of the most important beliefs that I inherited from my family was the importance of being happy.  I think this connects back to one of my top five values, enjoyment.  In my family I was always taught to be happy with what you have, even if you don’t have much.  I believe that this belief is still valid today and is something that I very much still believe in.  I was never raised in a family that had a certain religion everyone believed in, my family was very open to letting us grow up to believe in what we want.  I feel very happy that I was born into a family that was very open and allowed me and my siblings to grow up believing what we wanted.

I agree with this week’s reading that defining human values and how they are determined is a complex topic.  I agreed with the statement, “it should become clear on reflection that their are very few interior mental modes through which we come to ‘believe’ or ‘know’ anything” (9).  Upon looking at my own personal values, I realized that these four modes, sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition, are the four basic modes that I base my values and beliefs on, also along with the two synthetic modes, authority and scientific.  Although I find these modes quite accurate, I do not believe that everyone will agree with them, which is another big point in this reading that I agree with.  I liked how this reading gave an example of someone who disagreed with these modes and believed that divine revelation should be considered an important aspect of defining human values.  I agreed with the author’s logic on divine revelation can just be seen as an example of sense experience and after discussing this states that, “the reader agreed that revelation could be viewed as a special case of sense experience.”  This example shows that how people define values is both different among individuals and also that individuals often change the way they see values.  By agreeing with the author, the reader started to use deductive logic and sense experience to determine her values instead of revelation.  Although I believe that these modes are major aspects of how an individual comes to believe or think something is important, they may not be the only modes.  Defining personal values and beliefs is a very broad topic and I do not think it can be condensed to just one single idea, but I agree that it can be condensed to a few basic ideas that define how people decide to believe something.