In this week, we discuss about “personal values”. To me, personal values are mostly developed during the childhood, which means the educations from parents are the most important factor of developing personal values. The term “educations” means that the behaviors from parents and which places parents go often. Because, for children, everything is fresh, and everything is acceptable. They learn whatever they see and hear.
In H. Lewis’ “A question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives”, he writes that “the proposition that individual human beings are programmed into their values, either by the influence of genes on personality or by social pressures.” (page 8.) I totally agree with this statement, because, as I said, personal values are mostly developed during the childhood. Furthermore, when people grow up as adults, they might have the integrated personal values. However, they still have the right and the ability to judge what is wrong and what is right. Therefore, they might realize that some principles, told by their parents when they are children, are incorrect. Since people might receive much more advanced education than that of their parents, they could make their own decisions to whether believe or not believe something.
Moreover, why do people believe something, such as the length of one meter, the color of the sky, and so on. In H. Lewis’ essay, “For the color of our eyes or flatness of the earth…which we come to “believe” or “know” anything.”(page 9.) In short, observations, sense experiences and logics are the vital factor of believing something.
Nevertheless, to me, I have some different opinions. the three main factors of believing something are just for the rational people. For the perceptual people, they actually have the vague personal values,because they are always changing their personal values. For example, one loves Chinese culture, since China has 2000 years history, and he is really interested in what people do in the ancient times. However, one day, when he watches the movie Iron Man. He suddenly feels bored about the history; he wants to explore the future. Then he becomes a super crazy fan of American culture and American movies, because there are a lot of high technology stuffs in United States.
To sum up, there are too many factors which could influence people’s personal values, from the H. Lewis’ article, the most important factors are sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, intuition. With these model, people could develop their own values.
Hi,Houzhi,I like your article so much. I totally agree that you mentioned personal values are mostly developed during the childhood. I consider childhood is an important period that humans begin to model their personal value. And you also said that parents’value can greatly influence children’. I realized and also support that your idea Personally, I consider parents as the first teachers for children since they were born. However, I am not sure that I can agree with the point you mentioned that perceptual people have the vague personal values. You use an examples prove that, you said an perceptual people sometimes might like Chinese ancient culture but sometimes might like high technology United States. From my opinion, people cannot use rational or percept to identify some one’s personal value. Perceptual people also can use observations, sense experiences and logics to believing something. I think there’s nothing in the world is absolutely. In addition, I guess some one like Chinese culture or like American high technology is just personal interest not personal value.