Art & Human Values

Psychiatrists, priests, philosophers and any other person that we turn to for personal guidance offer a certain approach to personal values; this implies that their remedy is not similar. For instance, many books regarding personal values are written by rabbis, ministers, priests, academic philosophers and psychiatrists.

These professionals may have the highest credentials in their lifetime of work, study in their field of profession as well as a firm profession reputation. In most instances, they are defined as specialists and in other instances specialist-advocates. The priest looks at things from a particular point of view especially faith in authority. The social psychologist or psychiatrist will view things from a different perspective particularly science or social science. One should not expect an objective and unbiased account of conflicting values form such sources. Among all these professionals, no one is objective since everyone has personal beliefs and evaluations and probably they contribute to what they believe in.

There is an irony since neither a psychiatrist nor the philosopher wants to be an advocate of their own disciplines, and in order to do this they work hard to reduce bias. However, psychiatry and philosophy techniques are not simply created; they involve crucial value choices and stake out particular position. According to many Christians, any discipline that does not uphold faith in power is biased; to a number of philosophers, any discipline accepting faith in power is biased. In their contexts, they are both right.  Today a layman without any professional credentials in the dominion of values stands a good chance as anyone producing a truly objective account of the whole range of personal evaluations.  If possible, we should have a new academic area of expertise where one is devoted to an overall account of values, but such an area of expertise does not exist.