Week 2 – Human Values
The author makes the point that when looking from an outsider’s perspective our personal values are “unpredictable” and “incessantly quarrelsome”. He is seeking to point out the flaws with our logic and the fact that many people contradict others and even themselves. This point he brings has some validity, but I really think that he has some flaws to the ideas that this is inherently evident to someone looking from an outsider perspective.
He brings up stories a like the wealthy young hostess that said that God was “co-chairing” with her, and how Willie Nelson was described as a “Baptist Buddhist”. He also points to two seemingly politically aligned people that have completely different views on the American social and political system. These specific events do point to his idea that our values are unpredictable and quarrelsome. The author fails, however, to look at the continuities throughout human values. For the most part, a lot of society has agreed on some major values that affect a lot of behavior. Society agrees, in large, on the issues of murder and theft as well as that the rights of one should not infringe on the rights of another. When you look at a few isolated events its easy to make people think that there is extreme unpredictability in human’s value systems, but most of these events do not deal with core values. On whole I would venture to say that core values are actually very similar throughout humanity. Even when you look at religion, you see many different religions throughout the world and think that these people’s core values must be very different. Many of these religions actually have a lot of the same themes. For example monotheistic religions, which involve a great percentage of religious people, all believe in a single higher power and many of the same realities based off of that fact. Also if you look at many of the core values of religions as distant as Christianity and Buddhism you find many parallels in underlying values such as loving and respecting your neighbor.
There are always going to be outliers and exceptions to the trend, but on average many human values are not unpredictable but instead very similar from one to another.
2 comments so far
7:24 pm - 1-19-2014
I agree with you, and the author, that while looking at an outsider’s perspective out personal values are “unpredictable” and “incessantly quarrelsome”. A person is going to value something, whether or not they are supported in the matter. For instance, immunization is a very personal decision. Parents are caught in a very controversial debate now a days, of whether or not they should immunize their children; although studies show that immunizations do not cause harm, some believe that is does. It is a very values based decision, however there is always an incessantly quarrelsome debate between the matters. Who are we to judge what individuals value/believe in? Lewis (1990) brings light to the way in which we come to our values, “it should become clear on reflection that there are very few interior mental modes through which we come to “believe” or “know” anything” (p. 7). Through the interior mental modes of sense experience, deductive logic, emotion, and intuition we arrive at our values.
8:54 pm - 1-19-2014
I really appreciate that you agree with my post, but I believe you may have missed what I was trying to talk about. I was attempting to make the assertion that while there may be some values that seem very unpredictable and contrary to other values. These values are fewer and farther between than the author make them out to be. I agree with him that there are definitely some examples of his claims, but these are more ”outliers” than anything of real value. The example of religions that I used can be seen many other places as well. Lets look at eh difference between big businesses and the arts. Many people see these as very different, but really the values of both are the same. They both use all of the resources they have available to them to create the most value for the audience. In the arts that value is in the form of happiness or viewing pleasure, and in big business the audience is in the form of profits for the audience of the shareholders. Really a lot of the core values at the heart of the smaller values are not that different.