Objectives:
- Become familiar with the basic relationship of human values to psychological and philoshopical endeavors.
- Understand that values are formed from external and internal drives of an individual.
- Explore one’s own value system.
Artifact:
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.
Reflection:
This artifact is a reflection on A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Live in which I was to read and pick out points that were interesting to me and express them. I chose to focus mostly on the beginning of the article when Lewis talks about how “an objective observer… would be struck, not by the unity, but by the unpredictability, the almost madcap complexity, and the incessant quarrelsomeness of human values.” (P.1) He details this by going on to name a few examples of things that many people have herd of similar things happening and says that because of this our personal values as the human race are “unpredictable” and “incessantly quarrelsome.”
I disagreed with his viewpoint in the matter and wrote as such in my response article. I wrote about the outliers that are in everything but as a whole our personal values actually hinge on many of the same core values. In this I was very much exploring the first two objectives: become familiar with the basic relationship of human values to psychological and philoshopical endeavors, and understand that values are formed from external and internal drives of an individual. Looking at the real value creation process and understanding the core drivers behind it.
Future:
Going forward with this topic I very much plan to dive into the value creating process for me and for others. Within myself, knowing the value creation process is very important because it can help me avoid pitfalls of my own values. Knowing where my values come from and understanding them allows me to see problems with any value creation strategy that I might have. Knowing other’s personal value creation allows me to better understand where others are coming from. If I know where they are coming from and what core values need to be met I can create more amicable solutions to any problems that I might have with another person.