Values
- Propositions that elicit an emotional response.
- Fault-lines in the possibilities for rational persuasion. Where values are not shared, persuasion cannot happen.
(In some cases, the emotional response is faked.)
Most people have them: moral propositions which they value, i.e. attach an emotional response to.
Values do not stand by themselves or originate in themselves. They are valued by humans because they produce human emotional responses. While emotion as such is not any more understood than the basics of consciousness at this time, emotion is definitely known to be associated with various chemical cascades in the human organism. These chemical cascades are artefacts of biology. Thus it is that individual values are in theory strictly, and in practice partly, a function of biology. Half-and-half, is a good working rule.
The good news is, some values are universally shared by all extant humans, as far as anyone knows.
Values can evolve in faster-than-evolutionary time. Culture works pretty fast on humans, but there are limits. Incontinent persons expect human values to evolve in bureaucratic time. This is not realistic.
People ought to be careful abut the values they evolve.
I personally have strong reverential feelings about human liberty. Indeed, it can just about be said that human liberty is my only value, and any other values I have are merely different aspects or subsets of my reverence for liberty.
I can say with some certainty that culture, nurture, and society did not make me this way. These forces mostly value fairness and not getting hurt, both of which are antithetical to liberty. I valued liberty before I could define the word.
The advantages of egalitarianism in a primitive society are pretty clear, and primitive societies tend strongly to be egalitarian. The evolutionary advantages of liberty are more troublesome to understand, but clearly there is some advantage: liberal societies tend to be much richer and more powerful, and ultimately less cruel, than their socialist or authoritarian counterparts.
Whether you value liberty or fairness/equality isn't wholly up to you, or anyone else. Values are partly biological in nature, and you can't be blamed for your biological inheritance.
Suppose, for example, you experience strong moral feelings about fairness. You may state your argument in such a way that it strongly engages your feelings. You will then be amazed and possibly offended when I do not respond the same way. It's not that one of us is wrong. We're just working from different base values which are, at least partly, hardcoded in our DNA. We are different breeds of men.
Often I have appealed to the moral principle of liberty in my arguments with schooled-up tranzis. It would be too much even to say that the argument falls flat. The argument is literally incomprehensible. I might as well argue for toin, or spurl, or plinuckment. To a progressive, "liberty" is a nonsense word, a concept outside of human experience.
People tend to get self-righteous about their values. But if values really are as heritable as the natural sciences are finding them to be, then being self-righteous about your values is morally the same as being self-righteous about your skin color. It is bigotry, pure and simple. Beyond that, even without self-righteousness on either side, differences in values cause a lot of human resentment, at the least. Sorry about that.
The staunchest lover of liberty can be persuaded somewhat of the necessity of fairness and equality. Those moral values are primal; they came first; indeed they seem to be shared by non-humans. Liberty, as an institution, somehow evolved to be a detectable historical force in the last 800 years or so. Not everyone has inherited it yet. But liberty is a necessary component of modern civilization. Societies that discard liberty invariably become murderous, weak, and destitute. This is the empirical argument for the love of liberty.
Values are adjustable, by conscious effort. See Integrity
