Values and Ethics (Part 1)

What is Value

Finding a Grounding for Value is Hard – But Important

The first, and in some ways, most difficult step in living according to our values is to get at least somewhat clear on just what we mean by value. We talk equally comfortably about the value of a piece of jewelry as about the value of putting in a hard day’s work, or even the values you were raised with. Obviously, there’s something in common between these usages, but when you try to rigorously break it down, you might run into problems. Is the “value” of a financial asset really the same thing as the “value” of spending time with your kids? Why do we use the same word for such seemingly different things?

For our purposes, we’ll define value (the noun) as “whatever someone seeks to get more of,” thus, the verb value means “you want and are willing to act to get more of that thing.” For now, we’ll set aside the very important question about whether it’s possible to define better or worse values, and just accept that most of the time, if someone values something, he believes its better to have than not, and it’s therefore a good thing to go after.

First, though, let’s take a quick look at how beliefs about value and values have changed over the years and why so many of us are so confused on the topic.

We Live in a Values Post-Apocalypse

In After Virtue, Alisdair MacIntyre makes the case, I think rather successfully, that ever since the high middle ages, the West’s shared understanding of values, ethics, and virtues has fallen apart, such that we now live in a world where we have vague inherited notions of what it means to live a good life and how to do it, but no cohesive picture that provides a clear path forward, especially not in a way that we all can agree on. Instead, each of us is, to some degree, on our own. We have to cobble together a ramshackle structure of values that makes sense to each of us and can guide each of us in how to live. Maybe you’re lucky enough to follow a fairly coherent set of values, handed down as a tradition – perhaps from your church, or through a respected school of philosophy, or just a strong sense of how things are done in your community. But many of us are confronted with a world of wildly differing values, and have to pick and choose from among them what makes sense for me, trying to figure out who really does rule the wasteland.

If You Want to Live by Your Values, It Helps to Know What They Are

So, let’s say you’re nodding along, and you agree that our thinking on values is confused, and it would sure be nice to clarify that. Where to begin? Well, first let’s revisit the question we set aside about some values maybe being better than others.

We said that if someone “values” something, it means he wants more of it, which can get a bit tricky when you really try to pin it down rigorously (is being more healthy, rich, or educated really the same kind of thing as being more brave, kind, or merciful?), especially when it comes to things that we may simultaneously want and not want. You know what I mean – some part of you wants to eat that cheesecake, but another part of you wants a six pack. So, some part of you values the cheesecake, and some part of you values abstaining from the cheesecake. Which one of those is “really” reflecting your values? How do you decide?

My solution, at least for this discussion, is to say that values that lead to living well, to flourishing are the ones worth having, and any values that undermine that flourishing are better trained out of us (this is neither original nor new – it’s basically a restatement of Aristotle’s argument that eudaimonia (happiness, but literally “good spiritedness”) is the goal of human life). Of course, if you’re of a philosophical bent, your very next question is “ah, but what do you mean by flourishing, then?”

Honestly, in practice, this is largely a “you know it when you see it” kind of thing more than something anyone has been able to wholly satisfactorily define (or at least the books I’ve read trying to do so haven’t been wholly satisfactory, even when they’ve had some great insights!). Someone making lots of money, respected in his field, and receiving attention for his work, but who is miserable and lonely is obviously not flourishing as much as someone who is happy and connected, while also having material success. Of course, it gets much harder to say for sure when you start facing harder trade-offs: are you flourishing more with a strong family and not so great business prospects, or doing meaningful, well-paying work, but you’re lonely while you’re at it? Is the answer the same for everyone?

That said, if we’re willing to accept “flourishing” as clear enough to shoot for, and if we want to do it, then we’ll have to find values that if we pursue “getting more of them,” it makes us flourish and doesn’t hinder flourishing. And then we’ll have to ask ourselves “what kind of behaviors and practices lead us to get more of what we have decided to value?” Ethics, then, is about working out what the right or best things to value are, and how to go about getting more of that (and less of the bad stuff).

Okay, fair enough you might say, but just how do you arrive at what the “right” values are? Historically, there are two main approaches: received values and philosophically derived values.

Received values are either handed down as a tradition by a society or purport to come from some source that should be self-evidently trusted: God, a wise man, or what have you. You can, of course, combine these: for most of history, most Jews have followed the set of values in Judaism because that’s what they were raised with and it was how their community had always done it, but at root, that set of values is said to have come straight from God via Moses. This is far and away the older and more common way that values are transmitted and internalized.

By contrast, philosophical attempts to derive/justify/explore values are comparatively new (yes, this is the kind of place where ~2500 years ago is considered “pretty new”). Earlier attempts to use philosophy to understand values tended to take received values for granted, or at least mostly so, and then to explore them and try to understand them. Socrates and Plato didn’t doubt that “justice” (dike) was a real value that actually was desirable, but they wanted to better understand exactly what it was, what it wasn’t, and why it was desirable. Over time, moral philosophy has moved more and more to trying to find a way to arrive at rationally defensible values that can be reasoned into without any handwaving at “it’s always been this way” or “because God said so, that’s why.” While I think there has been a lot of edifying and clarifying reasoning done along these lines, overall, I think the Western philosophical tradition has gotten out over its skis, and now we’ve lost sight of the kind of straightforward, commonsense values that the original philosophers took as their grounding.

Which gets us to the fact that these two approaches to finding value can, of course, be combined. Many Christian Theologians have taken scripture as the most perfect of received sources for values and proceeded to analyze it with the tools of philosophy (most famously, St. Thomas Aquinas).

If all of this is a bit high-flying for you, allow me to propose what I think is a good-enough-for-most-of-us definition of value that will allow us to navigate some more fine-tuned questions about how to live rightly:

The goal of human life is to flourish – to live in a way that goes beyond mere survival and into meaning, mastery, and happiness. Proper values are those things that lead to flourishing, while less worthwhile values are those that either do not contribute to flourishing or work against it. Since humans are social animals, our individual flourishing is inescapably bound up in the lives of others: sometimes their help is necessary, sometimes we must make trade-offs, and sometimes there is conflict.

Okay, so there’s more I could go into there, but that risks getting into, you know, the entire history of moral philosophizing, but I think that hits the most salient points: flourishing is the goal, our ethical system should make that more likely, and we’re aware that acting ethically will involve making judgments about how our actions affect others (and how their actions affect us).

Ethics – Living Your Values

There Are Many Ethical Systems, Each with Strengths and Weaknesses

Over time, many different approaches have been taken to ethical reasoning (another of MacIntyre’s books, A Short History of Ethics, gives an admirably brief, if unsatisfyingly inconclusive survey of most of these approaches in the West). Even in classical times, there was divergence here, with the Cynics arguing for different ethics from the Stoics from the Epicureans (interestingly, for all that the Stoics and Epicureans squabbled, their actual prescriptions for “what does a life well-lived actually look like?” were remarkably similar). From the Renaissance on, you started having thinkers who said that instead of evaluating the deed, you should evaluate its outcomes (Consequentalists). The Early Modern period, with the flourishing of Rationalist systems of all kinds saw a variety of approaches: Natural Law/Rights, Deontological Ethics, Intuitionism, and others. Still later, one of the more successful branches of consequentialism was Utilitarianism, Nietzsche called all of morality as it stood a sham with his Nihilism, Kierkegaard argued it was a pre-rational choice to accept ethics on faith, and as the twentieth century wore on, more and more came to see ethics as merely an arbitrary set of rules that helps some get what they want and others get punished for doing what the more powerful don’t want, an elaborate mask for relativistic power games and coercion.

Now, for all (well, at least most) of these, there are valid critiques and interesting points raised, but for every system that arose as “the final answer to ethics,” another was able to show up and say “yeah, but what about these problems with that way of looking at things?” I personally find some value in being able to reason through situations using the lens of an ethical system I otherwise don’t subscribe to (like utilitarianism), but for now, I’m going to point you to what I think will do you the most good for actually guiding your life on a day-to-day basis.

The Least-Worst Approach: Virtue Ethics

I mentioned earlier that I found MacIntyre’s case in After Virtue compelling, and I’ve only found that strengthened reading other works on ethics. Part of that case is to argue that “Virtue Ethics” is, if not the best, at least the least flawed approach we’ve been able to come up with, and that in periods where Virtue Ethics were the norm, you had pretty clear cut agreement on what “doing the right thing” meant, and whether individuals were falling short of that, whereas since Virtue Ethics have fallen out of fashion, it’s hard to get agreement even on what “doing the right thing” means, much less how to do it, how to balance it against other constraints, and so forth.

(None of which is to say that back when we had Virtue Ethics everyone was wonderfully virtuous, of course. It was just much easier to agree on how and why folks were falling short.)

So, what are Virtue Ethics, then? In a system of Virtue Ethics, you have a set of Virtues (note the plural), and the goal of ethical training is to get those virtues to be habits of behavior, such that someone who has undertaken to cultivate those virtues will display them in all times and situations, even when under stress or called upon to make a snap judgment. The reason you want to have virtues and not merely virtue is that human life is varied, and what is required to flourish in one situation may not be appropriate in another, and trying to equate right behavior across all of these very different situations with a singular property like “virtue” is so vague as to be unhelpful.

For example, what exactly is in common between a soldier charging the enemy and a little girl caring for her new kitten? Sure, yeah, there’s maybe some amount of “selflessness” in common, but these are patently very different scenarios – one calling for bloody-minded courage, the other for tender attentiveness. Whether ontologically/metaphysically/in whatever sense courage and care are “the same” as virtuous behavior, it is useful to distinguish what it means to be brave from what it means to be caring, to recognize that some situations call for one, some the other, and some for a blend of the two, and then to practice being good at both when the time is right for each.

Having a set of well-defined virtues that you believe lead to your own flourishing and that of those around you, and then practicing living up to those virtues in your day-to-day life will allow you to make the weightier decisions rightly when the time comes.

But Which Virtues, Though?

As we said back at the beginning when we first started diving into value and values, we live in a fragmented time. The thinking of all the world is more available than it has ever been, including on what it means to live a good life and how to do so. In some ways, this is great: more perspectives allow for comparing, contrasting, and analysis, hopefully leading to deeper understanding. On the other hand, for those of us who aren’t moral philosophers, it can be daunting and exhausting, if all we truly want is a guide to living a good life that’s rigorous enough to pull us through the rough stuff, but straightforward enough that we don’t have to move to a monastery and devote our entire lives to understanding it, much less living it.

Below, I’m going to share a few sets of virtues drawn from different Western schools of thought and belief. I haven’t included any that I think are obviously wrong or not worth following, though I have my quibbles and thoughts on points of emphasis, specific terms, combinations, and so forth, and so of course I had to work out my own idiosyncratic list of virtues, which I’ve included as the last set, more by way of example than recommending anyone else follow exactly that.

Speaking of which, in looking through these example lists of virtues, you have a couple of options: 1) pick the one that works best for you and your beliefs and start following it, or 2) roll your own, whether by mixing and matching, looking for points of similarity, or reflecting on people, works, teachings, and other sources that have influenced your values. If you do decide to come up with your own, be careful to ask yourself if it is balanced – are you covering all of the difficult situations you might find yourself in? And when it comes to selecting potential sources of inspiration, keep in mind the piece of advice I’ve found most helpful in navigating spiritual and philosophical research: by their fruits ye shall know them.

Aristotle’s Virtues

The first philosopher to codify virtue ethics as we’re discussing here, though building on work done by Socrates and Plato. Essential to understanding Aristotle’s ethics is that he viewed every virtue as the mean between two vices at the extreme ends of a single spectrum – thus, being overly stingy is a vice, but so is giving away all your money, whereas it is a virtue to be generous in a way you can maintain. It’s worth noting that Aristotle’s idea of “flourishing” was basically to be an Athenian aristocrat with the time and wealth to sit around philosophizing with his friends all day, so to the degree your idea of the good life differs, you may find this list of virtues less “ready to go.”

• Courage
• Temperance
• Liberality with Wealth
• Magnificence (with great wealth)
• Proper ambition for honors
• Magnanimity (if granted great honors)
• Patience
• Honesty
• Wit/Humor
• Friendliness
• Justice
• The Intellectual Virtues (Intelligence, Inferential Reasoning, and Wisdom)

The Four Stoic Virtues

The Four Stoic Virtues will look familiar from Aristotle’s list, though the fact that there are only four is also suggestive that they were taking a very different approach. The Stoics were somewhere on the transition from thinking of virtues (plural) as totally distinct things applying to different areas of life to thinking of Virtue (capital, singular) as some kind of unified thing that all right behavior shared in. As such, their list of virtues is much shorter, with each covering more ground, and with an understanding that expressing all four in the right balance is somehow exhibiting the more transcendent Virtue that a good Stoic strives for. The Stoic idea of the best life is somewhat similar to Aristotle’s, but with more emphasis on being able to live it whatever your material possessions or responsibilities (but most of them would rather have a villa they could relax on and contemplate the big questions within).

• Wisdom
• Courage
• Temperance
• Justice

The Seven Heavenly Virtues & The Seven Capital Virtues

Here’s a two-for-one. In the middle ages, largely under the influence of Aristotle, the Catholic Church worked out various approaches to virtue ethics that worked for Christianity. Due to a couple of different paths, we got (at least) two different groupings of seven virtues that have stuck around, the Seven “Heavenly” Virtues, which combine the classical four cardinal virtues (which will sound awfully familiar from above), and the three theological virtues given by St. Paul in the Bible. The Seven “Capital” Virtues were written up as correctives to the better-known Seven Deadly Sins – the idea being that if you find yourself tempted by one of the deadly sins, you could turn to the corresponding virtue to combat it. Here’s both sets.

The Seven Heavenly Virtues

• Prudence (Wisdom)
• Justice
• Temperance
• Fortitude (Courage)
• Faith
• Hope
• Charity/Love

The Seven Capital Virtues

• Chastity
• Temperance
• Charity
• Diligence
• Kindness
• Patience
• Humility

The Virtues of Chivalry

Though there does not exist anywhere a codified list of the rules/virtues of Chivalry in the middle ages, looking both at historical documents about the expected and actual behavior of knights and nobles, as well as the romances that dramatized the ideal of such behavior, you can derive certain virtues that knights were expected to display if they wanted to keep a good name. Interestingly, that code of behavior was very similar to what the Samurai of Japan arrived at in their own code of Bushido, as discussed in Alexander Svetski’s very interesting The Bushido of Bitcoin.

• Loyalty
• Forebearance
• Hardiness
• Liberality (again, with wealth, we might call it “Generosity”)
• “The Davidic Ethic”/Nobility/Care for and protection of the weak
• Honor

The Nine Noble Virtues

These virtues were developed by modern American polytheists seeking to reconstruct and/or recreate worship of the Germanic Gods. To arrive at these, they looked at Germanic Myth, Icelandic Sagas, Wisdom poetry like the Havamal, the history of various Germanic peoples and what they admired, and so forth, with the goal of coming up with a list of virtues that would be consistent with the culture and beliefs of those peoples. My point in including it here is to show 1) the Greeks, Romans, and Christians don’t have a monopoly on Virtue ethics, even in the West, and 2) despite a very different basis, and in some ways being intentionally non-Christian (these are folks living in a culture that is still in many ways “Default Christian” trying to define a different religion, after all), notice how much this has in common with the other lists.

• Courage
• Truth
• Honor
• Fidelity
• Discipline
• Hospitality
• Self-Reliance
• Industriousness
• Perseverance

My Own “Thews”

Several years ago, I was struck by a quote on an episode of Jocko Willink’s podcast about how it’s hard to live by your values if you don’t know what they are. So, I decided I had better work out what my values/virtues were. I looked at philosophy, self-help, history, stuff from my time in the Army, and other sources and arrived at a list of nine virtues or “thews” (the Old English word for virtues). For extremely idiosyncratic reasons, I decided to find an Old English-derived word for each thew, so I’ll provide a bit of explanation where it might not be clear. For less idiosyncratic reasons, I followed Plato’s lead of dividing human faculties into the Head (nous), Chest (thumos), and Belly (epithumos), and so assigned three thews to each of these.

• Groundedness (Humility, calmness)
• Truth (Seeking it and telling it)
• Wisdom (Actually applying what you know)
• Love (All kinds of love, includes friendliness, kindness, hospitality, generosity)
• Troth (Loyalty, duty, keeping your word)
• Worth (Doing worthwhile things, greatness, honor)
• Hunger (Ambition, Drive)
• Guts (Courage)
• Grit (Discipline, toughness, perseverence)

Note: As the title indicates, this is only “Part 1” on Value and Ethics. We’ll return to talk a bit more about the relationship of values with economic “value,” the role of power in ethics (and ethics in power), and some final cautions for engaging in ethical reasoning, finding your values, and working out how to live by them.

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