What are Values?

[rodinuk]

I'm not sure "One Team" is a value, but okay. I'm also a little uneasy about the conjecture that a company can value anything. What we're given is what an internal committee came up with when given the assignment: advertise something about our corporate values. I'd rather focus on the value systems of people.

We're told all the time that as individual people we fall into groups that have conflicting values systems. Do we really? I kinda doubt it.

A company can value its assets such as its workforce and other assets like buildings, plant, fleet and brand, IPR etc which enable it to generate money to pay shareholders, Government or invest in its stated aims.

An individual can: have their own value system
follow a religion that has its value system
work for a company that has another value system
belong to a political party that has its value system

or any combination thereof.

Enough for me thanks. I value my sanity

[trish]

True, we exchange messages when we converse and we exchange messages when we use the phone and that's what communication is: the exchanging of messages. But is communication value? Different communications can be valuable for different reasons. The communication that tells me my flight has been cancelled is valuable for a different reason than the communication I have when I dine with a friend and console her 'cause of her recent breakup. It seems to me, that communication is just to complex and wierd a thing to be a value.

I'm sorry for being really unclear about this...which is why I started this thread...'cause I find this talk about values to be really confusing. It has sidetracked our politics, and divided us over a lot a confusing nonsense (imo).

[trish]

A company can value its assets such as its workforce and other assets like buildings, plant, fleet and brand, IPR etc which enable it to generate money to pay shareholders, Government or invest in its stated aims.

So assets are valuable, but are they values? What is it about an given asset that makes it valuable?

The value systems you mention seem to be more about what various groups value then about what about what those values are. My tentative contention is that we have the same values but we find those values in different things. Of course it's also possible that having the same values, we may prioritize them differently.

(I gotta go now too, but I'm be checking back in)

[hippifried]

Even within an individual interpretation, the meaning of the term "value" changes contextually. It's too overly spinnable & way too over used, to the point of being meaningless.

[BluegrassCat]

If you're talking about the values that divide us politically, liberals tend to value fairness, equality and care (or preventing harm) while conservatives tend to value sanctity, authority, and strength. Everyone appears to value those things somewhat, but it's a question of which is more important. And of course to say that "liberals believe x" is not at all explanatory since it's really more that we call them liberals because they believe x.

[Prospero]

Value is a complex word. if as I suspect Trish, you are talking about one's basic values in life - then I think that most of us would agree here (above and beyond the political spectrum). Honesty, life, decency, fair play, justice, honour, the Earth, the rights of others.... liberte, egalite fraternite.

What do I value in my life... well the above plus my family, my friends, my lovers (past and present), my health, my freedom. my human rights. my skills and talents. My cats.
I enjoy my possessions - but do not value them beyond the fact of their existence. possession is temporary.

[Stavros]

At a simple level, I think values are those things, mostly abstract, which we believe benefit our lives. Honesty, kindness, love, justice and entertainment are things with value.

The value in honesty comes from its expression of virtue, or truth -you value someone's opinion not just because it may resemble your own, but because you recognise a truth in what they say.

The value in kindness can be expressed through sharing, be it things or time -kind people will do something for you even if you did not ask them to do it, and at no cost to themselves.

The value of love is that can not only benefit your life, but benefit others too.

Justice is a value when what is perceived to be a wrong -a personal wrong or a social wrong -such as theft- is corrected: your stolen goods are returnd, the thief is punished. Justice can be political, it can also be emotional -justice as a value suggests that power may not necessarily be an expression of force alone.

If entertainment has value, it is because it benefits life through the generation of laughter, through the admiration of physical, intellectual and emotional skills -for example in music, dance and the visual arts.

No doubt Sophocles, speaking through Plato could show how something that benefits ME, is gained at the expense of someone else, but that would not be a value.

Marx based a large part of his analysis of capitalism on the way that value has been transferred from people to Material things or commodities, and was concerned to show how capitalism tends to turn everything into commodities, including human beings, so that a human being becomes valued for his or her ability to operate a machine, rather than for the operation of their brain or their heart.

Philippa Foot would argue against a relativist conception of value. Rather than arguing that values change in their contexts, she would argue that there are essential properties to values that do not change, it is the contexts that change.

Some things in life should be non-negotiable: treating other people with respect to their person, for example is a universal value be it Ancient Greece or contemporary London.

To me the big debate is on values and relativism -post-modernism tried to argue that there are no essential, fixed facts, that these change across time. The definition -even the practise- of something called homosexuality in Ancient Greece is different from what it is today, but today it is possible to argue that homosexuality does not exist, because gender only exists as a category defined in law, in 'real life' gender has no meaning other than whatever the person concerned attaches to it. But what post-modernism says about meaning can not be applied to everything, that is where the debate becomes more complex.

[trish]

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful responses.

Recently I’ve been listening to people explaining their thinking about the upcoming presidential election. One Hispanic woman loves Dream Act proposal but she’s leaning toward for Romney because his values and the GOP values are closer to hers. When pressed all she can come up with is that Romney’s stand on gay marriage is commensurate with hers. When pressed further she just feels that if the nation returned to Christian values things would get better. Her take is not an unusual one. It parallels the trumped up culture war attitude manufactured by Fox News.

It occurred to me that my values and this woman’s values really can’t be all that divergent. We both probably claim Love, Honesty, Truth, Security etc. as values. We both probably hold that marriage and family are institutions that secure these values for large numbers of people and for ourselves in particular. We seem to differ on the availability of these institutions to gays and lesbians. It seems wrong to say she and I have different values. We have the same values, and we probably even have them prioritized in approximately the same way. I think our disagreement is much less fundamental than O’Reilly and other culture warriors would have you believe.

(I do realize that the view of value as distinct from the institutions, behaviors and goods that exhibit those values is reminiscent of Platonism, but I don’t believe the picture is essentially Platonist.)

[Stavros]

Trish, I think that is why some argue that it is the context that changes, not the values. If someone is not comfortable with the idea of a 'gay relationship', that is the problem, not the values associated with marriage -sharing, caring, creating a home and so on. I think if anything it exposes the irrational -if we can assume that it is rational for a human being to want something that benefits its life. It is irrational for someone who is not going to be forced to be 'gay' to be intolerant of it. There are many ways of accepting same-sex relationships with the Christian faith, because Christianity values the ingredients that make all relationships successful and valuable -but if people want to create a context that challenges the values, as I say, I think they are diverting attention from the values and drawing it to their prejudice.

[Prospero]

I am sure your values and hers are largely congruent. But she also perhaps adheres to an inflexible belief system that informs her that Lesbianism, Gayness etc are deviant, unnatural and - thus almost certainly sinful. This in the abstract she hates the sin and with it, sadly the sinner. You cannot expect rationality in such a situation where the values are derived from rules in turn taken from such codifications as the Bible, The Torah, The Qur'an etc - viewed in literal terms. The centuries of subtle interpretation and analysis that Christians, Jews and - to a lesser extent Muslims - have subjected their sacred texts to are usually ignored by the new breed of literalists.