What are Values?

[Stavros]

It seems to me that one can have all the values shared by humanity in general and still be amoral. Moral codes encourage behaviors that embody our shared values, but moralities themselves are not universally shared and indeed morality itself is not universally recognized.

Values largely remain fixed and universal (I would contend that even the Aztecs valued life but erroneously thought that to preserve it one has to ritually sacrifice it). The rules, customs, laws and institutions that are meant to support those values change with the advances of the times.

There is some confusion here. Hippifried has said and I agree that human societies over millenia have developed core modes of behaviour shaped by a moral sense of what is right and wrong, what is good and evil, what is beneficial and detrimental to the survival of the group. The concept of sacrifice, Girard has argued, is linked to religion and the attempt to expunge guilt from society, but that human socieites have tended to replace human sacrifice with animal sacrifice. He argues that Cain, as a tiller of the soil, killed Abel precisely because he had no alternative on whom to vent his jealous rage, but the consequence was a profound guilt that was even worse than the jealousy that caused the murder. From this spring moral rules in ancient Jewish societies which forbid the coveting of things possessed by others -both an early form of the prohibition of theft, as well as an early concept of private property. The Crucifixion was thus an ambitious attempt to end all human sacrifice, be it in a ritual, in anger, or war: Jesus put himself up to demonstrate the futility of violence, and to encourage its polar opposite: love and life.

However, consider Kant and his categorical imperative. If categories such as truth, as honesty are believed to be pure virtues, important social values, morally unimpeachable goals -to lie undermines them and diminishes the person, it sets society out on the road to ruin. But it means that if a man in 1944 sheltering Jews in his house in Amsterdam is visited by the Gestapo who ask him: are there any Jews in this house? He must say yes, or be morally compromised. Perhaps because it did not occur to Kant, who lived in relative security in the international community in Konigsberg, that the moral act in 1944 was to lie. Or maybe, because he was a philosopher, Kant valued truth more than a human life. And he would not be the first person to put doctine before human life, Lenin springs to mind, for example.