Should we worry about having the right values?

Here’s something that worries me at night: are my values the right ones? By ‘values’ I mean things like equality, liberty and hard-work; the kind of things that guide my decisions, in a way that feels almost independent from facts. On the one hand, we spend most of our lives taking our values for granted. On the other hand, in countries like the US we constantly run into others who don’t share our values.

Not sharing values is often not a problem; if I value hard work and you don’t, then at most we shouldn’t do a project together, we’ll drive each other crazy! In these cases, values feel a bit like food preferences. If you hate marmite and I want to eat it every meal, then it’s best if we don’t eat together that often.

However, sometimes having different values is a problem, as when it comes to values that guide our political preferences. Say that you value autonomy over virtue, and I value virtue over autonomy, such that while you think alcohol should be legal in the US, I think it shouldn’t. Here, it is not clear we can each go our own ways. First, moving to a different country is extremely costly. But also the fact that I value virtue might entail that I also value the absence of your suffering and that, hence, I think you and your loved ones should also not have legal access to alcohol. What to do?

A popular answer is to say that there’s nothing to do, since values are like team preferences in sports, and that elections are like sport matches. Just as I root for the Maple Leafs and you root for the Panthers, I will vote for the candidate that promises absence of suffering and you for the one that promises to protect autonomy. It doesn’t make sense for you to ask me why I prefer the Maple Leafs to the Panthers; I would just think you’ve misunderstood how team preferences work. Similarly for asking me why I value virtue over autonomy. It also wouldn’t make sense for me to say that the Maple Leafs should take the Stanley Cup after the Panthers won the final. Similarly, it wouldn’t make sense for me to say that policies that reduce virtue should be imposed even if my side loses in the elections. In both cases I would be misunderstanding how values and team preferences work, and how we settle who has “the right one”.

The problem with the sports view of values is that it gets wrong how we actually act. For in the case of politics, our values might tell us that the procedure of settling who is right has gone awry, in a way that is much less common in sports. For example, many people on both sides of the abortion debate think it does not make sense to have something like the legality of abortion to be put up for elections. Indeed, those of us who value autonomy or virtue do not tend to think that whether policies that promote those values are in place should depend on something like elections. And to give another example: neither side of the banning of alcohol debate thinks that we should vote on whether a dictatorship should rule the country. This kind of standing our ground suggests that we think that we are right about the values that we have. After all, why else would I stand my ground?

This leads to another popular response to the question of what to do about differences in political values: we can’t help but act as if we had the right political values, so we should continue doing so. The idea behind this response is that we all must start our reasoning from somewhere, and that such starting points, like our values, are de facto the right ones. Of course, that will mean that from our point of view values that are different from ours are wrong values, but that’s just how it goes.

The worry with this view is that is that it doesn’t seem to fit with our attempts to convince others to change their values. These attempts are usually driven by telling people that they are being either irrational or unfeeling in holding some value instead of another given the consequences of living in a world that instantiates said value. And, indeed, except for psychopaths and psychotics, we all care about not being irrational or unfeeling. This suggests that these are honest attempts on our part to appeal to some deeper shared values to settle our differences about things like autonomy and virtue.

One might think that these practices of trying to convince each other are just covert attempts at manipulation, or something as nefarious. But perhaps we should take these practices at face-value. For while the sports model and the starting points model rendered the question ‘do I have the right values?’ senseless or trivial, respectively, it does seem like a perfectly fine question to ask. And our practices point towards a way of understanding the question: am I being irrational or unfeeling in having the values that I have? Of course, you might think that the question about the rightness of our values will end up being shown to be nonsense. But God forbid that not only does the question makes sense, but that the answer is that we are mistaken.