<aside> 🚧 I am almost done with a replacement for this essay, Values, Preferences, & Meaning .
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by Joe Edelman
More and more people are talking about values these days, and that's a good thing. A reorientation towards values is happening in many fields: economics, design, organizational theory, political theory, econometrics, product metrics, psychotherapy, international development, community, cryptocurrencies, etc.
But something is holding back all of this progress. Mostly there is a vague idea about what values are—the values of a person seem much less concrete than, say, their goals, plans, or preferences. To rebuild economics or metrics requires rigor, and vague ideas keep the reorientation toward values from proceeding. Values-based designs end up seeming jerry-rigged, subjective, and handwavy.
So let's explore, right here, a rigorous notion of values. The notion I'll present resonates with what other philosophers have called ideals, virtues, or strong evaluative terms[1], and it has something to do with what ecological psychologist James Gibson called affordances. If you take time and go through it carefully, you may become able to push the reorientation towards values forward, in areas where it's stalled. Whether you are building values-based surveys, starting a values-based cryptocurrency or voting system or social network, or helping individuals or groups articulate their values—this should help.
But before you start, a warning: you'll need to put aside your previous ideas about the word "values". The way we use the term normally includes social values, company values, etc. The idea I'll present here starts with personal values, and hews close to the process of daily living and acting. But I think this is the right place to start if you want a rigorous notion of what values are.
I'll start with two examples of how you might acquire a value.
<aside> 📖 Story 1. Imagine you ride your bike regularly, but you usually get lost in your thoughts while you do so. One day you try to attend to the wind, to how it feels on your skin, etc. You like it. You decide that this is how you want to do bike rides. Not for any payoff -- it just seems to be a better way to ride your bike.
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<aside> 📖 Story 2. Imagine you have something to get off your chest, and you decide to try to be honest with one of your buddies for this reason. You have the goal of getting whatever it is off your chest, and this is an experiment in doing that. But along the way, in being honest with your buddy, you discover a lot of other advantages. It feels good to be honest. The relationship feels closer to the kind you really believe in. After a while you realize that your honesty is no longer a goal-driven tactic or an experiment, it's just how you try to be. It seems to be the best way to be with your friends.
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In the first story, you learned the value of being sensual while biking. In the second, you learned the value of being honest with your friend.
You can probably recognize similar stories for learning about other values. You have developed values about how to treat people (honestly, openly, generously, without mercy); how to act more generally (boldly, thoughtfully, carefully); how to approach things (with reverence, with levity, with skepticism); and how to keep things (simple, sensual, rocking, full of surprise). And so on.
This should give you an outline of what I mean by values. To fill in the picture, we'll look at two properties that values have: they are improvisation-guiding, and they are hard to live by**.**
Most people only sometimes have goals or plans. At other times, they improvise. For instance, a person may not have any particular goal in mind when they’re chatting with their best friend. They just let the conversation drift. But even without a goal, they may still have a sense of how they want to be with their friend. They might want to be honest, or real, they might want to keep things light, and so on.[4] And as contexts for being honest or real or keeping things light arise, these notions come to guide their attention for a moment, as they improvise the conversational flow.
How is this different than a goal or plan? Colloquially, you might say you have a plan or a goal to be honest, but here I want to reserve plan for particular actions you intend to take, and goal for an outcome you're looking for. The value of being honest with your friend isn't about particular actions or outcomes. Instead, it's about noticing opportunities that call for honesty if they come up, and going for it.[5] So, a value is about how you'll go about things in a context.[2]
This distinction can be confusing, because some goals look a lot like values. For instance, you can take a value like being sensual while biking and make it into a goal, such as "attending mainly to my sensations on every bike ride this week." But making a goal like this is an extra step, distinct from having the value in the first place. You could value being sensual while biking without formulating such a goal.