This is a continuation of What the Hell are Values?, Part 1.

Here, we'll cover three more aspects of values: they are attention-directing, importance-recognizing, and good-life constituting. Then, with this more rigorous definition of what values are, we will examine how reading human life in terms of values has explanatory power, yet differs from reading life in terms of preferences, feelings, goals, etc.

Values are Attention-Directing

In the previous section, we covered values as if they were just guidelines about how to act. But they are also ideas about what is salient in different contexts. To see this, note that the guideline "be honest with friends" seems to be about how to act, but it can be rewritten:

<aside> ✍ be honest with friends → when you're with friends, attend to opportunities for honesty

</aside>

Similarly, the guideline "be sensual while biking" can be rephrased:

<aside> ✍ be sensual while biking → while biking, attend to what's happening with your body and the wind, your muscles, and so on

</aside>

It is this formulation of a value—as a directive for attention—that we actually use improvisationally. Because of this, we can see that values need to be rather precise. They need to point to something specific to pay attention to in the relevant contexts. For this purpose, “being honest“ is a bit vague. Here are alternative formulations which would be more useful:

<aside> ✍ being honest → attending to what I feel about each thing we discuss, and to letting my feeling show → attending to any false impressions I might be giving or even attempting to give

</aside>

So, with the concept of values I am laying out here, a "value" like "being honest" is just a shorthand for one of the articulations above. To have a value, a person must have a substantive interpretation of honesty as a specific path of attention, relevant to certain contexts.

This has many implications. I will mention a few without going into details:

1. There can be no short, complete list of universal human values. Attempting such a list tends to (a) lead towards vague terms ("community", "success", "connection") that lack this attention-directing aspect; (b) ignore the millions of more specific values which only small groups of people have discovered.
2. Two people who value "honesty" may differ substantially in what they attend to, and thus have a great deal to teach one another.
3. One interpretation of honesty, H, may be supported by relationship R, environment E, or group practice P. But another interpretation H', may have different requirements.

<aside> 📌 TODO: Get into how values and norms are intertwined, and how every unarticulated value is an amalgam and this is why it might seem there's no intrinsic reward and why it might seem that unconscious values are how we want to be seen

</aside>

Values are Importance-Recognizing

So far, I have used the term "value" to refer to guidelines about how to act and what to attend to. But in philosophy, it common to say that value statements are about what is important or good *in the world—*e.g., which objects, events, or qualities are of value. I believe these two are linked: if you speak about a value one way, it seems to be about your own actions; speak about it another way, and it's about the world.

Consider the attention-directing sentences we developed above. We can rewrite them, this time as statements about what's valuable in the world[1]:

<aside> ✍ when you're with friends, attend to opportunities for honesty → what's important with friends is opportunities to be honest

</aside>