BrokenWing Chronicles
Values, morals and ethics
What are the differences between values, morals and ethics? They all provide behavioral rules, after all. It may seem like splitting hairs, but the differences can be important when persuading others.
Values
Values are the rules by which we make decisions about right and wrong, should and shouldn't, good and bad. They also tell us which are more or less important, which is useful when we have to trade off meeting one value over another.
Dictionary.com defines values as:
n : beliefs of a person or social group in which they have an emotional investment (either for or against something); "he has very conservatives values"
Morals
Morals have a greater social element to values and tend to have a very broad acceptance. Morals are far more about good and bad than other values. We thus judge others more strongly on morals than values. A person can be described as immoral, yet there is no word for them not following values.
Dictionary.com defines morals as:
n : motivation based on ideas of right and wrong
Ethics
You can have professional ethics, but you seldom hear about professional morals. Ethics tend to be codified into a formal system or set of rules which are explicitly adopted by a group of people. Thus you have medical ethics. Ethics are thus internally defined and adopted, whilst morals tend to be externally imposed on other people.
If you accuse someone of being unethical, it is equivalent of calling them unprofessional and may well be taken as a significant insult and perceived more personally than if you called them immoral (which of course they may also not like).
Dictionary.com defines ethics as:
A theory or a system of moral values: “An ethic of service is at war with a craving for gain"
The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession.
Ethics of principled conviction asserts that intent is the most important factor. If you have good principles, then you will act ethically.
Ethics of responsibility challenges this, saying that you must understand the consequences of your decisions and actions and answer to these, not just your high-minded principles. The medical maxim 'do no harm', for example, is based in the outcome-oriented ethics of responsibility.
So what?
Understand the differences between the values, morals and ethics of the other person. If there is conflict between these, then they probably have it hidden from themselves and you may carefully use these as a lever.
Beware of transgressing the other person's morals, as this is particularly how they will judge you.
Talking about professional ethics puts you on a high moral platform and encourages the other person to either join you or look up to you.
******************************
Values and Morals Clarification
Mark Dombeck, Ph.D. and Jolyn Wells-Moran, Ph.D.
The final thing you will benefit from becoming more aware of is your own values and how those values correspond to your community's moral sensibilities, and to your own actions. Your values are the principles you believe in and have invested in (which is why they are said to have "value" in the first place). Values are the goals towards which you aspire. They largely define the core of your identity. More importantly still, they are the source of your motivation to improve yourself. If you did not value self-improvement, for example, you would not be reading this document right now.
It is important to develop a good understanding of your values, because of how influential your values are in determining and motivating your behavior. If you don't understand your values, you won't understand how to orient yourself in a direction that is likely to be satisfying. Your behavior, your actions will be more oriented towards putting out fires (satisfying your immediate needs), and less oriented towards developing your long term potential. You won't have a plan. You will instead, just be reactive. Because if you don't understand what they are you don't know what motivates you. Or what could motivate you - towards becoming a better person.
People's values define what they want personally, but morals define what the society around those people want for them. Certain behaviors are considered to be desirable by a given society, while others are considered to be undesirable. For the most part, however, morals are not written in stone, or proclaimed by God above, but instead reflect local sensibilities. Different societies have different ideas about what is acceptable and not acceptable. There are only a relative few behaviors (usually including murder, and various forms of abuse, including incest and adult-child sexual contact of any sort) that are pretty much universally despised by stable societies.
People are not born understanding their society's morals. Instead, these understandings develop and mature over time. Psychologist Lawrence Kolhberg's famous work has provided us with a developmental mapping of how moral understanding tends to progress through childhood and early adulthood.
According to Kohlberg, infants have little or no moral sense, because they are not born with an understanding of the nature of human relationships. As children reach elementary school age, they enter into the first major stage of moral understanding, known as the "pre-conventional" stage. Pre-conventional children are essentially selfish in orientation. They do not think about what behaviors will serve the greater good, but rather think in terms of what will most benefit themselves. They respond primarily to power, and think of morality as a matter of following rules so as to avoid punishment.
As children grow into adulthood, they typically enter into the stage of "conventional" moral understanding. Some children will be developmentally delayed in this regard and become adults who have the moral understanding of children; we call them sociopaths, narcissists, and anti-social personalities. The majority of people that do make it to the conventional moral understanding start thinking in terms of duty; a duty to do what is necessary to promote the greater good. They orient towards behaviors that are most likely to gain other people's respect and admiration. Part of conventional morality is the duty to behave lawfully. Some people take this duty further and understand it as a duty to conform to what other influential people around them want.
Most adults never actually achieve the final stage of morality, known as post-conventional morality, mostly because in order to get there, people have to throw off their sense of duty to what others around them want, and reinvest their moral sense in higher principles, such as (but not limited to) "honesty", "reciprocity", and "social welfare". Such people become willing to take unpopular stances and make unpopular decisions simply because those decisions represent the right thing to do. For example, a post-conventional CEO might decide to offer full medical coverage for all employees because it is the right thing to do (to use the company to raise up all participants), even though to do so would anger shareholders who might see this as a drain on profits. It is very difficult to achieve a post-conventional morality in what is largely a conventional world. The CEO in our example would probably not last long, unfortunately.
****************************
One of the most important characteristics of moral judgments is that they express our values. Not all expressions of values are also moral judgments, but all moral judgments do express something about what we value. Thus, understanding morality requires investigating what people value and why.
There are three principle types of values which humans can have: preferential values, instrumental values and intrinsic values. Each plays an important role in our lives, but they don't all play equal roles in the formation of moral standards and moral norms.
Preference Value
The expression of preference is the expression of some value we hold. When we say that we prefer to play sports, we are saying that we value that activity. When we say that we prefer relaxing at home over being at work, we are saying that we hold our leisure time more highly than our work time.
Most ethical theories do not place much emphasis on this type of value when constructing arguments for particular actions being moral or immoral. The one exception would be hedonistic ethical theories which explicitly place such preferences at the center of moral consideration. Such systems argue that those situations or activities which make us happiest are, in fact, the ones we should morally choose.
Instrumental Value
When something is valued instrumentally, that means we only value it as a means to achieve some other end which is, in turn, more important. Thus, if my car is of instrumental value, that means that I only value it insofar as it allows me to accomplish other tasks, such as getting to work or the store.
Instrumental values play an important role in teleological moral systems - theories of morality which argue that the moral choices are those which lead to the best possible consequences (such as human happiness). Thus, the choice to feed a homeless person is considered a moral choice and is valued not simply for its own sake but, rather, because it leads to some other good - the well-being of another person.
Intrinsic Value
Something which has intrinsic value is valued purely for itself - it isn't used simply as a means to some other end and it isn't simply "preferred" above other possible options. This sort of value is the source of a great deal of debate in moral philosophy because not all agree that such intrinsic values actually exist.
If intrinsic values do exist, how is it that they occur? Are they like color or mass, a characteristic which we can detect so long as we use the right tools? We can explain what produces the characteristics like mass and color, but what would produce the characteristic of value? If people are unable to reach any sort of agreement about the value of some object or event, does that mean that its value, whatever it is, can't be intrinsic?
Instrumental vs. Intrinsic Values
One problem in ethics is, assuming that intrinsic values really do exist, how do we differentiate them from instrumental values? That may seem simple at first, but it isn't. Take, for example, the question of good health - that is something which just about everyone values, but is it an intrinsic value?
Some might be inclined to answer "yes," but in fact people tend to value good health because it allows them to engage in activities they like. So, that would make good health an instrumental value. But are those pleasurable activities intrinsically valuable? People often perform them for a variety of reasons - social bonding, learning, to test their abilities, etc.
So, perhaps those activities are also instrumental rather than intrinsic values - but what about the reasons for those activities? We could keep going on like this for quite a long time. It seems that everything we value is something which leads to some other value, suggesting that all of our values are, at least in part, instrumental values. Perhaps there is no "final" value or set of values and we are caught in a constant feed-back loop where things we value continually lead to other things we value.
Values: Subjective or Objective?
Another debate in the field of ethics is the role humans play when it comes to creating or assessing value. Some argue that value is a purely human construction - or at least, the construction of any being with sufficiently advanced cognitive functions. Should all such beings disappear from the universe, then some things like mass would not change, but other things like value would also disappear.
Others argue, however, that at least some forms of value (intrinsic values) exist objectively and independently of any observer. Thus, our only role is in recognizing the intrinsic value which certain objects of goods hold. We might deny that they have value, but in such a situation we are either deceiving ourselves or we are simply mistaken. Indeed, some ethical theorists have argued that many moral problems could be resolved if we could simply learn to better recognize those things which have true value and dispense with artificially created values which distract us.
Are you confused?
I am!
BrokenWing
