Virtue vs Value Ethics

In the post on virtue ethics I mentioned how 'values' are the common way of understanding ethics today. Have you ever heard someone say, "Oh, I'm a good person, I have values." People say things like that all the time, but it doesn't really say anything. All a value is in this way of speaking is a subjective, arbitrary moral judgement. We all make moral judgements, it's just that some people make bad ones. These subjective judgements are personal and don't hold true for anyone else. If someone says to you, "I have values, and I don't believe in killing animals, and I don't believe in eating meat," just say back,"OK. I have values, too, and I believe in killing animals whenever I need to and I eat as much meat as I can." There's nothing else either one of you can say if you really believe in 'values'. This exemplifies the incoherence of the modern way of looking at things. It all boils down to power. There is nothing right or wrong, only power, political or otherwise, to dictate which values win.



Christian philosophers have been paying a lot more attention to virtue ethics in the last few years because of this. That means going back to Aristotle, and has led to more study of Thomas Aquinas. Interestingly, the ancients had no word for 'value' in this moral sense at all. They had a word for value in the sense of, "the value of this loaf of bread in $2." But 'value' as in 'family values' is a very new word. The Oxford English dictionary didn't have an entry for the word value in this sense until a supplement in 1986. It seems the first use of the word in English is found in a sociology paper from 1918. But it goes just a little farther back in German to about the 1880's and Nietzsche, and was eventually just absorbed into common language. Nietzsche talked a lot about values and 'transvaluation', getting people to change their values. (I need to check this, but I think the word was used in this way by some others in the 19th century before Nietzche, like Karl Marx, but some people have said Nietzsche basically coined the term.)



Now, a discussion of Nietzsche is premature, but I would like to say that Nietzsche isn't as bad as he is sometimes made out. He is attributed with creating Hitler and killing God, and all sorts of things that are really unfair. His philosophy was bad, certainly, and he did reject Christianity, but he was a lot more complicated most people know. Not all of what he said was wrong. And he was not a nihilist or a relativist. In fact, he had the sense to know that if the world no longer believed in God, existence really was like looking out over a great abyss. But enough of Nietzsche for now. Suffice it for the moment to say that he coined a new term, and it stuck.



It is important to realize that there is more to morality than a set of 'values.' Even if they are 'family values.' If someone says to you,"well, your family values aren't my values," there is really nothing you can say to them." Instead of saying, "that's against my family values," say, "that's not right," then explain why.