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Not to get into a back and forth - but that's not remotely true. Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health,
by dbspin 3y ago
Not to get into a back and forth - but that's not remotely true. Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health, social contacts, the hard limits on our healthy lifespan. Values are the ways of being we develop to bring our desires into alignments with the aspects of reality we can't control.
Moreover - what you're describing is virtue ethics, which is only one of many ethical systems. Hold hard to your values and be evaluated based on your adherence to them. Personally I'm more of a soft utilitarian - it's the results of my decisions that matter, not how they adhere to an abstract value. But we all fight the chaos in our own way.
- coldtea 3y ago>Our values are soft things next to the concrete realities of life. The need to eat, our health, social contacts, the hard limits on our healthy lifespan. All of the above can (and have) yield in order to uphold some values, including the ultimate sacrificing of one's life (much less health or social contacts). Plus, utilitarians have virtue ethics too. They just consider utility the virtue to uphold, downstream from that decision it's not different than plain old virtue ethics. After all the utility can only ultimately be judged by a value judgement (what we consider of higher utility). There's no neutral raw utility without a desired (value judgement) end result.