The Destruction of Values

I’ve stated in an earlier post that a lot of the disagreements threatening to tear our society apart have to do with differences in values, differences in what we consider to be good or evil, important or unimportant. These kinds of moral disagreements lead to demonization, tribalism, confusion, and nihilism. I’ve seen on the Internet how you can’t even have a moral disagreement without one side comparing the other to a certain twentieth century political party. It’s sort of pathetic.

There are a lot of reasons given to why this is. One idea given is the decline of religiosity in modern life. The story goes that, without Christianity, the intellectual foundation for our ethics has been pulled out from under us, leaving us with nothing but irrational sentiment to justify why we continue to love our neighbors as ourselves. Another theory given is the pluralism naturally found in liberal democracy. Thanks to the freedom allowed to us by modern society, such a diversity of different views on morality were allowed to flourish that there is too much diversity. Now, we’re all sort of stuck with one another, trying to find a way to tolerate each other. Now, all of these theories have their merit, but my favorite theory is the decline of value rationality in modern life.

One of the most important sociologists in human history, Max Weber, observed how humans seemed to have two different modes of reasoning: instrumental rationality and value rationality. Instrumental rationality is “determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as ‘conditions’ or ‘means’ for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends.” Instrumental rationality uses reason as a mere tool to find the most efficient means to reach a desired end. By contrast, value rationality is “determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success.” While instrumental rationality questions the best means to achieve a desired end, value rationality determines which ends should be desired.

Now, both of these types of reasoning are important. In fact, they complement each other quite nicely. You need value rationality to know what you should want, and you need instrumental rationality to know how best to get what you want once you decide that you want it. However, in modern times, the amount of value reasoning has decreased. Modern society teaches that you should get what you want, so long as you do it in the fair way. This is why the free market as an economic system (where the customer is always right) and democracy as a political system (where the people choose their rulers) are both highly praised, why the idea of being “judgmental” or “dogmatic” is so looked down upon, and why science (which is neutral to value judgments) has such authority in our decision-making.

So, what’s the problem with this? Well, instrumental rationality cannot judge whether some end or purpose it works towards is moral or even rational. Moral judgments under this framework are reduced to personal objections or popularity contests. It’s purely subjective, conforming to whatever we want. This is problematic in itself, as we shouldn’t always get what we want. But what’s worse, this sort of subjective reasoning can be hijacked. People can be easily manipulated into wanting something that isn’t actually good for them. This is how stores use low prices to get you to purchase a bunch of stuff you don’t need. If your local grocery store can do that, imagine what your government can do! Or, if you can’t imagine that, pick up a copy of this book sometime.

Without value reasoning, we cannot tell what is good and what is evil. We can’t recognize an evil that should be stopped. This means that there might be great evils, great injustices being committed in society right now as I type this that we just don’t recognize because we aren’t using our value reasoning. Without moral values, we can’t actually have intellectual moral conversations. We can’t actually tell what we want from what is good. We can’t tell what is evil from what is not.

We need to find the language of objective value again. We can’t simply be slaves to procedure; we need to know what a good end looks like, and we need to know how to reach that end. I believe this starts with looking at the purposes of things set by nature (as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas once did) and going from there. If we can understand what is good for us, we can understand what we ought to value, and we can have intelligent conversations about these things again.