Essay
What's in a Value?
by Wayne Dunn
Over the past few years there's been a lot of talk about "family values." Usually it emanates from the conservative side of the political aisle and is typically met with guffaws from the liberal side of the aisle.
But for all the talk or ridicule of family values, few people, it seems, could define what a value is or identify specifically why it's important to man.
However, philosopher Ayn Rand asked--and answered--some very important questions about values, questions that may never have been addressed before.
She approached the field of ethics by first asking not "What values should man hold?" but rather "What are values?" and "Why does man need them?".
"Value," she wrote, "is that which one acts to gain and/or keep." Notice that her thought process began with a precise definition and only then did she start peeling back the intellectual layers: "The concept 'value,'" she continued, "is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what?"
The of-value-to-whom part of the question is easy enough to identify; there is only one type of entity that can act to gain or keep something: a living organism. A chunk of coal cannot value, but a man can value a chunk of coal. The sun cannot act to gain a value, but a blade of grass acts to gain the value of sunlight (through photosynthesis). Inanimate objects have no needs and cannot value. It is only living entities that have requirements. But for what purpose? To what end? Of value for what? Miss Rand answers: "The only constant alternative that a living organism faces is: the issue of life or death...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible." In other words, life is the prerequisite for valuing (or for doing anything). Therefore an organism's own life is its highest value, because without its own life, no other values would be possible to it or needed by it.
But its own life is more than just a living thing's primary value--its life is its standard of value, the yardstick by which it measures whether or not something else is of value to it. If a thing contributes to the entity's life, then it is a value to that entity.
In the plant and animal kingdoms, value-pursuit is automatic. When a mosquito bites, it is acting to gain a value--the blood that propagates its life--and it has no choice in the matter. The mosquito cannot deliberately undermine its own existence or shun the things its life requires. When a tree grows its roots toward water and its limbs toward sunlight, it is acting to gain values--the water and light that sustains its life--and it has no choice in the matter. The tree cannot deliberately undermine its own existence or shun the things its life requires.
But how does man pursue his values?
While nature has "programmed" plants and animals to pursue life-sustaining values with processes they cannot subvert, man possesses no such "automatic" processes. And despite popular misconceptions, man has no instincts--he lacks even a so-called "survival instinct." An actual instinct, one must understand, precludes the possibility of its possessor disregarding it. A lion, for example, cannot override its instinct to kill zebras in favor of munching leaves. A goose, whose instincts tell it to fly south, cannot opt to winter in Maine. So if man had a literal survival instinct, then suicide--or any self-destructive behavior--would not be possible to him. Man's means of sustaining his life and pursuing values, his "tool of survival," as Ayn Rand put it, is: reason.
Mind power--not brute strength, sharp claws or super speed--is man's key to life. It was the faculty of reason, not instincts, which enabled our primitive ancestors to discover which plants are safe to eat, or under what conditions planted seeds grow, or how to make a spear or build a fire. This knowledge, like all knowledge, basic or advanced, was first discovered, discovered by a reasoning mind and only then could it be communicated to other men--who had to apply their reasoning minds in order to comprehend the knowledge. Unless a human properly uses his mind, he will perish. (Even an infant survives only because of reason: the reasoning mind of a maturer human who cares for it.)
Man's faculty of reason, unlike an animal's faculty of instincts, allows him to choose his actions. He can make rational, life-enhancing decisions or he can make irrational, life-damaging ones. He can be reasonable one moment and unreasonable the next and then flip back to being reasonable again. Or he might think he is taking the rational option yet in reality be making an error in judgment. But whether he consistently and accurately applies his reasoning mind or not, "to think or not to think" is man's ever-present choice, a choice he cannot escape. (This is what mystics sometimes call "free will.")
Since the issue of life and death is the "constant alternative" facing a living organism, and since without life no other values are possible, the answer to the question "Why does man need values?" is the same answer for why any organism needs values: in order to continue living. "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."
A thing cannot be a value "in and of itself," that is, apart from a living entity that stands to benefit from it. In other words, values are contextual. Is a rabbit a value, for example? It is to a hungry fox, but not at all to a hungry starfish. Is a tree a value? It's an immense value to the insects that bore inside it, but it's not a value to the person on whom it falls during a storm. Surely gold has intrinsic value, right? Not to a dog. Gold is a value to humans, in most contexts, only because we have found life-enhancing uses for it. A thing is valuable to a living organism only insofar as it contributes to the organism's life.
Now that we have identified both a rational standard of value--man's life--and man's means of supporting his life--reason--, the issue of right and wrong is rationally demonstrable: that which promotes life is a value, is right or good; and that which undermines life is a non-value, is wrong or evil.
Since life requires self-sustaining action, the linchpin of a rational ethics, then, is: self-interest. Actions that contribute to one's own life should be viewed as good, as efficacious, as moral, as virtuous. And, unlike faith-based moral systems, a rational code of ethics does not "look down its nose" at material things. The material objects that promote one's life, and which are obtained through one's own rational efforts, should be regarded as important, as good, as values.
In case you haven't noticed, Ayn Rand's value-theory, her reality-based approach to ethics, flies in the face of everything we have been taught. Most people believe that values are just "out there," dangling, so to speak, in the supernatural abyss, that they exist independently from the "real world," or that they are faith-based precepts. To test this assertion, simply ask a teacher of traditional morality to define and explain values--and then sit back and listen to the vague, esoteric, floating abstractions or memorized slogans that he or she will try to pawn off on you.
And therein lies the problem: Values and morality have been detached from the requirements of life. Life requires the value of self-interested pursuits, but morality, we are told, demands self-sacrifice. Life requires the value of material things, but truly moral people, we are taught, renounce material things. Life requires the value of knowledge if you are to succeed in the world, but the morally devout, we are informed, scoff at human knowledge and rebuke "worldly" success. You value happiness? The high-minded, you will be admonished, consummately suffer for others. You value your life and desperately want to live it? The morally enlightened, you will be informed, desire only to be rid of "the flesh."
And there you have it--the false choice that traditional ethics plops in humanity's lap: either embrace self-sacrificial "values" and be moral or pursue self-interested values and be immoral. With that kind of choice, is there any wonder, then, why so many people seem largely apathetic toward morality as such? This widespread indifference may actually be the shadow of a virtue: Most people want to enjoy life and so they don't consistently practice the self-abnegation, the self-sacrifice that conventional morality extols.
Ayn Rand has shown that the desire to live and engage in life-sustaining pursuits is not some vice for which one should repent but the exact opposite--it's a virtue of which one should be proud. Life, remember, is the standard of value. So rather than either being vague generalizations disconnected from life's actual requirements or a list of concrete dos and don'ts taken on faith, actual values are, in fact, reality-based, essential, understandable and provable. And their function is not to thwart and squelch the value-holder's life but to promote and improve it--right in the here-and-now, in this material, existent, "earthly" world.
So the problem is not, as some religious conservatives bemoan, that society has lost its "moral compass." The problem is that the compass people are taught is moral has a needle that points toward the irrational, in the direction of non-values and death. But since it was not calibrated with life on earth as its standard of reference, that compass, albeit misnamed, is functioning with precision. The real moral compass, the one that arrows toward rational values and life, is not lost--it's waiting to be used.
