It is difficult to take people as they are when you have been subject to liars before. I was a part of a cult. I did not believe, but that did not matter. The facts remained: People acted as if I were their family and put up that charade but, in the end, I truly meant nothing to them. That leads me to the question, what does family or friends mean to people in a cult? I don’t think it means anything. I think, if you are in a cult, then the people you consider to be your friends or family do not have any real value. The value you might impose on them is that they share the same ill-founded belief that you do, and that belief is the only value you know. But that belief isn’t real or, if it is, it is not well-founded and will not serve the same purpose that real convictions hold.
Values are difficult to talk about and difficult to define. To take a shortcut, I think values can be exemplified in behaviours. Someone might exhibit a behaviour you find praiseworthy, and that is an example of a value. Hard work is a good example of this. I find it difficult to imagine a hard-working individual who is not owed at least some praise. Even if their intentions are despicable, the courage it takes to form values and to act on them is worth something. Because most people do not have the courage to create value. To work hard is better than the alternative, no matter the intentions. You can criticize the intentions of a hard-working individual, but that is besides the point. Their hard-work ought to be evaluated in itself and praised for the determination alone. Leave the intentions separate when making this evaluation, that is a separate matter.
There is another choice distinct from creating value, and that is giving up. Believing that you cannot create value and taking up the values that someone else created (without reason) is no different from hating your Self. You can reason about values that some one has told you about. For example, our parents probably taught us about the value of hard work, but we ought not to take that on faith. Someone in a real position of authority can tell us about something we ought to value and sometimes, we should reason that they do have the authority to do so, but that requires actual thought. It is weak-willed and self-hating to decide based on word alone what values some one ought to take to heart.
Think for example of someone you admire. This person is probably skillful in at least one area of human faculties, and you will probably listen to them when they speak about those areas, but you don’t rely solely on their word, your reason is involved in that decision. Say for example, you are a guitarist and you are listening to a guitarist you admire give a speech on playing solos or something to that effect. He might say that “you need to play with feel, forget about the scales” or something like that. Since you admire him, you want to take him at his word, but you don’t. You, being a guitarist, evaluate a couple things before you decide on what he said. First, you acknowledge his perceived authority and realize that he might know something that you do not. Second, you draw on your own experience. You might think “Gee, I do play better when I think about ‘feels’ than when I rely on scales.” And after that point, you reason that what he said is sensible and you adopt it into your own guitar playing. That is what reasoning about values from someone else looks like.
What it does NOT look like is when someone you do not know, have never met, and have no reason to believe in says something like “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” and you decide “Gee, for some impossible reason I feel like I should believe this guy because it’s easy to do so.” And so you believe that you ought to “Render unto Caesar that which is Casesar’s”. But where is the reasoning in this belief? You are reasoning with your weak will because you are afraid to decide for your Self in this case. You do not know, from experience, whether this guy knows shit; therefore, you have no reason to take him at his word alone. You want, in this case, the benefits of reason without the hard work involved.
If a chemist tells you that water is composed of two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom, and you do not know whether this is true, you can decide, based on his authority, whether to believe him or not. Is he planning to gain something by misleading you? Or is he honest with his experience? The decision is yours to make, but in this case, it is obviously correct to believe the chemist, but you don’t really have any obligation to do so. You would not be making a moral error in neglecting to listen to the chemist as you do not have any convincing reason to believe him aside from that he is a chemist. You are essentially taking his word on faith.
Faith is a way that we reason about the world when we do not have any other means of doing so. If you were to choose between reason and faith, you ought to choose reason. But it’s not always the case that we are able to do so. With the example of the chemist, we are not equipped with the technology to examine water ourselves, to make the distinction between Hydrogen and Oxygen, and to reason that water is composed that way. We are forced to take the chemist at his word or reject his statement altogether. Faith in the religious sense takes this too far. Religious faith is predicated on too many premises and most of those premises can be reasoned against. The refusal to think is, I believe, the vilest evil there is.
Back to values. If you accept that you have some capacity to decide between good and evil, or useful and useless, then you accept that values are real. Values are that which serve your life in one way or another. The problem with talking about values is curious because we order the world in terms of values. It’s difficult to talk about how we order the world because it is so ingrained in us that it requires a great deal of human self-awareness to actually understand what we mean, even when we think like this all the time.
I think a lot about ethics. I think more people should because I’m not convinced that ethics dictates how most people live their lives. It certainly doesn’t dictate mine a lot of the time, but it should. When I act outside of ethics, I am doing something wrong. Ethics are, necessarily, something that you decide upon. Nobody but your Self can tell you how to act ethically. They might try to tell you how to do it, and they might be right, but ultimately, it’s up to you to draw your own conclusions and, if you reason correctly, then you can arrive at the right conclusion.
MyShelf 