This is the fourth and last post that attempts to respond to comments on my 3/15 post Some Values Matter More Than Others And Are Ignored Anyway.

A reader (Mike W.) thinks trust is a central moral value.  I’m inclined to agree.  I tend to doubt, though, that it can do much work in political thought.  My reason is simple: there always seems to be trust.  We seem naturally trusting.  People trust each other and they trust their leaders.  They trust their leaders far too much in the West.  Where there is absence of trust, the whole system does collapse (witness the current situation in the Middle East).  I suppose I am willing, then, to take trust on as a central moral value, but I doubt we need to figure out ways to make it more prevalent.  Perhaps the opposite.  Perhaps it would be better if we say we need to be—and we need our governments to be—more trustworthy.  And then I come full circle as I tend to think that the way to make that happen is to make autonomy and eudaimonia more prevalent. 

Another reader (Nathan P.) thinks immortal life is a (moral?) value.  Here I just disagree.  It’s not merely that I have no desire to live past 100 (yes, given today’s technology, but technology can only make that length so long given the other more important factors).  What would one do if one lived 1000 years?  Well, I would read a lot.  I’d read all of the great literature and great philosophy.  I’d seek to learn more of the sciences.   I’d also travel more.  Would all of that take 1000 years?  Maybe.  If you don’t think so, make it 10,000 years or 100,000.  And then the next question: what do you do when you’ve done all of that?  To some extent, there is an admitted lack of imagination here—with more imagination we can think of more to do.  Still, there are limits.  Sooner or later one would get bored.  But really, none of this matters.  An immortal life is not a recognizably human life.  Our incentives would be completely different—we wouldn’t have any need to rush to do anything.  Moreover, no one wants to lead an immortal bad life—and that is enough to show that immortality itself is not the value.  If it were, then an immortal bad life would be a value.  But its not.  Roger Crisp, I think, gave a great example that is relevant here: would you rather be an oyster that has a decent oyster life for 10,000 years or a Haydn who leads an extraordinary human life that is short even by human standards?  For me, the answer is obvious.

Pedrovedro provided other possible moral values.  He talks of “Avoiding harming or unjustifiably coercing others,” which I would call toleration.  This, as I indicated, is my first political value and its based primarily on the moral value of autonomy in my view.  He then names “moral purity.”  Here I simply admit that I do not know what that means.  Next is “fairness/justice.”  This is clearly an important one.  I’m going to hold off on commenting about it for now.  I suspect I will have many posts about it.  Continuing, Pedro names “Patriotism and other in-group loyalties” and “respect for legitimate authority.”  I have little to say about the first of those.  The last seems to me likely subsumable under the idea of justice.

One person (Benjamin B) asked, more or less, what I took a moral value to be in the first place.  By way of answer, I should indicate, first, that I do not take a moral value to merely be something that we see as morally valuable.  As I indicated in the 3/15 post, there is a difference between saying "X is a value" and saying "X is valued."  We can take something to be a moral value and be wrong about it.  A real moral value, I would say, is part of morality.  So what is morality?  I’ve not seen a better definition then that provided by Larry Becker in his wonderful book on reciprocity: “Morality … is the activity of deciding what rational agents ought to do and be, all things considered, and then doing or being those things” (Lawrence C. Becker, 1986, p. 36).  Moral values contribute to that.  Eudaimonia, autonomy, and trust, all seem to.