MODULE 2

THE ESSENCE OF VALUES

OBJECTIVES: At the end of the lesson, the students will be able to:

OBJECTIVES:
1. To enhance moral awareness, increase
At the end of thethinking
lesson,ability shared values,
the students will beand consciously
able to: plan value
education.
1.
2. Define core values and identify your own personal core values.
3. Explore your true values.
4.

The Essence of Values

The Essence of Values *VALUES comes from the Latin word “valere” which means to
measure the worth of something.

*Values are the elements of life prevailing in any society.

Max Scheler (1874-1928) is the foremost exponent of Axiology. Axiology is defined as the
philosophical science of values. “Acts reveal the person’s value preferences. Like a prism that
reflects the invisible spectrum of colors, a person’s acts manifest his invisible order of values.”
(Philosophy Today, 1989)

The following are true of values:

1. There are positive and negative values;

2. Values create an atmosphere; hence, we say a sense of values;
3. Values are of diverse types;
4. Values transcend facts;
5. Values cannot clamor for existence or realization;
6. Man experiences a certain order of values.

* There are also such things as subjective and objective values.

Phenomenology of Moral Values

1. A description of moral insights into a moral experience shows the following: * there
is awareness of the difference between right and wrong; * moral experience cannot be
reduced to other human experiences; * there is a “must” quality; *we experience an
“ought” in doing good and avoiding evil; * yet we are free to do good or evil.
2. From the phenomenon of dialogue, when we speak of and judge others, we
distinguish between the hero and the villain in myths, history, in everyday experience;
we praise some and blame others. We contrast the hero and the rascal; the faithful and
the unfaithful husband.

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Characteristics of Moral Values

1. A value becomes moral because it is recognized as reasonable and freely chosen by a
human person
2. Moral values are pre-eminent over other human values.
3. Moral values are absolute. Independent of other values and preferred for their own sake
4. Moral values are universal and necessary for everyone.
5. Moral values are obligatory.

The Metaphysics of Moral Values

1. In our experience the good appears as an analogous concept to the various grades of
beings.
2. The good as perfective of a subject is object of desire (thing-to-person relationship).
3. Dynamism of the Good.

Man has two-fold tendency:

a. Natural tendency to the good (will as object) and
b. The moral choice of what is reasonable (will as reason).

Knowledge of Values
1. A value is immediately felt or experienced before it is known and explained. Pre-
philosophical knowledge precedes philosophical, reflective knowledge.

Two ways of knowing value:

1. By real or experiential knowledge.
2. By notional or conceptual knowledge.

1. What is the source of our moral ideal, i.e., what we should do become to be fully human?
- The moral ideal in us is both present (we are human) and absent (the fullness of human
life is still to be realized). Hence, the moral ideal is a task of a lifetime. It is our vocation
to exist as fully as possible as human persons.

The World of Values

A. Relation of natural values to moral values.

1. Mediation of reason.
2. Subjective and Objective Relationship.
3. Sanction and Merit.

B. Mixed or Intermediate Values

1. These are values which are morally relevant natural values which are a potential for moral
values.
2. Moral education is required to habitually subordinate lower to higher values and thus to
acquire a proper sense of values.
3. Mixed values are ambiguous in the sense that:

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a. they can be a help or a hindrance to moral values.

b. they are intermediate between infra-moral values and religious values.
c. they can lead to a loss of proper sense of values.

C. Hierarchy of Values

1. Religious values
2. Moral Values
3. Infra-moral values -Economic values and values of well-being -Social and aesthetic values -
Intellectual values -Personality values
4. Infra-human values -Biological or vital values -Sensible values
Value- is not simply the good but it is an added aspect of the good. Moral value makes a man,
through his human actions, good simply as a human person.

Max Scheler’s Non-Formal Ethics of Values Throughout history there have existed many
different moralities in different peoples, races, nations, cultures, and religious. This has led to the
assumption that moral values and norms are relative.

Max Scheler’s ethics of values presupposes

Kant’s refutation of an ethics of goods and purpose (such as Aristotle’s) or an ethics of happiness
( such as utilitarianism).

Kant criticized all non- formal ethics which placed the basis of morality o man’s egoism as a
natural drive.

Kant’s formal ethics established a formal priori universal moral law- the categorical imperative-
independently of man’s natural being.

Scheler hold’s that Kant’s formal ethics as a refutation of an ethics of good and purpose is
overcome by the possibility of a non- formal, nevertheless absolute ethics of values.

In Max Scheler’s non-formal ethics of values, the whole of man, emotional, voluntative, rational,
soci al, historical, cultural, evolutionary, is the object of investigation. Questions of philosophy
ultimately reduce themselves to the questions of “what is man?”

Phenomenological Givenness in Intentional Feeling

1. A value is immediately felt in experience before its object is known. Values are given to
the intentional feeling immediately, as colors are to sight or sounds are to listening. Value
feelings must be strictly distinguished from feelings which are not intentional. Since
values like lovely, charming, noble, courageous, are felt, we can speak of them as the first
messengers of the special nature of all objects.
- A value can be very clear to us while the object to which a value refers is still obscure.
Value feeling is prior to a given thing.

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- The prior givenness of values pertains both to the psychic and the physical. Values are
not qualities of things, nor do all good and noble things have common properties, for one
single act or one individual can comprehend a real value.

2. Values are always exhibit a specific content. Their content and the ordered ranks (higher
and lower values) among them posses a priority of givenness in the order of experience
because value-feeling is prior to a given thing.
- In the order of reality, values and things form an insoluble interconnection. And finally,
in the order of essence, values are independent of being. Values do not change with
changing objects. All kinds of values form an absolute order and they are immutable.

3. In this order of values, there arise also a priori formal laws. Values are either positive or
negative. One value cannot be at the same time both positive and negative. Every non-
negative value is positive and vice-versa.

- The order of ranks of values (higher or lower) is absolute. Therefore, it is possible to relate all
historical moralities ad forms of ethos to a universal system of reference; however, only one of
the order of value- modalities and qualities, not of goods and norms. It also gives a negative
domain in which each positive historical age and each specific group has to find its own, always
only relative system of goods and norms.

ACTIVITY

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