Values, Voluntarism and Service brings to the sari-sari store, with the words “good for” a
can of milk or a bag of sugar. But values should not be
Transcendence – what everything we do; we believe that there is a
higher purpose.
Factors in developing once values:
1. role modeling
2. environment
3. culture
4. personal experiences
What are values?
The first thing to be said about values is that they are
objects of out intentional feeling.
- Intentional feeling is different from the sensory
feeling of the five senses from bodily vital
feeling-states, and from psychic feeling.
By their very nature, intentional feelings of something,
they are oriented towards values. Spiritual feelings such
as bliss and despair are essentially intentional being
directed towards the value of the holy, but other feelings
act like preferring, love and hatred are likewise oriented
towards values.
Values are given to use in intentional feeling. We “know”
values by feeling them, they do not wait for our rational
justification in order to appear in our lives. Our intellect is
blind to values just as the eyes are blind to sounds. This
does not mean that we cannot reflect on values, but
when we so, we are no longer reflecting on value as
value, but on value as a concept.
An illustration of this point is the value of service, of being
a person-for-others. The Ateneo de manila constantly
drills this message into college students for four years
through their courses and reading materials. The
Ateneans are intelligent enough to understand this, but
how many of them venture to spend a year or two in a
service-oriented job after graduation? --- For the few who
do, the decision usually comes after an immersion
program, which enables them to feel the experience of
poverty.
As objects of our intentional feelings, values are
essentially qualities and are not to be mistaken for goods,
tough goods are carriers or bearers of values. The
misconception of value for goods may be due to our
language. The Pilipino word for value is “halaga”, but
another common expression used by young people,
“bale”, Spanish origin, which may also mean “worth”.
“Bale” refers also to the small piece of paper Filipino
mistaken for goods. As qualities, values qualify our life
and do not easily give in to quantification: as qualities,
values are objective and immutable, whereas goods as
carriers of values vary and depend on the subject, time,
circumstance, and situation. A metaphor may be of help
here. The color green is a quality seen by the eyes and
different from the color black. If I paint the green board
black, it is now a carrier of the color black whereas before
it was a carrier of color green. The quality green or black
does not change; only the board has changed.
It is important to stress here the immutability, the
objectivity of values: for values, especially higher values,
call upon the person and when the person fails to
respond to a value, it is not that is destroyed but the
person himself. Justice as a value calls on the person to be
just, and if he does not respond to this call by being just,
it is not the value of justice that is destroyed but the
person himself. We are here reminded of the words of
Socrates: “To do injustice is worse than to suffer
injustice.” As qualities, values transcend man.
The ambiguity of values lies here in their immateriality.
Our life attains a quality because values constantly
present themselves to us, and intervene in our life as
instigators of action, as a prospect for commitment, as a
reason and standard for behavior and expression, norms
and principles of conduct, and as criteria for aesthetic
appreciation and economic utility. But values elude all
their embodiments or carriers. A value gives itself in an
object to be desired, but once the goals is attained it
affirms itself in the form of another demand. It is in this
sense that we can speak of the universality of values –
they exercise an influence on the totality and unity of our
life. Values form a kind of horizon to our life.
(Research code of ethics for Filipino nurse)
More especially, values generate an ought-to-be and
ought-to-do. For instance, because justice is a value,
justice ought to exist and I ought to be just. Values, in
other words, ground our obligations, beliefs, ideals, and
attitudes, without being identical with them. How then
do we express values? The key to this question is to be
found in the notion of the human being as a person, for in
a real sense only man and woman can experience values.
A person, for Max Scheler, is the seat of the spirit, which
spirit transcends nature. As spirit, the person is not part
of nature, but apart from it, he/she can determine
himself, direct his/her own life. Self determination is
another word for freedom.
A manifestation of this is the human being’s capacity to
go against the drive of evolution, the instinct for survival –
the person can willingly take his own life. In his freedom,
the person is the unity of diverse acts, past, present and
future, and as such is openness to reality. In a similar vein,
Martin Buber talks of the person as a being in dialogue
with the world. The being of the person is a being of
response-ability, and freedom is the precondition for the
person’s response to the other, whether another human,
nature, thing, event, or God. For Buber the opposite of
constraint is communion: to be free, and thus to be a
person, means to be able to respond to the call of
communion. It is here that values are experienced – in
the dialogic relation of the human being as a person.
Unlike the animal which a biological need compels with
the force of a natural physical law to satisfy necessities,
values call for a free response from the person. There is
no experience of value if value is not recognized as such,
consented to and willed by the human being. Values
appear in the human being’s engagement with the world,
in his/her openness to reality. The experience of value is
at once the experience of person. Values then are not
created, but discovered by the person I involvement with
the world.
The person is the unity of diverse acts, but among these
diverse acts, there are three that characterize the person
uniquely:
1) The act of reflection or the act of making
oneself the object of one’s thinking;
2) The act of ideation or abstraction, of deriving
an essence from existence; and
3) The act of loving.
Of the three, the last is the most important trait of the
human being as a person: a person is a being capable of
loving. Loving and hating are the fundamental primordial
acts of the person to which all our other acts are
reducible to them. In this sense, a person is what he/she
is by what he/she loves and hates.
our being a person or spirit. This ordered rank of values is
also objective and immutable. What is subjective and
mutable is out perception of this hierarchy, our “value-
ception”, and our concrete realization of values. Hatred is
a disorder of the heart because it wrongly reverses the
order or the rank of values.
What about the moral values of good and evil? For
Scheler, the moral values of good (positive) and evil
(negative) are not to be found in this hierarchy of values
but in their realization; they, so to say, “ride on the back
of the deed.” A deed is good if it prefers a higher or
positive value in place of a lower or negative one. On the
other hand, a deed is evil if it prefers a lower or negative
value in place of a higher or positive one. Without the
deed and the person who performs it, no moral good or
evil occurs. In this sense, moral values are personal values
– they originate from persons. But to the extent that good
is the realization of higher values, the spiritual and the
holy which refers to our being as persons, and to the
extent that evil is the realization of lower values, the
sensory and the vital which refers to or likeness to the
animals, then good enhances our personhood while evil
degrades our humanity.
The moral acts of good and evil are based then on the
person and not on any moral authority. Obligation, as we
said earlier, is based on value, not the other way around.
Values generate “ought” through being modeled in a
person; without a person to model them there would be
no norms or obligations. In the case of moral values,
nothing can make a person good but the intuition of the
example of a good person, whose love, in turn, invites
one to follow. Scheler cites the example of Christ loving
the sinner Mary Magdalene and thereby effecting her
moral conversion. Model persons are the primary vehicle
of value transformation in our moral world.

Both love and hatred are movements of the heart

oriented towards values. Love and hatred are similar in
that as movements, they open up a hierarchy of values.
The opposite of love is not hatred but apathy. Love
directs us to higher values whereas hatred directs us to
lower ones. It is interesting to note here that the Pilipino
word “mahal” also means “esteem” or “of high value”. At
the lowest rank are sensory values (values of pleasant and
unpleasant, technical values, and luxury values). Next in
rank are the vital values of noble and vulgar, the values of
civilization. Higher than vital and sensory values, both of
which are related to the ego, are the spiritual values of
justice/injustice, truthful/falsehood, and the aesthetic
values of beauty and ugliness. The highest values are the
holy and unholy. Both spiritual and holy values refer to