Leah de Roulet once stated, “Science and technology are powerful tools but how do we use them? Shall we use them to destroy or to build? It depends on our values.

All values are important. Everyone who has ever touched my life in some way is a mentor for good or bad. Life is a blend, and a person is a blend of all the influences that have touched his/her life.”

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your talent and understanding, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you.” (John Gardner)

“When I talk to elderly people who are dying, I find they don’t worry about material gain or about having too little success in life. They worry about what they should have done with the people they loved.

All the above statements give profound importance to the role of values to our lives in particular and to the society in general. But what are values?

Values have been defined in a number of ways, as follows:

  • Etymologically, value comes from the Latin word “valere”, which means to be strong, to be worth.
  • Values are those standards by which a group of society judges the desirability and importance of persons, ideas, actions or objects (Maciones, 1997). For example, the honesty and integrity of a person, the nobility and applicability of an idea, the fruitfulness and productivity of an action, or the intrinsic worth and usefulness of an object.
  • Values are shared conceptions of or beliefs in what are considered desirable or undesirable (Popenoe, 1974). For example, that God stands for good and the devil for bad.
  • Values are something deserving of one’s best effort, something worth living for and, if need be, worth dying for. For example, the late Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. stated before his death, “The Filipino is worth dying for.”
  • Values are principles or ideas in which groups and individuals may believe strongly and which guide their respective behaviors; principles by which man lives. For instance, the principles of equality, justice and fair play.
  • A value is an enduring conception of the preferable which influences choice and action. For example, success is preferred over failure, honor over dishonour, and life over death.
  • Values are the ideals, customs, institutions, etc. of a society toward which the members of the group have an affective regard. For example, the ideals of freedom and democracy, the solidarity of the family.
  • Value refers to the utility of a thing, the environmental conditions at the time of evaluation. For example, a hungry and thirsty person stranded on a hot desert would prefer food and water than all the wealth in the world; a person in the middle of the Pacific Ocean would prefer a fifty-peso piece of Styrofoam enough for him to float than a billion-peso.
  • Value is that quality of anything which renders it desirable or useful. Worth implies intrinsic excellence or desirability. Food, water and air have intrinsic values.
Value Clarification Process

There are seven aspects of values that have to be clearly defined and presented in order to say what the person has chosen is a value. These aspects are within the three valuing processes: choosing, affirming or prizing, and acting.

Choosing

1. Value is chosen freely.
2. It is chosen among alternatives and with consideration of the consequences of choice.

Affirming/ Prizing

3. There is celebration; the person is happy for his choice
4. There is public affirmation of the choice

Acting

5. The value must be acted upon; it must be evident in one’s behaviour
6. Acting must be repeatedly done in some fashion to a variety of similar experiences.
7. Value should enhance and not impeded the development of the emotional and spiritual well-being.

Importance / Functions of Values

Values are important for the following reasons:

  1. Values provide the framework within which judgments are made. Values are guides for behaviour.
  2. Values give purpose and direction to the lives of people. If values are clear, consistent, and well-chosen, people tend to live in a meaningful and satisfying way. If a society lacks values or the values held are in conflict or confusing, life would be confusing and frustrating.
  3. Values give meaning and significance to life and to the totality of society.
  4. Values make things desirable, satisfying and worthy of approval.
  5. Values define what are important to people, what are worth living for and, if need be, what are worth dying for. Life is meaningful when a man has found something capable of arousing his commitment to it.
  6. Values provide for the gap between knowledge and action. It is not the most knowledgeable person who puts into practice what he knows….. We do not do what we know; we do what we want. We have to care and love to be able to do.
  7. Values have a primordial place in education, in the total formation of the person.
Theories on the Origin or Sources of Values

There are four general theories on the origin of values namely:

1. The “Inner Man” or Mentalistic Theory of Values – by William James

According to William James, all our obligations, all of what we call good and what we call bad, do not exist as good and bad par se. They are OUR constructions and are for each of us but a product of each individual’s wants, needs and desires. The value one places on any given thing… the goodness or badness of it… is purely the product of each heart and mind.

He further posits that there is no pre-existing good or bad obligation, good and ill “have no relevancy in a world without a sentiment in life… to a valuing person nothing can be good or bad except so far as some consciousness feels it to be good or thinks it to be right.”

2. The “Outer Man.” Or Behavioral Theory of Values – by B.F. Skinner

B.F Skinner posits that values come from your personal experience. You get punished or rewarded for things you did, and that reinforcement is what determines what you’ll deem good and bad. Values are created by a never – ending series of a combination of behavioural reinforcements and extinctions.

3. The “Id; Ego”, and “Superego” Theory of Values and Preferences – by Sigmund Freud.

Freud posits that we have evolutionary-based instinctual drives – id based drives – to prefer certain things; we develop over time a consciousness of ways to interact with our external world to get what we want – ego based drives – and we have a set of culturally and parentally induced should and should not – superego based drives – that spend a good amount of time in a tension – producing conflict between what we have and what we prefer.

Ego pursues pleasure and tries to avoid displeasure. Superego will work to the degree it is present, to restrict the ego to those pleasures considered appropriate by the environment in which it is developed. As the tension increases, we experience pleasure or displeasure. And as we lower the tension between these drives, we experience pleasure.

4. The Labeling Theory or Cultural Relativism Theory of Values:

According to this theory, things, ideas, events, behaviour are neither good nor bad per se. It is society which labels them as either good or bad. If a society comes to an agreement that something is good, then it becomes good; when society labels it as bad, then it becomes bad.

Since people of different societies differ in their beliefs., life situations, and experiences, they have different norms or standards as basis for what is valuable and what is not valuable, of what is good and what is bad. Values would be relative from culture to culture, from one society to another.