Values and purpose are inexorably linked. Purpose gives life meaning, and gives you something to strive for; values guide you in striving for your purpose. In my philosophy, values are the timeless, constant principles by which I live my life. Because I reject religion as an ethical code, it's up to me to adhere to my values, and in most cases, I'm the only judge of how well I'm doing that. In other words, I don't believe there's a hell to punish me if I fail; rather, my punishment is the knowledge of failure that only I can truly be aware of.
Integrity--a topic about which I've written at length in the past and hope to write more about in the future--is, simply stated, sticking to your values, no matter what. In order to do this, you must know what your values are--and anyone who's thought about this sort of thing for more than a few minutes knows the level of complexity and hard work that it implies. This is why I think it's important to state my values very explicitly and succinctly.
I believe that my values logically follow my purpose, and in fact, in most cases I believe that my purpose dictates my values. Here they are.
[Note: much of the text that appears below appears, with some minor changes, on my firm's website, www.mscgi.net. I am the original author of this text.]
This value concerns the quality you exhibit when you do your absolute best at
whatever you are attempting. Arete is a Greek word dating back to the writings
of Homer, where it was used to imply courage. It later evolved to describe the
duty to improve oneself.
When considered in the context of Personal Responsibility, Arete yields a
profound conclusion: you answer only to yourself in your pursuit of
self-improvement. When you believe you have achieved this improvement, only you
will know the true triumph (or ease) of your achievement; when you believe you
have failed, only you will know if you truly gave it your best effort.
This is the value implied by a belief in free will. Free will is the notion that nothing in this life is pre-determined; you are always free to make choices.
The subtle and profoundly important truth of free will lies in its relationship to Arete, from which arises the value of Personal Responsibility: in pursuit of Arete, you are honor-bound to make the best choice you can make. You and only you—no matter what others may see or believe—are responsible for making the choice that furthers your pursuit of Arete. Once the choice is made, you remain responsible in this pursuit of Arete; if you succeed, your Arete is furthered by the success. If you fail, you pursue Arete by taking responsibility for both the decision and the failure to execute.
A strong sense of courage is required to accept the value of Personal Responsibility, because every choice includes the option to do nothing, as any leader knows. I embrace Personal Responsibility with a strong belief that, by pursuing Arete, I can accomplish any goal to which I set my mind.
This value is about finding peace in the moment.
For my purposes, Equanimity involves the acceptance that everything is perfect exactly as it is. This is closely related to Personal Responsibility and free will: the current moment is the ultimate conclusion to all of the decisions you’ve ever made. If you have made each decision with acknowledgement of free will and in pursuit of Arete, it follows that the current moment could not possibly be more perfect. This does not imply a surrender to circumstances or a disregard for the future; rather, it reinforces the values of Personal Responsibility and Arete: if things are not perfect, only you are responsible, and in order to take responsibility you must increase your focus on Arete.
This value implies the deepest knowledge of self, and the uncensored sharing of yourself with others.
Authenticity is the deepest personal foundation upon which Arete, Personal Responsibility, and Equanimity are built. You cannot know the goals of personal improvement, the ultimate consequences of your actions, or the feeling of peace until you know yourself.
Pragmatically, Authenticity requires you to observe your own thinking as an outsider, to know why you believe what you believe, to understand your own philosophy of life and how it influences your thinking. It is only through such introspection that you can achieve full control over your mind and direct it fully toward your life’s purpose. It is at this point that the pursuit of Arete, Personal Responsibility, and Equanimity becomes almost automatic. This is also the point at which it becomes automatic to be completely genuine with other people, to constantly reveal what you truly believe—because the sincerity and peace with which you reveal it are embedded in the belief.
This value dictates for whom I live. I live for myself.
Many people read this to mean that I'm selfish; I believe that observing my actions for any period of time will disprove this assumption.
Individuality does mean that I make choices based on what's best for me, not what's best for anyone else, no matter how close they are to me. However--and this topic would take thousands of words to explain adequately--this is not to say that I never voluntarily subjugate concern for myself to concern for others. In fact, believe it or not, I've been described as "generous."
I believe that, for human beings, individuality is not a choice. We are programmed to act in our own self-interest; it's what kept us on the planet long enough to get to the point we're at today.
Yes, the cave man may have endured extreme hardship to bring home the mastodon thigh, just as my father worked his ass off so that I could go to a good school; the point is, in these sorts of cases, the actor is making a voluntary sacrifice that is in his own long-term self-interest. The cave man got more satisfaction from seeing his wife and children fed and healthy than he would have gotten otherwise; the same logic applies to my father. And I contend that the same logic applied to Mother Theresa (if in fact she was as saintly as the media says), or to the fireman who runs into the burning house to save the baby. We all make deeply personal philosophical choices about what's important to us, and act accordingly. Selfish is a word that we use to make judgements--usually based on prevailing societal opinion--of the types of self-interested decisions some people choose to make. The father in Angela's Ashes was clearly selfish based on the collective judgement of virtually any society. But I would add that his behavior was also incongruent with Arete, Personal Responsibility, and Authenticity, and that's the basis of my judgement of such behavior.
I have no problem with the extremely self-sacrificial types who believe that it's every human's responsibility to subjugate himself to every other human; I just don't think they have a very clear understanding of human nature, or of human progress. Ultimately, if you choose to subjugate yourself to everyone else, you have presumably done so because it brings you more happiness to live for others than to live for yourself. You have made a decision based on what's best for you. You are an individualist.
If you are miserable subjugating yourself and still do it because you think it's right, you are still making a choice based on your own free will; you are still an individualist. The only way I can see for a person to not be an individualist--to not act in his own self-interest--is to be forced. Rejecting individualism is, I assert, impossible.
The "meta-values" stated above are rather abstract, and they imply quite a bit. When you get down to the nitty-gritty of living by the implications of your values, you will often find apparent conflict between two or more of them. For this reason, it helps to think through the practical implications of your high-level values, and to think about under what circumstances one might take precedence over another.
Here's a smattering of the more pragmatic values implied by my above abstract values, and some example precedence rationale:
This is the pragmatic manifestation of my purpose and all my meta-values. I believe every human has the right to pursue her own values, which may or may not be similar to mine. The only time I can suspend this belief is when, in the process of pursuing his values, someone attempts to interfere with my pursuit of my own values. In that case, my right to pursue my values trumps his right to interfere, and I am justified in taking action to restore my rights.
Honesty derives primarily from the values of Arete, Personal Responsibility, and Authenticity. I'm pretty hard core about honesty; I strive to never lie, to never even deceive, and to never omit or "spin" information for my own benefit. In my line of work, this is especially difficult.
Trumping honesty is difficult and dangerous, yet there are circumstances when other values will take precedence. The most famous example used by philosophers is the "Nazi at the door:" if you lived in Nazi Germany and a stormtrooper came to your door and asked you point blank if you were hiding a Jew--and you indeed were--would it be okay to lie? Most non-Kantians (and many Kantians) would answer "yes," and so would I.
My reasoning follows from "Respect for the Rights of Others:" I believe everyone should be free to pursue their own values, including values similar or identical to mine--whether they recognize this or not. If I handed over the Jew, the Nazi would terminate his free will.
Sincerity is the direct public manifestation of authenticity; if you are authentic, you must be sincere in your interactions with others. In fact, I would go so far as to say that being insincere is a form of deception, which means that the same precedence rules that apply to honesty apply to sincerity.
Patience follows directly from equanimity; if everything is perfect exactly as it is, what is there to fuss about? It also follows from Arete, in that I think impatience often interferes with excellence.
Patience is trumped most often by a combination of Arete, Personal Responsibility, and Individualism. If I have strong evidence that someone is going purposefully out of their way to impede my pursuit of Arete, or to make me appear responsible for something I'm not, or to force me to subjugate myself to someone else, I take this as sanction to lose my patience, if doing so would help to resolve the impedance of my values.
Ethics and values are hopelessly intertwined, and therefore the above goes a long way towards defining my ethics. I view values as being analogous to continents surrounded by the seas of ethics; they tell you a lot, but you can't get a picture of the whole planet without looking at both ethics and values.
An ethical system provides both a higher level of abstraction and a higher level of behavioral specificity, but is also much more complicated to define. Values give a good snapshot of the major components of an ethical system. I hope to write more on my ethics at some point, but until then this will have to do.
Admit it, you're broken hearted over that, aren't you?
Copyright © 2004 Vince Cavasin. All rights reserved.