At the time you must chose, which one is prevailing?

Truth or compassion?

Friendship or Justice?
 
Beauty or usefulness?

Freedom or Equality?

Solidarity or Prudence?

It is easy to choose between good and bad; the difficulty is to choose between bad and bad or good and good. The hard part is to judge the degrees of each and how they fit together.

The trouble with positive moral values is that they are not ends in themselves and not alone to rule the world.

The high moral values are - like work and science - only tools, instruments, servants of the final value - GOOD itself - which is essentially Human flourishing in the pursuit of happiness.

This truth, that most high values are only means is often forgotten by the zealots of one or other ideal. The moral values are good because and only as long as they serve humanity's well-being and survival. They are means not ends. As high and sacred as they are they are, they remain good as long as they are pursued in harmony and good sense. Good as long as each of them leave place to the other good values. Such concord is not easy.
 
Worse, values are not created equal, there is no impartial measure of numbers to compare their merit* and they have no privilege to measure each other. They are relative to each other but poor judges of each other: the case in point is that you cannot judge all the other values by how true or precise or profitable they are; or you cannot judge truth on how beautiful, or generous or just it is. In fact, truth cannot claim moral merit beyond itself. The pairs I proposed as examples are all in possible conflict. To avoid turning inhuman, our value judgements require character and intelligence - and, above all, wise moderation - not just exclusive loyalty to abstract codes.

Most of us people, even the vilest, will swiftly agree with most of the labels naming high values of humankind: life, freedom, happiness, truth, respect, justice, equality, prudence, compassion, courage, modesty, patience, moderation, harmony, industry, competence and so on. Who does not want a happy and meaningful life, those ultimate values of humanity? This could open, as it seems, a generous way towards global  harmony and peace, a rule for the solution of all conflicts.

​However, ask people which value is the most important and prevailing in order to make life happy and meaningful (not to speak about how they define what those words mean); you will suddenly find in the pattern of ranking the striking differences that tell fascists apart from communists and religious fanatics from tolerant free thinkers; or, why not, tolerant believers and fanatic free thinkers [1]. In good faith, each live in their own edifice of unquestionable values, so obvious and universal, the sole one possible, that debate is impossible, a dialogue of the deaf. Values are too deep in the chest to discuss.

Bad people have no problem with good values. Irreconcilably opposite world views and politics are made from the same handful of noble building-blocks representing ideals of the most desirable, of human duty and virtue. It is the hierarchy and the weight of each that differs; and also to what or whom we believe that they apply, where and when.
​
The selfsame values change their bonds and consequences depending on how we rate their order of importance and how far we go in applying them. The noblest value turns base and evil when exaggerated astray from good sense.

​                                                                              *
Arguably, the difference between sages and fools is also a matter of good sense in judging the priority of values in a real-life context.

Did you ever find time to explore your backbone of values?

To pull your own constellation of values within awareness - in front of your mind, not behind it as a puppet-master -  and  to size up your orders of priority - in general but also relative to the often incongruous seasons in which you live - careful reflection is well worth. Simply because you may want to be a free person, not a puppet or a weathercock.

Alas, in our busy everyday life the changeless virtue of values passes so unquestioned by the persons and groups professing them in good faith, that our common sense keeps unaware and we take them for granted.

​We do not see or examine our edifice of values because we see everything through them, as if they were our eyeglasses. Your "obvious" layout governs nevertheless, like a compass shielded from critical sense, like a shiny mirror reflecting everything but itself, who you are, what you value and respect and what you seek in life. Nonetheless what you detest, hate or ignore with indifference. Your value-formula determines what good life is for you and what kind of wisdom fits you. That in turn gives shape to your possible choices and sizes your moral freedom.

Not considering the existence of a plurality of ways in which values are shaped and structured hierarchically in individuals is, I find, one of the main blindnesses making people unable to even understand their differences, not to speak about discussing them with mutual respect. This makes life so much harder to live.

Your values drive you; if you are not aware of their thrust, they drive you from the dark. You interpret everything - inevitably - in their selective light. Bring them to awareness and examine their articulation, so that you become the rider, not the horse. Moral values are supposed to be rational; therefore you do have the means and a right - in your head - to weigh them fairly but freely,  to chose your own justified preferences.

                                                                               *

To start this work of clarification you cannot avoid understanding that values are not something otherworldly, nor intangible; they are standards of an encounter, a face-to-face of who you are with the World, with people and with circumstances, sometimes beyond your control. Your values acquired from your education and your experiences, become practical in what you do or abstain to do. Values are not nailed in some spiritual realm, nor in lip service and political correctness. I would go further, to say that many values become existent only because and to the extent we practice them and thus bring them into our world.

We tend to forget that values are man-made axioms of civilisation, agreed as beneficial for each of us and for us all to fit together. To share a sphere of  core values (an axiology) is to justify peace and recognise humanity to each other. In the succession of Cultures such shared spheres of values are historically changing, seemingly improving but stable and reliable in each culture; we share them because we need them, we instituted them as sacred, warrants of social harmony established by well grounded tradition, but there is nothing God-given about them, if you ask me [1a].

Some post-modern thinkers (whom I see as responsible in part for discouraging moral relativism, for promoting anomia and the dissolution of Western civilisation) draw from the plurality of value systems and from their human, historically evolving origin a loser's conclusion that everything is relative, that whatever comes is justified for somebody, sometimes or from some point of view.  This is false and spineless nihilism, compare it with one telling you to throw away your walking cane because there are many kinds of cane and some people do not need walking sticks anyway. It is not true that anything goes.

We do not live in general, in History, we live here and now, in our time, our country, our culture, our biography. We do need these artefacts to be sacred and stable, our norms conquered their social reliability through long tradition, because they serve and protect us. Our hierarchies of values make our human world predictable. They make human action mutually understandable and concerted. After having tested and civilised them for millennia, we have a right to our customary values; visitors - and even theorists studying them - have a duty to respect them. As long as they give meaning and harmony to our life and societies, we have a right to refer to them and to act in their name. Human values make us human. They give us rights.

It becomes however justified to re-examine values and challenge them when they are used to oppress and to cheat. When values offer pretext for hate, rejection and violence it is time to remember that they are man-made and therefore they may need to be argued and justified anew. For the sake of being free, when people wield  "universal" values at you as self-evident, higher and more important than Man, keep Nietzsche's hammer at hand [2] or at least in your mind, to gently tap on each such value and to judge the sound. Depending on the place where they are hung, some of those bells are noble sounds but some may give an empty ding of hypocrisy. Or of utopian delusion turned feral.
 
My call here is not theory, it is a recipe of personal freedom: your own chime, your arrangement of espoused values chants who you are and what you can. Master it. As long as you respect people who differ and they respect you, this is a right.

___________________________________________________
Notes:

* The precise word for this is "incommensurable".

[1] See the work of Milton Rokeach ex: "The Nature of Human Values" 1973

[1a] To put the science of values (axiology) in simple words read this:

"Pre-industrial societies thought and lived secure in the belief that their collective
axiological projects had been passed down to them by their sacred ancestors or the
gods.
In the first wave of industrialisation, societies were convinced that they received
their collective axiological projects from the very nature of things or the inevitable
course of history, through philosophy and the sciences.
In modern industrial knowledge societies, we now know and live in the knowledge that we do not receive anything from anyone. Rather, we must construct it ourselves."

Corbí, Marià, Principles of an Epistemology of Values, The permutation of collective cohesion and motivation, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016   p.V

[2]Friederich Nietzsche, "Twiligt of the Idols" and "Beyond Good and Evil"

 On this plate sent by NASA on a Pioneer mission to civilizations whom it may concern, the receiver, can see (if it is endowed with optic recognition) the proportion of two beings.

For our human eyes those shapes are two white people, man and woman, naked (probably because they are inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian man), but decent.  

One, rises a quinary limb in what looks to me, here on Earth, as a Red Indian salute of peace, a “Stop here!” warning, or a traditional moutza Greek insult. The human shape is proportioned to all the rest; or is all the rest, atom to Universe related to it? Are we sizing the Universe?


Which makes me reflect to the maxim by Protagoras of Abdera, the disparaged philosopher: 

"Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, how they are, and of things which are not, how they are not" [1] he said, which piqued Plato to ridicule him because Plato believed that eternal ideas, not Man, are the reliable reference [2].       

                                                                              *

This saying is for me a metaphor we live by, of us being the unavoidable means and valuers of knowing; for knowing is done by knowers and nothing else. We understand the World in the manner we interact with it, by our own proportion, from our point of view, inevitably in our human terms and representations.

Why be so defensive against this maxim? You do not want people to believe a metaphor, it is meant to be understood not believed. It is the spoon, not the soup. It is the finger that points, not the moon. Metaphors do not explain, they help to make sense in our mind. They offer a vivid representation for our conscious sense to grasp, to move, to give shape and familiar concreteness, to let our imagination compare. In this case, we are the spoon, we are the finger, while the Universe is imperturbably as it is. Philosophers pleased however to see the "man-measure statement" as the universal root of moral relativism or of unscientific ignorance; I believe that Protagoras simply refers to a legitimate point of view, which does not deny universal reality but cares for what it means to us...

“Man is the measure of all things...” indicates that, for us, in our life-space which is definitely a reality for us, things count to us as much as they relate to us, in interaction with us; they represent to us, compellingly, what they are at human scale and what they make to us and we can make to them, not in general, nor in themselves.

The thing in itself is indifferent to the person as infinity is not our house. If the human looks at infinity from his own point of view he sees immensity, something inconceivable; infinity does not see anything looking at the human, because it does not look - man is an insignificant speck of dust in the blind eye of the Universe; if human looks at himself from the eyeless point of view of infinity, he sees nothing of human interest.                                                 

                                                                                *

When you seek wisdom - the way to one of the choices of a good life - most advanced knowledge and technology, giant discovery for Humanity, are still a small step for each single Man; the intelligent individual’s legitimate question is what use, what meaning it gives to our life, what worth it has. I oppose this wise quest to the self-defeating fascination of Big History immensity and to the view from nowhere [2.1] which disenchants us humans and leaves our lives meaningless. Our humanity-serving question is what understanding we gain to live happier and fulfilled, how not to be dissolved and reduced into a lifeless Universe.  

For wisdom is a humble choice; of looking at us and the world - with taking some distance - and then, interpreting each encounter steadily from the point of view of what it is to us as persons, of what makes sense to us, of what value it has for life, for our life: How does it concern us, people? Is it good for me or bad for me? Do I like it? Is it beautiful, good, just, life-upholding? Does it add to my civilisation, to my spiritual life? What can I do about it? What is it for us - to judge, to decide, to do, to beware? From where do we come, who are we, where do we go?...

Such purposeful Homo Sapiens bias makes knowledge human, ours, understood beyond parroted grand explanations. The rest, so necessary, so undeniably true, so powerful - facts, data, experiments, detached explanation of things “in themselves” grand laws, algorithms, theories, perfect skeletons of dried-out thought  - is ascetic science and disinterested reason trying not to be human, craving to free itself from being human; that is, truth for a world without us. That knowledge for the sake of itself, independent of us, its capital discoveries and its planet-changing technological conquests, require therefore constant vigilance and harnessing to join back our best interest.

                                                                                   * 

Let us be clear, humane wisdom is not opposed to science; it is its necessary complement (even as science does not know yet how to define wisdom and how to enrich it). It would be of course absurd to say that wisdom is better than science. The vocation of wisdom is not to diminish our trustful respect for scientific progress, our learning from sensible knowledge; it is rather to grant that science still serves us, instead of us worshipping science.

We humans aim to know things as they are and also to judge what they mean to us, not to the infinite Universe, nor for the sake of Ultimate Truth: grasping what the known is worth to us, how it links back to our needs and values and action. This entails exerting the humble but ultimate human interest of living a good, flourishing life.

Wherever science prevailed, wisdom ads worth to it as it interprets science in human terms, accountable to society.

Information, data, knowledge grow into understanding, servants to the conscious human person, the one who feels, says “I” knowingly, judges and chooses. By the means of science - our tool and servant - the world as it is becomes for us a charted ocean in which we can navigate aware of what we do and where we go. I would add that in spite of universal change being ruled by necessary causes we can still change the course of change - in what concerns us.

Where science still fears to rush in, repelled by imprecision, flow, subjectivity and lack of "proper logic" (which enumeration describes fairly the human world), wise judgement navigates alone, subtle, intuitive, risky but life-saving. The wise examine consequences of what we understood, know, intend, meet and do for the earthly life of persons. They care a lot for what we do not know or do not understand. Charting the unknown is part of knowing. They seek the ways to navigate that great ocean or if you prefer, to explore the maze of the given, to chose, steer course and improve and complete an earthly reality we live, instead of just bearing it. 

                                                                                  *  

A wise one works to turn the world mind size, simple enough and friendly for us; fools make it too complicated to cope with; or too abstract, metallic and alien, too non-human for us to survive.  

Be on your guard though to the power and dangers of making things wise by making them simple with our metaphors. “Science without conscience"[3] is a cold beast; but let us add with prudence: wisdom unverified is of a blind seer.

                                                                                           © Ioan Tenner 2011-2019

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 [1] in Sextus Empiricus  (Adversus Mathematicos,  7.60) (Diels Kranz 80 b1): 
“Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that [or "how"] they are, and of things that are not, that [or "how"] they are not.”

Alternative quotes:

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.216; Diogenes Laertius  9.51.

About what the mysterious phrase may initially mean, it is useful to read Ugo Zilioli, Protagoras and the Challenge of Relativism: Plato’s Subtlest Enemy, Ashgate, Burlington, 2007  

Hannah Arendt goes even deeper in restoring what Protagoras actually said:
""man is the measure of all use things (chremata) [my underlining], of the existence of those that are, and of the non-existence of those that are not." in:
Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, 2nd ed The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998, p 157
Reading her interpretation I realise that the "being the measure" of Protagoras was about all things made (and maybe looked at) for the use of Homo Faber, in the life-space created by humans. It is common sense that what is made by humans and also what is made for humans to understand shall be of human proportions. This reminds me the ingenious idea of Giambattista Vico that we humans can only know the human made world, including our knowledge, the other, "natural" one being only understandable by God, the one who created it.

[2] Plato turned Protagoras into a straw-man for his extravagant contrary belief that absolute and eternal ideas (finally, God) are the measure (the norm) of all things; later philosophers thought that nay, Reason, not God is the measure and judge; nowadays, triumphant Science knows for certain that Matter is the substance to be measured, the Universe – in which we are nothing – the measurer, and quantity - dimensions, weight, duration, numbers is the only measure which proves being to be real.
 
[2.1]​ A must read about the point of view from nowhere remains Nagel, Thomas - The View From Nowhere, Oxford University Press, USA (1986), which goes deep into the analysis of the absurd but inevitable tension between taking objective distance to see things from outside - from nowhere, independent of us, the knowers - and subjectively - from inside, at the same time, as we, living conscious beings, are the only possible knowers that be.

[3] Rabelais: "..science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme... Œuvres de François Rabelais, Tome troisième, Pantagruel, Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion, Paris, 1922, ch III, p.109 

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PS: This outline was reviewed in 2012 and 2013, based on my discussions with Daniel Tenner.