VALUES BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL: AN APPLIED INQUIRY
Ioan Tenner — Working Draft Incorporating Editorial Critique
3 October 2026

When I spoke the words into the recorder—“Values between good and evil, a wide axiology of valuation, showing what makes people tick”—I used an old, familiar phrase. We say “what makes people tick” without thinking twice, as if the human heart were a pocket watch with springs and escapements, or a machine waiting for an engineer to turn the key.

Deep’s critique was frank and necessary: if we want to understand human valuation, we must discard the clockwork. A machine does not value; it only functions. Algorithms, behavioral steerers, and predictive digital tools want us to believe people are clockwork mechanisms because clockwork can be measured, predicted, and nudged. But a human being does not merely “tick.” A human being chooses, stumbles, bears wounds, fears loss, and tries, often clumsily, to protect what is loved. Valuation is not an escapement gear; it is an intentional, vulnerable act of living meaning.

As an incorrigible agnostic and practical relativist, I do not look at human values from the dizzying height of an absolute moral system. Nor do I flee with Nietzsche beyond good and evil into the cold pride of pure power. Human life is lived stubbornly between them.

“Between” does not mean a tepid, indifferent compromise where nothing matters. It means the exposed, practical ground of daily life, where we must act without the luxury of omniscience. In textbooks, values sit in neat ladders: truth, beauty, loyalty, justice. But in the mud of experience, values do not line up in an orderly catalog. They collide.

It is easy to choose between obvious good and obvious bad; any child can do that. The real agony of valuation begins when good clashes with good:
• When loyalty to an old friend collides with speaking an uncomfortable truth.
• When the desire for freedom endangers the security of those who depend on us.
• When compassion demands that we soften a rule that justice insisted on maintaining.

When these values tear at each other, we do not consult an algebraic formula. We act from our loves and our fears—from what we are terrified of losing, and what we are ashamed to betray. And whichever way we turn, something precious is compromised. A genuine moral residue remains.

A wide axiology of valuation cannot be an inventory of virtues for saints, nor a behavioral manual for manipulators. It must be an honest, earthly account of how fragile human beings navigate the distance between good and evil: judging degrees, bearing costs, and learning how to live together when no simple answer is given.

— Ioan Tenner (with editorial development by Deep)