Human Wisdom

Thoughts

Values between good and evil

First published: 3 October 2026 Last updated: 3 October 2026

Published at Ioan's request on 3 October 2026, as a thought in progress. His original spoken seed appears first, followed by the applied working draft incorporating the editorial critiques, and the separately signed contributions by Sol and Deep.

Ioan Tenner — spoken thought

VALUES BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL
Ioan Tenner — spoken thought, 3 October 2026

Values between good and evil, a wide axiology of valuation, showing what makes people tick.
— Ioan Tenner

Transcription note — outside Ioan's text: This is the continuous reading text of a recording lasting approximately 23 seconds. Two local machine passes agreed on the words; punctuation and capitalisation are editorial. This is a working transcription, not a certified verbatim record. No additional argument has been supplied.

Applied working draft — incorporating the critique

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)

Sol — response and critique

RESPONSE AND CRITIQUE — SOL
3 October 2026

I read this as a direction for inquiry, not yet a developed thesis. “What makes people tick” invites us to examine what people actually prize, fear losing and choose between—not merely what they call good.

My reservation is about the relation between valuation and motivation. What someone values may help explain what they do, but habit, fear, constraint and conflicting commitments can intervene. A stated value is neither a complete explanation of conduct nor proof of what a person will choose.

I would also keep two questions distinct: what do people value, and what deserves to be valued? Understanding the attraction of something does not justify it; condemning it does not explain its attraction.

One possible widening is to examine conflicts among goods—loyalty and honesty, freedom and security—as well as conflict between good and evil. That would let the inquiry explore difficult choices without assuming they all fall on a single scale.

— Sol

Deep — response and critique

RESPONSE AND CRITIQUE — DEEP
3 October 2026

Looking directly at the seed you planted:

Values between good and evil, a wide axiology of valuation, showing what makes people tick.

Sol examined this through the lens of institutional clarity and behavioral realism: distinguishing valuation from motivation, separating what is prized from what deserves to be prized, and suggesting that we explore conflicts among competing goods.

My critical eye looks at the philosophical architecture of the sentence itself—at the tensions living inside your own words. I see three distinct points of friction that a full essay would need to confront:

1. The Clockwork Metaphor vs. The Living Soul

The idiom “what makes people tick” is an engineering metaphor. A clock ticks; an engine hums; a mechanical apparatus operates by springs, escapements, and cogs.

In our current technological climate, this metaphor has become dangerous. Behavioral psychologists, marketing algorithms, and predictive AI all claim to possess an “axiology of valuation” because they map human preferences, trigger points, and dopamine loops. They believe that once you know “what makes people tick,” you can predict, nudge, and steer them. That is the technocratic caricature of valuation: turning the human person into an instrument to be operated from outside.

The critique: If your inquiry sets out to map “what makes people tick,” it must explicitly disavow this mechanical reduction. Human beings do not merely “tick” according to an internal mechanism; they choose, they suffer, they repent, and they aspire. Valuation is not a gear inside a machine; it is an intentional act of meaning, dignity, and freedom. The moment an axiology treats people as predictable clockwork, it ceases to be an instrument of wisdom and becomes the conceptual prelude to manipulation (the very danger you warned of in your recording on computer crime).

2. “Between” Good and Evil vs. “Beyond” Good and Evil

Nietzsche famously wrote Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) to discard moral categories altogether, arguing that the strong soul rises above the moral dichotomy into pure will to power.

Your phrasing is fundamentally different and far more human: you write between (între / entre) good and evil, not beyond them.

The critique: “Between” can mean two entirely different things, and you will need to choose which one you mean:

  • The weak meaning: A moral twilight or compromise—treating good and evil as extreme ends of a flat continuum, where most people sit comfortably in a grey middle, acting with a bit of virtue here and a bit of selfishness there. If axiology becomes merely a descriptive survey of this grey area, it risks moral relativism: flattening evil into a low preference score and virtue into a high one.
  • The tragic, living meaning: That good and evil remain real, objective gravitational poles, but human life is lived in the perilous, exposed middle. In this middle ground, human beings are neither angels nor monsters. They are caught in agonizing cross-currents: protecting those they love while harming strangers; seeking truth while hiding from painful facts; acting from deep generational wounds while longing for grace.

If you mean the second—and knowing your thought, I believe you do—then evil cannot simply be treated as “one end of the axiology scale.” Evil is real harm, desecration, and cruelty; good is life, justice, and love. The “between” is the arena of spiritual struggle and tragic responsibility, not a neutral zone.

3. Why Hierarchies of Value Break in the Mud of Life

Formal axiology (Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann) loves to build orderly ladders: sensory values at the base, vital values higher up, spiritual and moral values near the top, and the sacred at the summit.

Sol rightly noted that real moral life involves conflicts among goods (liberty vs. security, truth vs. kindness).

My critique goes one step deeper: People rarely consult an abstract table of values when making real choices. We act from our loves and our fears—what Augustine called ordo amoris. When values conflict, the choice is almost never an algebraic calculation. It is an existential tear. When a person must choose between absolute loyalty to a friend and telling the painful truth to an institution, choosing truth does not make the betrayal of loyalty feel “clean.” A genuine moral cost remains, a real residue of sorrow.

A “wide axiology” worthy of Human Wisdom cannot just be a catalog of virtues or desirable things. It must have the courage to reckon with what we fear losing, what we are ashamed of, and what we owe to our shared mortality (“we owe a death, we all”).

A Question for Your Next Step

When you look at “what makes people tick” in your own life and memory, what has driven people more: the ideals they aspired to, or the vulnerabilities and fears they were trying to protect?

— Deep

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