Values and Virtues in Philosophy and Psychology

During the recent general election campaign in the UK, I received a flyer through my door from a local independent candidate who claimed to value, among other things, humanitarianism. He also wanted to repurpose the entirety of the UK’s foreign aid budget to fix potholes on Britain’s apparently neglected roads. To my mind, these two statements were inconsistent at best. How could someone at once value human life while also proposing to defund life-saving support for people who need it? Confused, I wondered if the candidate was just saying that he valued humanitarianism because it sounds good, if he had a peculiar conception of humanitarianism that prioritises the needs of motorists over people facing famine, or if he really did value humanitarianism but thought that fixing potholes would be a vote-winner? None of these potential explanations painted the candidate in a favourable light, so I didn’t vote for him.

One thing the candidate’s flyer highlighted was the way in which we expect consistency between individuals’ proclaimed values and their actions (or proposed actions), and how we see each as expressive of their characters. In my current research project – reviewing philosophical and psychological approaches to values and virtues – this thought takes on a particular salience and raises several questions. This is because we tend to think of virtuous people as having the right kind of values, which they skilfully and reliably manifest through their everyday actions, and whose characters we admire accordingly. But what kind of things should the virtuous value? How are those values themselves shaped by virtues, and which ones? What are values, anyway, and how can we identify and measure them?

For Aristotle, and neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists, eudaimonia (human ‘flourishing’ or ‘happiness’) is the central value around which virtue is organised. Importantly, the relationship is not one in which the virtues should be seen as only instrumentally valuable for achieving this end – but that eudaimonia is itself constituted by virtue. Different virtue ethicists appeal to different values. Michael Slote (2001, 2013), for instance, suggests that the virtues are organised around the central values of universal benevolence and caring. Linda Zagzebski (1996) argues that the intellectual virtues should be understood as finding their motivational grounding in the central epistemic values of wisdom and understanding. And Christine Swanton (2003) claims that there are as many relevant values as there are virtues when it comes to responding to the world in virtuous ways.

In psychology, while work on values has a long history – with Milton Rokeach (1973) paving the way for the contemporary and dominant theory of basic human values from Shalom Schwartz (1992; et al., 2012) – the virtues have until recently had much less attention. This has changed somewhat since the turn of the century, with notable contributions like Blaine Fowers’ (2005) Virtue and Psychology, and Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman’s (2004) ambitious classification of character strengths and virtues. But while there now appears to be more engagement with the virtues in psychology – especially apparent in the proliferation of work in positive psychology – there remains a gap in understanding regarding how these traits relate to values.

Regarding the possibility of integrating philosophical and psychological approaches to values and virtues, there is some cause for pessimism. As Kristján Kristjánsson (2018) (and others) have noted, the general reluctance amongst psychologists to engage beyond the ‘fact’ of the fact-value distinction is a common stumbling block, whereas matters of value are, of course, the natural domain for many philosophers. Although endorsement of value-neutrality is ubiquitous in psychology, that this itself expresses a kind of valuing is rarely acknowledged, while the admiration (and thus evaluation) of certain personality traits persists, often implicitly. Whereas virtue ethicists will commonly draw upon specific values (like those listed above) to ground their theories of virtue, psychologists tend to think that ‘value is in the eye of the beholder, not in the object of perception’ (Schwartz 2016: 63). This subjectivism might be accommodated by certain philosophical projects – like Valerie Tiberius’ (2018) work on well-being as value-fulfilment – but it appears incompatible with virtue ethical theories grounded on values taken to be valuable no matter by whom.

An alternative way of characterising this tension is to distinguish between the kinds of questions that practitioners in each discipline are, or traditionally have been, asking. Whereas psychologists have tended to ask, ‘what values do people have?’, philosophers err towards ‘what is value?’ or ‘what is (or are) the fundamental source (or sources) of value?’. To an extent these questions are conceptually distinct and can be pursued separately. We need not suggest a general theory of value or values to ask what people value – we can just work from an (albeit conceptually thin) understanding of value that is in line with our common usage. Moreover, philosophers can insist that what people value need not relate to what is of value. People of course value all sorts of things that are plausibly without ultimate value (racial purity or extreme personal wealth, for example). Treating these as separate but theoretically useful research topics rather than struggling towards an account of human values that coheres with a robust theory of virtue might be the best way forward.

One further significant question to contend with is the conceptual relevance of values to the virtues. While there are suggestions of an analysis here within the existing literature, there appears to be much more work to be done. Fowers (2005) proposes that the virtues are essential for the full realisation (or actualisation) of our values – a view also implied by the name of the Values in Action Institute (set up to support Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) project). Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso (2017) details the many possible ways in which intellectual humility may be related to ‘prosocial’ values like altruism, benevolence, and universalism. More generally, the view that individuals’ virtues express their values is prominent and often presupposed – with Jennifer Cole Wright, Michael Warren, and Nancy Snow’s (2021) rich interdisciplinary work giving perhaps the most philosophically rigorous and empirically engaged account of how values provide the motivational foundations for the development of virtue. Robin Dillon, on the other hand, claims that the vice of arrogance ‘perverts our ability to value’ (2007: 102), suggesting a more dynamic relationship between our virtues and vices and our practices of valuing (with the implication that, on one interpretation, virtues like humility may foster our ability to value).

While there are many theoretical possibilities and some likely impasses, answers to many questions may only be validated through engaged psychological study. The first priority might therefore consist in agreeing effective methods for identifying and measuring virtues and values. In contemporary analytic philosophy, conceptual clarity and precision is perhaps the greatest value, whereas psychologists must be more pragmatic, valuing theoretical constructs that can be effectively ‘operationalised’ in necessarily resource-limited empirical studies. It seems, then, that mutually satisfactory progress towards understandings of how values and virtues combine to create character will depend upon the considered appreciation of these two values amongst philosophers and psychologists in their future work. Only through such efforts might we hope to understand the confusing psychologies of election candidates, among others.

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

References

Cole Wright, J., Warren, M. T., & Snow, N. E. (2021). Understanding Virtue: Theory and Measurement. Oxford University Press.

Dillon, R. S. (2007). Arrogance, Self-Respect and Personhood. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(5–6), 101–126.

Fowers, B. J. (2005). Virtue and Psychology: Pursuing Excellence in Ordinary Practices. American Psychological Association.

Kristjánsson, K. (2018). Virtue from the Perspective of Psychology. In N. E. Snow (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue. Oxford University Press.

Krumrei-Mancuso, E. J. (2017). Intellectual humility and prosocial values: Direct and mediated effects. Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1167938

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.

Rokeach, M. (1973). The Nature of Human Values. Free Press.

Shalom H. Schwartz. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65.

—– (2016). Basic individual values: Sources and consequences. In T. Brosch & D. Sander (Eds.), Handbook of Value: Perspectives from Economics, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., Ramos, A., Verkasalo, M., Lönnqvist, J. E., Demirutku, K., Dirilen-Gumus, O., & Konty, M. (2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 663–688. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029393

Slote, M. (2001). Morals from Motives. Oxford University Press.

—– (2013). Education and Human Values: Reconciling Talent with an Ethics of Care. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203116555

Swanton, C. (2003). Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199253889.001.0001

Tiberius, V. (2018). Well-Being as Value Fulfilment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well. Oxford University Press.

Zagzebski, L. T. (1996). Virtues of the Mind. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139174763