I want to argue that in one way we do and in another way we do not create or invent values. And I want to emphasise that when I use the word we, I refer to us humans (as opposed to other animals of which we have knowledge) because we are — and must never forget that we are — uniquely bright among animals, but share with the rest of animals a great number of characteristics, not least the characteristic of being alive and being possessed of brains.
Another explanatory thing that I ought to put in first: a value in its most fundamental sense is that which has a value placed on it by a creature who is capable of moving about — i.e. of seeking things that it wants or needs and of seeking to avoid things that threaten it or endanger it or otherwise displease it. We have to remember that in this sense a value is something that is either sought or avoided, something that has a meaning or significance to a creature for either good or ill. But in common parlance, to value something is usually thought to mean to value it highly, as something good and something to be sought after. I think that this common use is slightly misleading, but as my argument goes on I shall undoubtedly slip into using value in this sense of thinking that something is good, to be sought after rather than avoided. But to start off with I will talk about things 'valued' as things perceived by an animal as either good or bad, to be sought or avoided.
It is fairly well agreed among neuro-physiologists that within all animal brains there exist broadly two types of nervous system, both organisations of neurons, differently organised. There is first the brain stem together with its limbic system concerned with appetite, sexual behaviour, defensive behaviour patterns, etc., and that is a value system in the sense that it adapts to some things that are good for the animal and adapts to other things that are bad for the animal and it is connected with many bodily organs, so that it regulates heart and respiratory rate, sweating, digestive functions, as well as bodily cycles related to sleep and sex. These systems have been selected during the course of the evolution of the animal to match the body of the animal, not to match signals from outside. These are systems of the interior, and when the brain stem system dies, the animal is in most cultures deemed dead.
The second major nervous system organisation is called the thalamocortical system and these systems are situated in the mid-brain and they've evolved so as to receive signals from sensory receptors — i.e. from the outside world — and to give signals to voluntary muscles.
These systems evolved later than the brain stem system, and with various connected parts of the brain they have increasingly elaborate and swift motor reaction in the animals as well as the memory and categorisation of input from the world outside. The two systems are linked in that the categorisations and interpretations dealt with by the second are employed against a background of the very slow changing basic valuations embedded in the brain stem system.
So it would be true to say that all the learning of which animals with a cortical system highly developed, such as rats, all the learning that animals go in for, all that they perceive, all the categories with which they categorise the world are done according to a value system adapted over time to their own bodies. In behavioural terms we can observe how a rat learns — i.e. remembers — his way through a maze by categorising his perceptual experiences so that he can locate and relocate the paths through the maze to the food placed in the centre, which of course he values highly. Again, he can remember how to avoid the electric plates put in his way which cause mild shocks if he touches them, which he disvalues (or in human terms hates). The rat is conscious, capable of remembering, and has very pronounced likes and dislikes.
From these shared beginnings — and you realise that I have described them very crudely — humans have, over time, developed what we may call 'higher consciousness', an ability to think of themselves as themselves, an ability not only to remember but to recognise that they are remembering. So a notion of the past and the future, and above all an ability (to use the old-fashioned term) to abstract develops. John Locke, in the seventeenth century, said 'brutes abstract not' and this is still the mark — or one of them — of the difference between human and other animals (although some very bright chimpanzees may be thought to come quite near it).
I don't suppose that anything entirely new needs to be postulated in the human brain in order for higher consciousness to develop over Darwinian time. It is rather that the complexity of the nervous system has gradually increased, so that not only can humans make maps of their experiences (as rats can), but they can also make second order maps — maps of the maps that they have and use.
But the real reason why humans and not other animals, not even the brightest chimps, are able to form abstract and general ideas is that they are able to invent a symbolic way of referring and re-referring to these ideas. This enables them to mark the categorising that they do by the use of these ideas so that they can refer to them again: namely, they are able to use a language. At the same time that they developed this ability to symbolise and use a language, they developed physiologically so as to be able to articulate these symbols and repeatable and complex signs that they can remember and make in the same way again through the development of the supralaryngal tract made possible by the fact that they adopt, unlike other animals, an upright posture.
At this stage of development humans, already having values like other animals (i.e. things they like and dislike, want to pursue or to avoid), for the first time were able to take note of these values, to elaborate them as abstract ideas — the nice and the nasty, the desirable and the undesirable — and so gradually the notion of an idea would become intelligible: something that as an abstract and unrealised value could nevertheless be sought after and for which sacrifices could be made, i.e. lesser goods could be postponed, or evils be endured, for the sake of a greater and perhaps far distant good. So far everything I have said has been concerned with value in general — the nice and the nasty, the safe and the threatening, the exciting and the boring — concepts (if only they had the words!) that are probably common to all animals. But the question we are supposed to be discussing today is whether or not values are created, and it is to be presumed that the values we are most interested in must be predominantly moral values, though perhaps not exclusively so. I want to turn to these in a moment, but before I do so I should like you to bear in mind the background of valuing things in general that I have tried to sketch in. I want to ask you to keep before you the picture of humans and other animals, all of them capable of movement and therefore engaging, if not in what Aristotle called proairesis or rational choice, then at least in what he called orexis, a reaching out for that which they want and an avoidance of that which they don't want.
Morality, the articulation of moral values, like the articulation of aesthetic values depends entirely upon the ability to form general concepts and to use language which is essentially generalising. That's why if we want our children to become familiar with and internalise moral values we have to teach them as we teach language. This is also why animals other than humans must necessarily be excluded from the class of moral agents — much as we may be tempted to praise or blame our particular friends among animals in moral terms. Of course these friends of ours among animals may display virtues, even virtues like courage or loyalty, but when we ascribe these virtues to them as moral virtues we're not doing so in the same sense as that in which we ascribe them to humans. We are guilty of anthropomorphism if we do so. So in asking whether we create moral values we are asking the question which for centuries has pre-occupied philosophers, namely: what was the origin of morality? or a slightly different and perhaps more misleading and ambiguous question: what are its foundations?
For various reasons, although this question was central for moral philosophers from Plato onwards, it fell into disrepute over the past 30 or 40 years. But it is just now coming back as a respectable question to ask, and we must not succumb to any lurking fear that in attempting to answer it we may be guilty of some logical indiscretion.
There is still a tendency, not only among moral philosophers but among a wider group of people of a broadly liberal kind, to suggest that it would be a mistake to postulate some set of value-judgements applicable universally, valid for everyone, and so people feel ashamed of talking of some universal morality. This shame I think is a mixture of the old fashioned positivist view that only statements of fact can be asserted with certainty, and the somewhat less old view that judgements of value should be written off as expressions of feelings and no more. In addition there is the widespread belief of a basically amiable kind that in a multi-cultural society (as we are frequently told we are) no-one should assert a moral proposition without hedging it about with reflections about where he is coming from in asserting it and which group he represents. The outcome tends to be a clash between those who hold that values are and must be commands from God to his people (but which commands will of course depend on whether you are a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian — and in general the Muslim God seems a bit more lavish with his commands than the rest) and on the other hand those who feel that values are at best the outcome of a particular cultural standpoint and should be treated like anthropological specimens, to be observed but not wholeheartedly adopted.
Contributing to the second part of this dichotomy, the anthropological alternative if you can call it that, is a much wider epistemological relativism of a generally postmodernist nature deriving largely from Derrida and others who argue that getting things right, whether in matters of fact or matters of value, is a concept that is intrinsically flawed. The image of what we say or believe being a mirror of the way things are, the notion of truth to the facts, let alone truth to the fact of good and evil, is, they think, untenable. Everything depends on the point of view you adopt and there is no one single proper point of view. There is your truth and my truth, there is a masculine truth and there is a feminine version of truth, whether this is of history or science, and both are equally, in their way, valid. Value systems are incorporated into all the stories we can tell and all are equally non-final. Such views as these, often dressed up in the most florid rhetoric, seem to try to substitute some vague feel-good factor for truth. You accept that which makes you feel OK and thus you undermine not only education and research, but also ordinary conversational conventions about truth and accuracy. They certainly undermine any suggestion that there is a set of values which, even within one society, might be broadly agreed and shared.
It is my contention that without some such set of values there cannot be any hope for either greater understanding or greater harmony within society. For my part, I find it very difficult to whip up any interest in the idea of a value, whether epistemological or moral or aesthetic, about which one doesn't have, in the words of the philosopher Kant, "the expectation, the hope of agreement". If I tell you that something is of incomparable beauty and lead you to see it I hope and expect that what I say will be to some extent persuasive in that you too will see in it that which I see in it. I'm not denying the reality of the multi-cultural society.
I deny that its existence entails an absolute irrevocable relativism in the matter of what we do and should prefer.
Neither do I deny that the concept of truth is ambiguous and certainly truth need not mean an exact mirroring or representation of the world, whatever that may be. For example, truth contained in fiction is different from the truth contained in a police report, and there are infinite gradations in between, but truth or truthfulness must remain an ideal to be patiently approached. Indeed, this is what all conversation, all dialogue, actual or literary, aims for. Dialogue can't simply take off from the world if it is to be, as it is, something that we value highly.
There is an incidental point that I would make, that is not really central to the question we are addressing but related to it. The major threat to society at the present time in my view seems to come not from a conflict of moral values such as we are told must exist in a multi-cultural society, nor even from a diversity between such values, but from the existence within society of a large number of people who, though they may have other values (i.e. things they like and dislike, want and don't want) nevertheless recognise no moral values of any kind whatsoever — although they are, as I have said, like all kinds of animals, prepared to pursue other kinds of values. But what characterises a moral value or a moral idea is that it arises out of a certain wish that humans, most of them, have: namely a wish to be good. This is something which humans alone are capable of wishing, but of course not all of them do wish it. The consequence is that we tend to be confused; we tend to think that a manifest conflict between, let's say, those who have recourse to violence and those who wish not to, is a conflict between different moral ideas. Sometimes, of course, it may be, but often it's a conflict between those who believe in moral values and wish to be good, and those who do not. And if there is a genuine difference between different moral views then there is much more hope for compromise, discussion, consensus, a respect between the people whose views differ. And I should perhaps add that only if such possibilities for consensus, compromise and respect exist is there any hope of a governable or civilised society.
So where does this leave us? Do we or do we not create our own values? My answer is that we do, but the aim of those creating values is always that other people should share them and that they shall become universal. To value something is to think it worth valuing, not merely to admire it but to hold it admirable, worth admiration. But the other, perhaps more important, feature of our value-creating is that we create values only within the framework of our own human Darwinian development as a species.
Kingsley Amis long ago in Lucky Jim made his hero say that he was increasingly convinced that 'nice things are nicer than nasty things', and this I believe is a profound if banal truth about any species of animal. Every species likes nice things and hates nasty things. Humans however, alone among animals, have the astonishing capability of higher consciousness developed as they developed the capability of language and they can form abstract ideas and reflect not only on how the categories of the world are described but how they are related to each other. They can reflect on themselves, on the species of which they are members. They can survey the world as a whole with themselves as members, but most important they are able not merely to remember, as other animals can, but reflect on their memory and form a concept of the past — not only of my past, your past, but of past time, of history, of continuity between past and present. They can also reflect on the future, the ability to think about things that are not immediately present to the senses — whether the objects thought of are abstractions such as justice or love, or whether they are events which happened in a previous time or people who are distant in space or events and people who never existed at all — this ability is properly designated imagination. It seems to me quite proper therefore to argue that it is through imagination, rather than either sense or reason, that humans can invent the idea of what is truly valuable, what we mean, in short, by a value.
If this is agreed, namely that it is through imagination that values are articulated, sometimes elevated to the status of ideals to be aimed at, not merely enjoyed, then it seems to go without saying that we create or invent values.
The imagination is essentially the inventive free part of the human brain, but nevertheless not just anything can count as a human value because as I've already argued, if we set something up as a value we mean that value to be universally intelligible, if not universally accepted; if not accepted then at least understood since after all everyone values a lot of different and incompatible things.
If I, for example, set the greatest store by security, I like living in a familiar cosy scene, yet I may have, or have had, moods of longing to get out of this cocoon, to try the solitary, the adventurous, the unlimited; so if someone else appears whose highest value is solitary adventure it is quite likely that I can, through sympathy, understand what is attractive to them about this. In general, if we are emotionally committed to something, we do not usually regard this as wholly unimaginable to others. We expect that our designating good or bad, nice or nasty, will be understood by others of our species if only we can express properly and intelligently that valuable element in it. Now a great deal of human discourse is devoted to this very end.
Think of quite ordinary conversations in which one tries to explain to someone else what is so marvellous about a particular prospect, so funny about a particular situation.
This species of imaginative sympathy that we expect from others and give to others in the course of ordinary conversation seems to me (as it did to Hume) to be at the very heart of morality, which could not exist without it.
One of the marvels of the evolution of the human species is that we have developed the ability to wish to do good, to wish to be good members of the species rather than bad, and there can be no specifically moral values, as I have said, without this wish to be good. But the human imagination is such that there can be no foreseeable limit to the ways in which this wish may express itself. Human life is subject to many hazards and humans like other animals are prey to destructive and aggressive motives, but we are equipped to recognise these as potentially harmful to the kinds of communal living that we are prone to seek.
We are therefore capable of the essentially moral motive of curbing and inhibiting our primitive aggressions and greed for the sake of a higher good.
I am attempting to argue for the conclusion that being imaginative animals we do create values, being enabled to do so by our powers of abstraction and idealisation, if that is the proper word, the power that is to aim towards something we know we can never attain. But what is valuable, what we like and dislike, in however high and imaginative way is somehow based in the biological state we humans are in and the degree to which we have developed and changed over Darwinian time. So the answer to the question first posed, 'Do we create values?' is unsurprisingly, 'Up to a point.' The good news is that our creating our own values does not entail that there is no hope of sharing common values across the whole human spectrum. The only thing is that we do not any longer need, in my view, to suppose that these common values without which we cannot very well live have to be imagined to come from outside the human race itself. One of the values we may create is the value of adopting a religious point of view, something I strongly believe in, that is fortunately another question and the subject of another debate that may perhaps follow on from this one.