Are There Objective Human Values?
Presented by Joseph Ellin, PhD, Philosophy Professor , WMU
About the Speaker
About the Event
Announcements
It was announced that well-known freethought speaker Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation is confirmed for a special speaking engagement at the GRCC campus in the auditorium. This will take place on June 27 @ 7PM. Barker’s presentation will be based on his book “Losing Faith in Faith.”
The Annual Freethought Picnic will be on Saturday, June 16 from approximately 10AM- 5PM at Fallasburg Park in Lowell. The bulletin’s info for it being on the 17th is a typo.
Dennis Murphy collected completed surveys and passed out more for those who have not yet received them. These surveys that he put together are anonymous and to give a “snapshot” of our group’s interests and backgrounds. Hopefully, we will be able to use this information to better shape the discussion topics and meeting format to the group needs.
Presentation
Our topic was “Are There Objective Human Values? Human Hope vs. Randian Logic as an Answer to Relativism” presented by Dr. Joseph Ellin, Philosophy Professor at WMU. The discussion was moderated by Jill Pinkerton. Dr. Ellin gave us the website to receive information and materials on various topics from a philosophical standpoint. It is: .
Our presenter broke his presentation into five parts, dealing with the question of objective human values that he addressed individually, tying them together at the end. These included: Cross cultural constants, (what is) acceptable to most reasonable people, (what is) reasonable according to acknowledged standards of reasonableness, Universal rules, and, Common human decency.
First “objective” needed to be defined, which he did, as “how things are, independent of how one sees them.” In asking if values can be objective, he quoted from the Russian born Objectivist Ayn Rand’s book “Virtues of Selfishness.” He summarized her views on this and began to take them apart, showing how her views could be adopted by the slave owner or thief in his/her rational self interest, that many who are historically regarded as having benefited humankind would run counter to her examples, once examined. The belief that only life has value- and that an organism’s survival is the highest objective value, he countered by stating that there is no singular “grand termination” where all ultimate goals lead to and that survival isn’t the only good or what it means to BE good.
Dr. Ellin presented various cases of human groups and societies where the highest ideals run afoul of many cherished views of what are valuable characteristics in our own, or other more familiar cultures. A disparity arises as what is reasonable or honorable; what is esteemed or admired within different groups. He gave further examples of how some societies handle ethical disputes that would seem foreign to us.
As to universal objective values, Professor Ellin, employed the Kantian idea that rational people won’t produce bad behavior that would be translated into bad universal laws. Moral imperatives of the type: “Once you agree that everyone should worship the One True God, then everyone will know the One True God” result from this logic. At what point is civil disobedience warranted? Those in the position to adopt a particular view of a “universal” value do so; to what degree are the beliefs of people not in that position taken into account? Another example given was that lying is deemed to be wrong but one can think of “reasonable” exceptions. Sometimes, a universally held concept of a good value becomes detrimental when adopted by everyone. One example given for this was that of saving a drowning man. If everyone dove in for this goal, chaos would ensue.
Dr. Ellin centered on the idea of common human decency to get as close as we might to objective human values, if such exist, where “decency” is used in the general sense of “good will.” Earlier, he spoke of the mental cogitations on this matter as “academic puzzles” and he came back to this with the thought that it doesn’t really, ultimately matter if we can prove this or not. “If we don’t use common human decency, what does it matter if we use logic to prove it?” He read an illustrative story to bolster this concept called from the book “In My Father’s Court.” The author grew up as a Rabbi’s son, seeing various real life ethical conundrums played out.
He talked of the ability to sympathize, to cooperate in hard times, dealing with contingencies and difficult circumstances and how hope substitutes for logic. If there are, in fact, objective human values, the hope for common human decency is how it would translate. We can hope for certain sentiments to go toward obj. human values but cannot show that we have arrived there yet. Ethics are only how people see them, which contrast with the definition for objectivity as stated at the top of Ellin’s presentation. Our presenter talked of how logic can take us only so far; our values are based on emotion, we are naturally storytelling animals, not naturally logicians or “empirical machines.” Values are “deep expressions of who you are,” not so much calculated logical proofs.
In our discussion, the point was made that we often base our concept of human decency on how we feel-a projection onto others of what we value, while the one receiving may not share in this view. Also discussed was how differing contexts change the response to circumstances. And how some things are desirable without being universally necessary. When laws become based on an inflexible goal then dilemmas emerge. An example given was that if we hang those who steal, because stealing is wrong, then do we hang the poor, starving person who steals the loaf of bread without further consideration of circumstances?
This is but a very brief summary of some of the ideas presented by our speaker and during the group discussion.
Secretary: Charles LaRue
