Values construction is the intentional building of a personal value system after the inherited one has ceased to be load-bearing — a deliberate act of construction in conditions where the older mode of inheriting values is no longer fully available.
values-construction
The deliberate building of a personal value system after the inherited framework has ceased to be load-bearing, treated as an intentional act of construction rather than discovery or inheritance.
Definition
Values construction is the deliberate, intentional building of a personal system of values in conditions where the inherited system is no longer fully load-bearing. The concept presupposes that values can be neither simply discovered (as classical Platonism would have it) nor simply inherited unrevised (as conservative traditionalism would have it) nor simply chosen out of nothing (as caricatured existentialism would have it), but must be constructed — deliberately assembled from inherited materials, examined commitments, and the requirements of the life one is actually living.
The concept is associated with the existentialist tradition's account of value-creation, with Nietzsche's call for a revaluation of all values, and with the pragmatist tradition's treatment of values as habits of action whose construction is therefore a substantive practical project.
The problem it answers
What does a person do when the value framework they were raised within has ceased to organize their life? The traditional Christian answer was to repent and return to the framework. The Enlightenment answer was to reason one's way to universal moral principles applicable to all rational beings. The Nietzschean answer was to undertake the revaluation of all values — the creative work of constructing new values out of the recognition that the inherited ones rested on conditions no longer in force.
The concept of values construction occupies a particular conceptual space: it accepts that values must come from somewhere (against pure self-creation), that they cannot simply be inherited unrevised (against traditionalism), and that they cannot be derived from pure reason (against rationalism). What remains is the practical work of construction — deliberately taking up some inherited materials, rejecting others, examining the consequences of holding particular commitments, and assembling a system that fits the life one is actually living.
The core thesis
The core thesis has four parts.
Values are not simply discovered. The Platonist picture of values as eternally given and waiting to be found has been undermined by the historical, anthropological, and cultural evidence on the variability of moral systems. Values are at least in part constructed.
Values cannot simply be chosen out of nothing. The Sartrean caricature of pure self-creation — the agent freely positing values from nothing — is structurally impossible. Every act of value construction draws on inherited materials, on the requirements of the life being lived, on the structure of the agent's existing commitments. The materials constrain the construction.
The construction is genuinely creative. Within the constraints, there is real space for deliberate construction. Different agents starting from similar inherited materials and similar life circumstances genuinely construct different value systems. The construction is not arbitrary but it is also not predetermined.
The construction is an ongoing project, not a finished state. Values are constructed and continually revised over the course of a life. The construction is more like the maintenance of a garden than the building of a permanent monument.
The Nietzschean substrate
Nietzsche's call for a revaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte) provides much of the conceptual substrate for the concept. Nietzsche's diagnosis: the inherited European value framework (the good-as-humble, evil-as-strong opposition that descends from Christianity) rested on the historical conditions that produced it and could not survive the changes those conditions had undergone (the death of God in particular). The constructive task was therefore the creation of new values, fitted to the post-religious condition.
The Nietzschean framework matters for the concept of values construction not because it is the only or even the most adequate model, but because it gave the question — what does one do when the inherited values are no longer load-bearing? — its sharpest modern articulation. The Nietzschean answer is the creative act of value-positing; the existentialist tradition extended this to a structural account of how the work is to be done; the contemporary literature continues the engagement.
The existentialist articulation
Sartre's account in Being and Nothingness and Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) develops the existential structure of value construction. The human being is condemned to be free — obligated to choose, even when refusing to choose is itself a choice. The values one lives by are values one has effectively chosen, regardless of whether one has explicitly recognized the choice. The constructive ethical project is to make the choice deliberate rather than unrecognized, and to choose values that one can affirm rather than merely default into.
Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) extends and refines this framework, especially in its emphasis on the social and intersubjective conditions of value construction. Authentic value construction, on Beauvoir's account, must will the freedom of others to engage in their own construction; values constructed in ways that suppress this possibility undermine themselves.
The pragmatist articulation
The pragmatist tradition gives the concept a different inflection. For Dewey and the pragmatists, values are habits of action that organize practical engagement with the world. Values construction is therefore not an abstract metaphysical exercise but the practical work of developing habits of action that serve the life one is actually living. The test of a constructed value is its working in experience: does it produce a life that the agent, on reflection, can affirm?
The pragmatist framework has the advantage of grounding values construction in something more substantive than pure choice (the practical consequences of holding particular values are real and discoverable) while avoiding the Platonist commitment to values as pre-existing entities to be discovered.
Common confusions
Values construction is not arbitrary value-positing. The constraints — inherited materials, the life being lived, the consequences of holding particular commitments, the requirements of intersubjective existence — are real and limit the space of construction substantially. The agent does not construct values from nothing.
Values construction is not the same as relativism. Recognizing that values are constructed does not entail that any constructed system is as good as any other. Some constructions support flourishing lives; others produce miserable ones. The constructive work is constrained by what actually works for the kind of being one is.
Values construction is not a one-time act. It is an ongoing project. Values constructed in early adulthood are typically revised through middle age; values appropriate to one life situation may need revision when the situation changes.
Contemporary engagement
The concept is engaged across several contemporary literatures. Existentialist ethics continues through the work of Charles Guignon, Robert Solomon, and the contemporary phenomenological tradition. Pragmatist ethics continues through John Lachs, Cheryl Misak, and the broader neo-pragmatist tradition. Moral psychology — especially the empirical literature on values formation (Shalom Schwartz, Jonathan Haidt) — gives the substrate for the analytic concept. Practical philosophy and the philosophy of self-cultivation — Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995), Michel Foucault's late lectures on the care of the self, the contemporary virtue ethics tradition descending from Anscombe and MacIntyre — all give resources for thinking about values construction as a substantive practical project rather than an abstract metaphysical one.
Further reading
- Belief Systems — the Pillar concept this satellites
- Will to Power — the Nietzschean substrate for the revaluation of values
- Authenticity — the existential value the construction can aim at
- Virtue — the older value-category the construction often draws on
- Identity Reconstruction — the related rebuilding of the self the values support
- Inherited vs. Chosen Belief — the diagnostic the construction responds to
Satellite of Belief Systems. The intentional building of a personal value system after the inherited one has ceased to be load-bearing.