The Origin of Human Values:

Virtually every conversation we can have involves ethics in some manner. This is because ethics are of and about everything in the human world. More specifically ethics is the study of Theory of Man and as such is predicated on the Natural Laws of Human Nature. The best way I can think of to demonstrate this is the Principle of The Origin of Human Values.

All humans are born into the world with certain natural proclivities or core passions. This can easily be seen in most small children. Ask most 4 or 5 year olds what they want to be when they grow up and the response is most often spontaneous: I want to be a fireman or ballerina or doctor, etc. Because children of this age are naturally simple they grab at something they understand that is naturally associated with those core passions.

From birth to death we all experience. Life feeds us an endless stream of experience from moment to moment, even while we sleep. Experience gets entwined with our core passions, when we are very young, to create our most basic core values. As we age and gain in experience our system of values grows in scope and complexity. It evolves. One way to test this is to think of what you valued most at that age. Just a little consideration will reveal that you still value the same thing but how you value it has changed as a result of experience. The key point here is to understand that this process or mechanism for creating values is exactly the same for everyone. What it produces is utterly unique to each of us because of the unique nature of our individual patterns of experience, however the basic mechanism is exactly the same for all of us. This is a fundamental Natural Law of Human Nature and thus an ethical principle.

There are more reasons than I can count why a common understanding of this is so important. However one reason is particularly relevant here. This demonstrates a universal commonality for all of us while also demonstrating the fundamentally profound impact of our unique value systems on virtually everything in the human world. Most particularly this second point is demonstrated by how our particular values lead to our most basic judgments.

Each of us makes judgments about things. In fact everything we can think about is tied to judgments from colors we do or don’t like to textures to styles of cars and even personality traits. In turn our judgments are the basis of our decision making processes. Here again there are infinite possibilities for discussion and debate however I will leave that for the discussion forum we are setting up. One particular aspect of judgement does bear mention here.

All of us are prone to make judgments about others, unfortunately we almost always make those judgments based on our values rather than in reference to the values of the one we are judging. When I make a judgement about you based on my values I am doing both you and me a disrespect. Judging you on my value terms is tantamount to saying my view of the world and system of values is superior. A proper judgement would be to understand your values and offer a different perspective that may in some way help you. More needs to be said but the most important point here is how this common practice so often leads to misunderstanding in communication and nearly always ends up triggering some form of conflict.

I do not mean to imply that human nature is in any way intrinsically negative. All of the greatest potentials for Beauty, Brilliance and Accomplishment are also intrinsic aspects of human nature. The key point is to establish a common understanding of the fundamental ethical principles that are human nature. It is only with a broad based understanding of these principles that we can begin to understand the most basic causes of problems. From that we can finally begin to create practical and sustainable solutions to those problems.

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Seek not to understand the meaning of life for that is a marvelous exercise in frustration. Understand rather that it is the Lives around us that gives our Life Meaning. - J.W. Goldman

A ruler is someone who wears a mantle of Authority and only takes up Responsibility when circumstances force them to...A leader is someone who wears a mantle of Responsibility and only takes up Authority when situations require them to.

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