Values or Virtues?

Victoria & Albert

One difference between our Victorian era (1837 -1901) ancestors and our current era was the emphasis on virtues rather than on values.  

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), a German classical scholar, philosopher and critic of culture, first began to speak of “values” in the late 19th century when he had started a permanent revolution against both classical and Judeo-Christian virtues. Indeed, Nietzsche and the intellectuals who followed inspired a revolt against the very idea of virtue according to the article Virtues, Values, and Lessons From the Past from Epoch Times.  

Friedrich Nietzsche

Victorian virtues were practical and down to earth.  They provided clear prescriptions for a way of life that supported the dignity of ordinary people and the general well-being of society.  Values on the other hand are subjective and relative.  They are merely customs and conventions for a purely instrumental, utilitarian purpose.  Values inform particular people and tend to be specific to race, class and gender. One cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, that anyone’s virtues are as good as anyone else’s, or that everyone has a right to his own virtues.  Virtues belong to all humans.  Values are specific to the one(s) doing the valuation.

Value: the degree to which something is useful or estimable; it is from words meaning strong, value, worth.

Virtue:  is moral strength, high character, goodness, excellence, worth and is derived from ancient words indicate human.

The shift from virtues to values had launched a revolution in thought that was both deceptive and troublesome. Today, a person’s values do not have to be virtuous. They are often self-serving beliefs, opinions, emotions, and preferences—anything that any individual or group claims to value for any reason at any time.

Moderns frequently advise others to get over their Victorian hang-ups and become less judgmental. We are called upon to unburden ourselves from the past and move on.  But rebirth comes not as the result of random experiments that happen to turn out well.  It is the deliberate imitation of what has worked before.  

Perhaps humanity needs to step up its level of energy and focus on what is of excellence, what is of inestimable worth what is of high character and moral strength rather than what is valued by some human party or subgroup.

Seek what is best for all and not just a part.  Maybe the Victorian Era had at least a part of it correct.

End note:

Prominent elements of Nietzsche philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a critique of religion and Christian morality.  

His perspective of truth was that the popular belief in God had become “unbelievable” and so everything “built upon it and propped up by it, grown into it” is bound to collapse and he equated this to the statement “God is dead.”  

He also addressed nihilism, a philosophical approach that rejects the absolute validity of commonly accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as knowledge, morality, or meaning.

In 1889, at age 44, Nietzsche suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia from a series of strokes. He died 11 years later in 1900 as a result of these ailments.