Values Are Not What Humanity Is, but What Humanity Ought to Be

On 10 December 1948, three years after a war in which tens of millions had been killed, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It began with the statement that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. As a description of the world in 1948, the sentence was false. Millions lived under colonial rule, women could not vote in many countries and the camps of Europe had just been liberated. The authors were not describing what humanity was but declaring what it ought to be. The topic makes the general point that values are standards for conduct and not reports on it.

The philosophical background is the distinction between facts and values. David Hume observed in 1739 that writers on morality often move without notice from statements about what is to statements about what ought to be, and he insisted that the transition requires a justification that is never supplied. No collection of facts about how people behave logically entails how they should behave. G. E. Moore later called the attempt to define goodness in terms of natural properties the naturalistic fallacy. That most people lie, cheat or fight does not make these things right.

The point has practical importance. If values were descriptions of what humans are, then moral reform would be impossible, for what is already the case would be right by definition. Instead, a moral standard is a lever for criticising conduct. When Martin Luther King said in Washington in 1963 that he had a dream that his children would be judged by the content of their character, he was setting the nation's practice against its professed ideals. Abolitionists, suffragists and anti colonial leaders did the same. They appealed to a standard that the world did not meet.

India's Constitution follows the pattern. The Preamble speaks of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, to be secured for all citizens, though in 1950 a majority of Indians were illiterate and the caste system governed daily life. Dr Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 that India was about to enter a life of contradictions, with equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life. The Directive Principles in the document list goals that the state is to strive toward, and these goals are stated as duties and not descriptions. The distance between the text and the reality is the room in which the country works.

The distance between the text and the reality is the room in which the country works.

Individual lives show the same structure. A person who values honesty is not claiming to be always honest but is holding himself to a standard that he sometimes fails. A student who values learning acknowledges that he is not yet learned. Values guide because they point beyond the present, and the feeling of falling short is evidence that they are working. A person who always met his ideals would have set them too low. In this sense, aspiration is the home of moral life.

Yet the claim should not be pushed to the point of severing values from humanity entirely. Values do not drop from the sky. They arise in creatures with particular needs and feelings. The primatologist Frans de Waal has documented in apes the roots of empathy, fairness and reciprocity, which suggest that human moral sentiments are continuous with the social lives of other animals. Evolutionary accounts hold that cooperation and care were selected because groups that practised them survived. If so, the ought has an origin in the is. What humanity ought to be is partly what its better nature already tends to be.

Cultures differ, too, and the variation raises a doubt about universality. Anthropologists and surveys such as the World Values Survey show that societies place different weights on authority, individual freedom, family and religion. If values are what humanity ought to be, whose ought is it? A relativist says that each society's standards are valid for it. A universalist replies that some values, such as the prohibition of cruelty to children, are found everywhere and that cross cultural agreement on basic goods suggests a common core. The debate has no easy end, but it shows that the claim of the topic needs a source for its oughts.

Kant offered one by locating the moral law in reason itself. A person ought to act only on principles that he could will to become universal laws, and ought to treat others as ends and never merely as means. Such a requirement does not depend on what people happen to be like, and it explains why a moral demand can bind us even against our inclinations. The idea that ought implies can, which is also from Kant, adds a limit, since we cannot be obliged to do what is impossible. Values must be demanding enough to inspire and not so remote as to be meaningless.

What is humanity to do with the gap? Teachers know the principle. They treat a child not as he is but as he might be, and the child often rises to meet the expectation, as research on teacher expectations has suggested. Cynics use it as evidence that values are hypocritical, since people profess ideals they do not follow. A better reading is that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, as La Rochefoucauld put it, and that the gap is the mark of a creature that can imagine better. A society with no professed ideals would have nothing to be hypocritical about, and would also have no way of improving.

A final puzzle remains in the topic. If values are what humanity ought to be, then humanity must in some way already know what that is, to be measuring itself against it. Where that knowledge comes from, whether from reason, conscience, tradition or revelation, is the oldest dispute in ethics. We seem to carry a picture of ourselves as we should be without being able to say who drew it, and the resemblance between the picture and the person is perhaps the best argument that it was not entirely invented.