Value Hierarchy Workshop

Navigating Your Value Hierarchy: A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Prioritizing Core Values

A Virtue is what you do to gain and keep a Value

• E.g. Running on the treadmill is a Virtue because you Value exercise

Getting to your Core Values requires Conceptual Analysis

• This exercise asks you to go from specific to general. 

  • From perceptual experiences to wide abstract concepts containing many specifics.

  • When getting to your Core Values, you will find yourself at wide abstractions. It is important to consider all of the concepts within that abstraction and only consider it applicable to you if also Value all of the sub-concepts as well.

    • For example, if someone says they Value health, but they only Value exercise but not healthy food, then it is Exercise that they Value, not health.

• E.g. You Value exercise because you Value your health, you Value your health because you Value your physique, you Value your physique because you Value the attraction of the opposite sex, you Value attraction because you Value love, you Value love because it will make you happy.

• In this case, the core Value is happiness (you may find this coming up repeatedly because happiness is irreducible to a rational person), but you can also consider love, or perhaps family or legacy, as the core Value. Or, if you’re being truly honest with yourself, you may find the core Value is negative, as in a fear of being alone or a need for someone else to take responsibility for your life.

Benefits of your Value Hierarchy

• Rational decision-making

  • When your Values inevitably conflict, choosing to pursue a higher value instead of a lower value is the definition of a Rational Decision.

  • Pursuing a lower value at the cost of a higher Value is the literal definition of sacrifice.

    • It is not a sacrifice to give up watching YouTube or TikTok for 8 hours a day so that you have time to work and study because those represent higher Values, such as Learning and Providing for your independence.

    • It is a sacrifice to give up your self-esteem, goals, or security for short-term or immediate pleasure.

• A non-contradictory lifestyle

  • The source of much of people's unhappiness is because they try to hold contradictory Values.

    • E.g. I deeply love my spouse, and I also Value sexual novelty and having a variety of partners. Acknowledge your higher Value and let go of the other. Otherwise, you will experience constant conflicts.

  • Living with integrity

  • Identifying and pursuing a deliberate lifestyle that will make you happy

    • If a family is one of your highest Values, then shape your lower Values to be ones that don’t conflict.

    • If materialising your creative vision is at the top of the list, then a lifestyle that gives you a lot of time to focus may mean letting go of vague notions of kids.

      • This doesn’t mean you won’t ever feel like you’ve missed out, but you are able to know that you made the right decision for yourself, which helps you quickly bounce back from negative feelings.

Take your whole life into perspective 

• On average, you will live until you’re about 80-85.

  • You cannot Value when you are dead.

• This task asks you to assess and be honest about what your current Values are

  • In running this activity the other way around, I have noticed that people too often come up with very lofty Values like Wisdom, which they don’t really know how to embody.

  • This does not mean you should leave your hierarchy this way!

  • After completing the exercise, you should try to assess what Core Values you would like to embody or you may have missed and then include them in your hierarchy, but be realistic

Activity instructions

1. The table below is to help you structure your thought process, it is not the final order of values.

2. Start by listing out the things you do in your life in the Virtue column 

   1. Vices like smoking or excessive television go here, too

   2. “In my daily life, I often-”

   3. The virtues/vices that are specific to you will get you the best results, but there are things to learn from conceptual analysis of the activities that everyone does, like eating, because you may do it in a different way and for different reasons

3. Conceptual Analysis of why you do those things and why you value those things and why you value those things and why you value those things and why you value those things and what that means your Core Values are

4. Take your Core Values and then order them

   1. The number of values you select doesn’t really matter, but we want to focus on the top of the top because that’s where you get the most benefit

   2. You theoretically could list out and order every value you have, but you will probably get diminishing results weighing up Nutella and Leche Flan

5. Add in the Core Values you missed

6. Add in the Core Values you wish to embody and do the activity in reverse to find the lifestyle behaviour to actualise them

7. Save the list to your phone, carry it around, and sleep on it.

   1. Is it accurate? What if I moved this up a position? Do I truly value that?

8. Revisit it occasionally because you will change, and your values may change as well

Order of Core Values

Anecdotes

• She felt too guilty to leave her family behind and study overseas. After being honest with herself about her values, she realised learning is at the core of who she is. Leaving her family will not be easy, but now she is self-assured to take steps towards a more fulfilling life.

• Young, married to a successful man and pregnant. A hard worker and a risk taker, and so far, those risks haven’t paid off, bad company after bad company. Child or career? It was a false choice, the answer was Self-esteem. 

• Dream big in the big city or frugal freedom in the province? If children are his highest value, what benefits them the most? Probably Existence. Imagining a whole life-affirming, happiness-bringing person not existing because the cost of city ambition is a third child, and that was just too expensive.

Conceptual Validity

• Sensory experience (Sight) → Perceptual comprehension (This banana) → Conceptual abstraction of percepts (Banana) → Higher concepts (→ Fruit → Food → Goods → Objects → Existents)

• For a concept to be valid, it must have a basis in Perceptual reality; otherwise, it is a Floating Abstraction

  • The concept of Length has a perceptual basis in a Long table

  • Homeopathy has no objective medical benefit, so its Health claims are demonstrably false

• A concept must also acknowledge its genetic roots; otherwise, it falls under the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept

  • The concept of Orphan presupposes the concept of Parent

  • The argument that ‘humans cannot know anything’ is a fallacy because you could not know the statement's truth

Consciousness

• Your Awareness

  • When you are asleep, knocked out or dead, you are not conscious

• Consciousness exists on a spectrum from hazy to focused

• The cause of focus is irreducible to anything but your will to be in focus

• It is an act of volition to increase your level of focus