Bad values are a bit like an STI: most of the time we don’t know we have them, and once we have them they’re really hard to get rid of...And sometimes it's because you fucked or fucked with the wrong person for a little too long and contracted some bad values and/or the Clap.
I will, however, stop with the STI analogy immediately, as it's leaving a bad taste in my mouth…(gua!). All Freudian-esque phrases aside, we finally arrive at the question as to why people stick with bad values. This question has both simple and complex approaches.
Some may argue that challenging oneself to change bad values requires more effort to change them, thus the mind deploys a certain value-based cognitive dissonance- one in which it's better to just stick with your bad value rather than actually challenge them whether you know it or not. One could say people hold onto bad values because they simply don’t have the capacity to even fathom they have one or a few. This is different from the previous point I made as, in this case, the person isn’t even aware that it’s something they have. Many argue this is the blissful state of ignorance which usually precedes the approach mentioned before, which was in fact, being aware, and acting on the bad value despite its repercussions. Despite these two arguments laid before us, there seems to be something that links them all. That being the fundamental building blocks of those bad values, where they stemmed from, and what they become.
For the sake of philosophical dissection, let’s take a look at Rational Choice Theory. Rational Choice Theory is one in which a person makes moral decisions that translate into rational decisions. If rational choices are not assumed to be self-interested, they may nonetheless be ethical simply by virtue of their formal properties. However, in the realm of moral subjectivity, can we ever assume rational choice theory exists, realistically? Of course not, maybe so, but very rarely. And here lies the building block of value development. People, more often than not, behave “rationally”, but that rationality is incredibly subjective.
In part 3, we will dive more into rational choice theory and its applications in terms of bad values.
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