by Rosemary Redfern

Created on: April 14, 2010

‘Morals are concerned with the judgement of goodness or badness of human action’ according to the Reader’s Digest dictionary. Values are about the worth an individual gives to a person, article or idea. 

Morals help us to make decisions which are balanced, fair, kind or have value.  It’s part of learning and establishing what we consider is important in life. Without a moral concept we have few checks on our behavior. It is easy to see in the modern world, where communications are so open, what happens when the leader of a country is without moral values. The people are exploited, money loses it’s value and life becomes extremely difficult for the population while the leader becomes richer. 

There is an element of justice in morality.  We have rules which govern our cultures because they are agreed by most of the people that certain behaviors are unacceptable. It is what makes a society run smoothly because then individuals can feel safe to live their lives without the fear of being murdered, robbed, exploited or any of the other unpleasant things humans do to each other. 

Morals have a number of levels.  There are ethical morals which govern our approach to issues of importance.  Because individuals differ on what is valuable, there are debates on contraception, euthanasia, war, treatment of individuals within our societies who do not conform to the expected norm and many other topics. Even without realizing it we establish moral value early in life as we learn a sense of fairness and that life is not fair. 

Values help to govern our moral concepts.  We give value to what we feel is important. They are a set of standards and principles which help us or make order in our lives. 

We can value a skill such as a musician might have, or a painter or the calm way a negotiator deals wit a difficult situation. We can value someone’s courage in the face of adversity. We can appreciate the love we receive from those we value. Why we value certain people, ideas or things is essentially personal. 

Values sometimes tend to be thought of as financial.  There are times when we might compromise our values because we do not have enough money to sustain them. For instance, someone starving only wants to eat, how they get the food becomes of little importance. Values become lost.  This is often a result of war or famine.  War is a man made aggression which does not have to take place.

There is a close alliance between morals and values. Both are concerned with judgement. Morals are something we need to work out for ourselves in spite of learning the values of the culture we grew up in. 

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