Bennett W. Helm

Deliberation about personal, non-moral values involves elements of both invention and discovery. Thus, we invent our values by freely choosing them, where such distinctively human freedom is essential to our defining and taking responsibility for the kinds of persons we are; nonetheless, we also discover our values insofar as we can deliberate about them rationally and arrive at non-arbitrary decisions about what has value in our lives. Yet these notions of invention and discovery seem inconsistent with each other, and the possibility of deliberation about value therefore seems paradoxical. My aim is to argue that this apparent paradox is no paradox at all. I offer an account of what it is to value something largely in terms of emotions and desires. By examining the rational interconnections among emotions and evaluative judgments, I argue for an account both of how judgments can shape our emotions, thereby shaping our values in a way that makes intelligible the possibility of inventing our values, and of how our emotions can simultaneously rationally constrain correct deliberation, thereby making intelligible the possibility of discovering our values. The result is a rejection of both cognitivist and non-cognitivist accounts of value and deliberation about value.

My thesis in this paper is that although one normally identifies with something by virtue of a certain holistic rational pattern both in one's judgments and will and in one's emotions and desires, in certain cases one's judgments and one's emotions can be largely separate sources of one's identity and hence of meaning in one's life. These cases, however, are cases of irrationality in which, roughly, the pattern in one's judgments and will has become disconnected from the pattern in one's emotions and desires, resulting in one's being fragmented and so divided against oneself. By understanding the kind of rational patterns involved, we can more deeply understand the kinds of conflicts and, conversely, accord or integrity that are possible for persons.

Authenticity, it is plausible to suppose, is a feature of one's identity as a person---of one's sense of the kind of life worth living. Most attempts to explicate this notion of a person's identity do so in terms of an antecedent understanding of what it is for a person to value something. This is, I argue, a mistake: a concern is not intelligible as a value apart from the place it has within a larger identity that the value serves in turn to constitute; to assume otherwise is to risk leaving out the very person whose identity these values allegedly constitute. By contrast, I offer an account of values as always already a part of one's identity. I do so by providing an analysis of values in terms of what I call 'person-focused emotions,' emotions like pride and shame. Such emotions, I argue, involve a commitment to the import of a person primarily and, only secondarily, to things valued, and in this way enable us to understand what it is to value these things *for the sake of* the person. The upshot is a more satisfying account of a person's identity and values, an account that can provide the necessary background for a more thorough investigation of authenticity.