Value at the Root: Cultivating Virtue in a Post-Truth World

Context 

The following reflections grow out of my live dialogue with Bonnitta Roy about the metaphysics of value. She’ll be sharing the discussion in her pop-up school for those who subscribe. Here I wanted to offer some further reflections on what was stirred up in me.

A few orienting points: First, we wanted our philosophical conversation to be applicable to concrete issues that we are currently facing politically, culturally, socially and not just hang out in the space of abstract principles. Second is the question of whether there is really anything new that can be said about these perennial problems having to do with the origin of moral and aesthetic values? Are there ways to overcome tired debates, creative proposals that allow us to avoid simple dualisms, getting us out of classical theistic (and atheistic) dilemmas and so on? Is there a way to come at these issues fresh, without all the baggage of traditions? Or is the best we can hope for a kind of contemporary translation of perennial wisdom?

This brings up a related orienting question: the extent to which being nice, say, or diplomatic in an exchange is genuine and authentic, or fake. I would hope that part of my ethos is to operate as a kind of diplomat and to do my best to hover in that in-between space. There are occasions when I feel compelled to take a side—or maybe there aren’t just two sides, maybe there are multiple options—and I feel really convinced that there’s a correct one. But my default is to hold tensions long enough that something more creative can emerge.

Is Value Basic—or an Afterthought?

Metaphysically, an important divide concerns whether or not we believe value is basic—as basic as anything else in our metaphysics—or whether it is thought to emerge later: say, with human sociality; or perhaps when mammals evolve; or maybe it’s with bacteria or living cells generally that value becomes a salient feature of the universe. As a Whiteheadian, I’m with David Temple here: value is basic. It’s not something you can add in later as an afterthought. It’s not something that emerges evolutionarily. There is emergence and evolution because value is baked in.

I accept Hartshorne’s point that the distinction between necessity and contingency must be at the core of what metaphysics is about. We’re in pursuit of the necessary features of our experience when we do metaphysics. And I also appreciate something Whitehead says: metaphysics is the analysis of the obvious, and it takes a very unusual mind to consider the obvious. This is because usually we notice what stands out, what doesn’t do what we immediately expect. Then we are thrown back into reflective thought about what we had previously sensed directly. Metaphysics is difficult precisely because it isn’t just about just being thoughtful or reflective, it is an attempt to directly intuit—not just the facts of immediate sense experience—but also the co-creative relations our own acts of cognitive mediation have with that sense experience (and the physical world it signifies). When we do metaphysics we’re trying to pay attention to what doesn’t change, to the absolute conditions of all experience, to what abides in every thought, feeling, intention, or sensation as their ground not only of explanation but of existence. Eternity is hard to notice once you’ve forgotten it. It often requires an entire lifetime to wake up to it. For some, a special power of imagination or a mystical grace grants a glimpse of the soul within or behind the seen part of us, of what’s left after the body dies.

So back to the question of value: is it necessary? Is it a necessary ingredient in cosmogenesis—like flour and water to bake a cake—or is it contingently emergent? Is it a higher-level thing that’s real at its level but wasn’t always part of this cosmic process? Or is it emergent in a more epiphenomenal sense—where we think we have freedom and morals, but if you scratch a little below the surface we’re all just animals: hungry, horny, acting out of instinct, and then telling a nice story about how we’re free agents? That latter view would be closer to Yuval Harari’s take, which, more or less among the Western intelligentsia is what many people assume. At best it would be nice if we could get along and have a story we tell about human rights and not kill each other for stupid reasons, but at the end of the day we look at history and think, well, it’s a bloodbath, and it’s all about power. The recent ascendancy of authoritarian rulers in the U.S. and elsewhere feels like an expression of where we’ve ended up as a civilization when we tell that kind of story about value: that it’s contingent, and whoever has power gets to determine the story we tell about what’s valuable and what’s not. There’s no deeper intrinsic or necessary dimension to value in the cosmos.

I come at the question of value from a process-relational angle. 

Iain McGilchrist draws on people like Max Scheler, who studied the German idealists and influenced Heidegger. Scheler’s idea, often translated as “value-ception,” is that the modern Humean distinction between fact and value breaks down quickly under phenomenological scrutiny. We take an interest in facts. We distinguish this fact from the totality of fact. That selection or interest is itself a value. In perception, we notice what we value.

And it is not just in perception that value and fact are inseparable. Ontologically, every being, every event in the universe, inherits an already existing evaluative field and contributes novel feelings to an evolving evaluative field. Whitehead’s prehension is the feeling of these fields of value. An electron “evaluates” whether it has enough energy to pop up or pop down and emit a photon. All events, all actions, take place in an evaluative manner, whether we are talking about particle physics, cell physiology, or human psychology. 

God, Creativity, and the Necessity/Contingency Tangle

Historically, in the West, value and morality have been grounded in God—and God is the Being for whom existence is necessary. Kant later calls this “ontotheology,” and Heidegger picks up on the critique: God as highest Being, with all other beings evaluated in reference to this highest Being.

Process theology reframes this entirely. Whitehead makes Creativityultimate, and Creativity is, as Nietzsche put it, beyond good and evil. Not neutral, exactly, but at least amoral. In that light, what Whitehead calls the primordial nature of God is an accident of Creativity, a creature of Creativity. God is no longer the Being whose existence is necessary in the strongest sense; from the perspective of Creativity as ultimate, God’s existence is contingent. However, from the perspective of us as finite creatures, the primordial nature of God functions as necessary, because it mediates our relation to Creativity.

In Whitehead’s scheme, the function of the primordial nature of God is to order the realm of possibilities. It evaluates possibilities and makes an initial distinction between better and worse, beauty and ugliness, or, to put it in terms a bacterium might appreciate, yum and yuck. Whitehead is careful to add that this original evaluative act is unconscious, a kind of blind yearning. Because this primordial valuation is contingent relative to Creativity, its actualization in the world is always going to be limited, always subject to the contingencies of the creative process and of an evolutionary becoming. It is always open—there is a profound openness despite the always incarnate divine lure toward Beauty.

An interesting question follows: is evolution itself a necessary or contingent feature of the universe? I think it’s a necessary feature that produces contingent outcomes. Evolution requires some degree of competition, and that competition often leads to subtler and more complex forms of cooperation or to symbiogenesis. Predator–prey dynamics are obviously competitive, but they are also symbiogenic: fox and rabbit co-create one another across generations. Their very physiology is a function of that relationship. In a healthy ecosystem, those dynamics find a creative balance. Despite the fox feeding on the rabbit, the rabbits, in a way, depend on the foxes to keep their numbers in check. Evolution depends on these dynamics to produce higher goods.

Incommensurable Goods, Individuals and Groups, and a Working Map of Axiological Terms

At the human level, too, there are these apparent incommensurabilities in value. We often think of them as cultural differences—one group wants to practice Sharia law, say, and another group centers liberal individual rights. But the tension also shows up within groups, all the time, as the pull between an individual’s uniqueness and the expectations of their community. That’s always the problem with identity politics when group identity gets substituted for the individual: we lose sight of the irreducible differences within any group.

In an evolutionary cosmos, that tension isn’t a bug but is a feature. There will always be a live friction between individual uniqueness and the habits of the group—habits which are, I think, another way of talking about ethics in the loose, everyday sense: the accumulated expectations that even allow us to distinguish a group as a group.

Since we’re using these words, let me sketch how I’m semantically mapping them here:

• Morality (in a more Augustinian sense) has to do with inner intention, conscience—the personal dimension.
• Ethics is about outward conduct and the habits we conform to in a particular community—the ongoingness of shared practice.
• Justice reaches for universality—rules we would want in place if we didn’t know who we’d be in society, what class or race we’d fall into. That’s the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance,” an exercise of abstraction that all human beings are capable of to some degree.

These distinctions matter. Consider an example of patriarchal, customary tribal codes: I read an article about a case in Pakistan where a young woman was raped, and “repair” was sought by having the victim’s brother rape the perpetrator’s sister. In a certain primitive sense, that’s “fair” as an exchange that looks level. But it’s not moral. It spreads the violence and suffering. World history gives us the same tragic pattern: World War I ends with punitive reparations on Germany—“Now we’re even”—and the resentment seeds World War II. “Fairness” in the thin, tit-for-tat sense can be a moral disaster.

This is part of why I resist the idea, typical of metaphysically thin liberalism, that human rights are merely institutional constructs, maybe rooted in empathy but with no deeper ground. If rights rest only on our fragile institutions, the whole human project sits on flimsy stilts. I’m not saying there’s one religious monopoly on grounding (contrary to what some Christian chauvinists say about how only the Imago Dei secures human rights). I’m saying plural traditions—Christian, Buddhist, Indigenous, and others—can each articulate why something like human rights has cosmic significance. We should do that grounding in a pluralistic way, but we should do it. Otherwise “justice” floats free of both conscience and cosmos.

Conscience and Encounter: Kant, Levinas, and a Gospel Scene

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously says he had to limit our knowledge of nature to leave room for freedom. In his theoretical philosophy we’re walled off from reality by phenomenal appearances; what things are in themselves we can’t know. But in his practical philosophy, we have a kind of direct line to the numinous: freedom shows up as an inner conscience, even a feeling of freedom. We act, then we can reflect and say, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Based on what? For Kant, that “what” is not empirical; it’s the moral law speaking in and through us.

I’m not a fan of the categorical imperative when it hardens into absolutism. The stock example: it’s always wrong to lie. Even if you’re lying to protect the Jews hiding in your basement when the Nazis come knocking? That can’t be the right takeaway from Kant’s conception of moral autonomy. Still, I want to keep Kant’s central insight: our freedom as individuals—this sense of conscience—is a window into something cosmic that is alive in us as cosmic creatures. There is a longing for harmony. We don’t know how to formulate it in advance because it isn’t fundamentally cognitive, it’s aesthetic (and for Whitehead, the aesthetic and the moral are closely coupled)—but we are compelled to realize it, to act on its behalf.

Kant’s evidence is phenomenological: we know, in a very personal, intimate way, when we fail to live up to that inner call of conscience. We can’t fully state what the Good is, but we feel it in the breach. That, to me, is already a decent argument for the metaphysical necessity of value.

Levinas relocates this contact with a transcendent Good from the interior of the subject to our encounter with others. The face of the other breaks us open; it interrupts our self-sufficiency and our confidence that we are in the right. In that encounter, we receive a command, not as a formula but as a summons. If Kant’s address is subjectively inward, a kind of “inner other,” Levinas’ arrives from the relation to an actual other.

There’s a Gospel scene that embodies Levinas’ point. A Canaanite woman—so, not Jewish—begs Jesus to heal her daughter. He says he was sent to shepherd only the lost sheep of Israel. She pushes back. In that encounter, Jesus is compelled to widen his mission; he overcomes an initially in-group sentiment and heals her daughter. It’s a religious innovation happening in real time: God, as it were, learns from a woman and an outsider about what the Good requires. It is a move from tribal to universal care that keeps echoing whenever we let conscience and encounters with otherness correct our comfortably narrow locus of concern.

Virtue, Habit, and the Moods That Move Us

This isn’t about free will versus determinism. That dichotomy is so misleading. The extent to which we are free depends very much on the accumulation of all the micro-decisions we’re making from moment to moment: who we associate with, what we read, how we practice. Freedom is always conditional freedom.

William James has a line in The Principles of Psychology about habit that I love. He says, in effect, that as we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific, by so many separate acts and hours of work. The alcoholic might say, “I’ve gone five days without drinking; one little drink won’t make a difference.” But it does. You don’t become an alcoholic in a day, and you don’t quit in a day either. Moral life works like that. Which is why virtue ethics makes sense to me: it’s not simply about having the right formula at hand; it’s about becoming the kind of person who can see and respond well when the moment comes.

Mood is relevant here. Do we control the moods we find ourselves in? Not by pushing a button. Not by flipping a switch. But through practice we can move ourselves more often into a mood of openness, sensitivity, and flexibility, and try to avoid anger and resentment. Even so, the most even-keeled among us get angry. When you notice it, there are practices—empathize with the person you’re angry at, breathe, step back—that can shift you. Or maybe anger and the action it leads to is the appropriate move in that situation! Still, it’s never just, “I’m going to be happy now.” It’s a background, dispositional state we cultivate over time.

Now, imagine you are in a war zone. There’s a tremendous power differential. You are starving. What is your capacity to act in a way we’d call free and moral in that situation? The conditions are such that you can’t really expect anyone but a saint to pull that off. They’re going to act to stop the bombing, to feed their families, to kill the people trying to kill them—that’s just survival instinct. So there are levels here. In the moment, the moral thing is to attend to human suffering now: feed children, stop bombs, get medicine. History matters for justice, but triage comes first. Then, yes, move toward justice: involve the relevant institutions, review the history, sign agreements, all the steps. But if we confuse the orders—if we demand abstract adjudication before basic care—we are missing what is truly human.

This is why I keep coming back to the micro-phenomenology of moral life. What matters, right now, are the moods people are in given their conditions—and how those moods open or close their capacity to respond.

Public Intellectuals in a Post-Truth Ecology

Whether we like it or not, because of the information ecology we live in, we’re in a post-truth world. Nietzsche becomes relevant here: knowledge, truth: these are perspectival things. But that doesn’t mean we throw up our hands in relativism. I like C. S. Peirce’s move: imagine a future ideal community that will have gotten a little bit further, asymptotically, toward capital-T Truth. We’re not that community now, but we can orient by it, regulate our thoughts and actions today by reference to it as a possibility. From that angle, the role of the public intellectual—if that role still exists—is probably, in most cases, to avoid polemic. You try to widen the circle: how many people who are currently disagreeing can we bring into a different kind of conversation, one that begins to converge on an actionable course that would involve less death and suffering?

But the ecology has changed. “Public intellectual” is a term from the age of print media when people read books and sat through Lincoln–Douglas debates that lasted hours. There was something called an “attention span.” Now we live in the age of social media. McLuhan already saw it—the electronic “global village”—and he didn’t promise it would be peaceful. The assumption behind our periodizations—pre-modern, modern, post-modern—is that history is progressing. The way communication technologies are unfolding suggests otherwise. We’re not necessarily on the on-ramp of progress here. In some ways we’re drifting toward techno-feudalism. Tribal consciousness is flourishing again, only now it’s memetic.

This is where we have to distinguish the public intellectual from the influencer. The influencer is trying to form a tribe; the public intellectual is trying to speak at a level that remains open and more universal. Social media fosters the personal, but in an abstracted way focused on brand and identity, while narrowing ideological bandwidth and polarizing the space of discourse. Herein lies the difference between culture and cult. Ensconced within a memetic tribe, you’re constantly fed fact-values (Latour’s “factishes” comes to mind) that confirm your expectations. You’re not challenged to think dialectically across apparent contradictions to reach higher values. It’s cognitively comfortable and intellectually deadening.

Josiah Royce offers a helpful lever to think with: communities properly form around loyalty, but there is a higher loyalty, a loyalty to loyalty as such, that lets you leave any given group for the sake of the ideal no group can monopolize. That’s what keeps communities permeable. It’s what keeps inquiry alive. It’s what distinguishes living culture from entombed cults. And it is exactly the stance we need if we’re going to navigate a post-truth total information war while avoiding memetic capture.

Individuals, Societies, and Where Creativity Happens

On the one hand, we might say that to be free and creative means you’re not habit-bound. But at the same time, for me as a human being, to do something creative at the level of thought or art or science depends on the cellular society of my body staying more or less habit-bound so that at this higher level I can be creative. Evolution is always building and sedimenting habits—what Whitehead calls societies—that then allow for more creative acts to occur, sheltered by that social habit. We have to keep that evolutionary picture in mind.

Metaphysically, Whitehead distinguishes actual entities and societies. Actual entities are individuals; societies are collectives. At the human level, I’m an individual and you’re an individual—even though, strictly speaking in Whitehead’s terms, each “person” is really an intimately related nexus of occasions. Each moment of my life history is an individual occasion of experience, even though for the purposes of legal discourse I am a legal person held accountable across a lifespan (with a statute of limitations). So “individual” can mean different things depending on whether we’re speaking legally, socially, or metaphysically.

In terms of where creativity comes into play, we have to keep all these distinctions in mind. But I wouldn’t want to let go of individual creativity in either sense. Each actual entity is a novel value entering into the universe, conforming with everything that’s come before but not determined only by what’s come before. There’s something new added: the many become one and are increased by one. Every individual human being is likewise unique; and each moment of every individual’s life is unique. No two moments are the same. The importance of individual creativity, for me, is metaphysical. It’s not just that it comes in at the level of moral or ethical theory; it’s baked into the way the universe works.

AI as Mirror, Not Agent

I don’t think AI acts. There’s no action in algorithms; it’s deduction, logic gates. Now, a human being using such tools may be different. But we have to be very careful to avoid becoming the tool of our tools. You can use it as part of a deliberative practice. What if we used the power of these technologies to shape human action toward the good? The counter-argument is: “Well, then we’re not ethical, just habituated.” But that critique already assumes ethics is an individual decision rather than the collective behavior of a group.

The question of whether a particular LLM architecture can become conscious or generally intelligent is not that interesting to me—the answer is no. Obviously not. People imagine their instance of ChatGPT or Claude has “woken up” because of some magical prompt; in those cases it’s not the AIs that are hallucinating, it’s the humans. Still, used responsibly, these large language models can be useful. I use ChatGPT for transcripts, and it’s kind of replaced Google for asking questions. It has a memory function, so it knows a lot about me—different from how a friend knows me. On some level it knows less than a human friend; on another level, depending on how I prompt it, it can be strangely neutral in the feedback it gives.

There’s a way we can use LLMs as something approaching a mirror for our own developmental progress. Not a replacement for a therapist or for real friendship, but a supplement. Because it’s an algorithm running on—let’s say—every sentence ever spoken or written and recorded on the Internet, it can return a kind of species-level feedback. That can be beneficial in our attempt to understand ourselves and the world. Of course, I could say many critical things about the AI companies—how they do everything they can to convince us we’re dealing with a real person, the humanlike voices, the anthropomorphic hype, etc. But set that aside for a moment. As a tool, used with care, it can help us see ourselves without the emotional entanglements that come with our closest relationships (as essential as those entanglements are for becoming fully human!).

Are We Human Yet? Nature, Morality, and the Anthropos

Is nature moral? Maybe not yet. Because with the human being there emerges the possibility of nature becoming moral. Or, to put it differently, maybe we’re not actually human yet—Anthropos is an ideal we’re striving toward. That ideal would mean maximal wisdom and compassion, a being capable of exercising value-attentiveness moment to moment. If we were plants, we could just stay in place and grow toward the light with no moral dilemmas. But we’re animals, and self-aware animals at that. We believe we have some sway over our actions, and for creatures like us moral action is never finally resolvable. So we keep having these conversations, internally in the lonely cavern of our own hearts and publicly (to the extent that spaces for truly public discourse and deliberation still exist).

Religions have crystallized around exemplary lives, people who seemed to realize more of that wisdom and compassion than the rest of us. We formed whole religions in response to what they did and said, and those remain signposts for what’s possible. But even the simplest rules don’t cash out cleanly—“Do unto others” assumes we’re all at the same level of moral–psychological development, and, honestly, what if you’re not very good to yourself? So I tend to fall back on virtue ethics: cultivate the dispositions that let you see clearly and act well in response to concrete once-occurrent particular situations, not by formula but by practiced attention.

An Open Future and the Possibility of Convergence

There are many wars already underway, and they’re spreading, and there’s no sign the momentum is slowing. The whole liberal project I grew up inside of—Fukuyama’s end of history, democracy and capitalism as the final solution, etc.—fell apart in my adult lifetime. I was in 10th grade on 9/11; up to that point I more or less assumed American exceptionalism, that we were the world’s policemen and everybody loved us for it. That’s gone. Dead. The future feels wide open, exciting on one level and absolutely terrifying on another.

Given that, we need to build the muscle that allows us to talk about value in a way that establishes at least the basis for convergence, if not convergence itself. Otherwise it’s a fight until the last man standing, and younger people, who haven’t lived through world wars, don’t quite realize how terrible war is. So the task is double: 1) attend first to suffering in the now (feed children, stop bombs, care for the sick), and then 2) move toward justice that acknowledges history, builds trust in institutions, and creates the context for lasting agreements—without losing the pluralistic but nonetheless metaphysical depth that keeps important values like “human rights” adequately grounded in the reality of Spirit, however we relate to it culturally.

Between inner conscience and the summoning face of the other, between stabilizing group habit and disruptive individual originality, between predator and prey, lives the Good beyond good and evil. It is not a rulebook but a living aim, only ever partially realized, and yet eternally possible. Act at first only “as if” value is cosmically real if you must. You may discover, in the acting, that it always already was.