What to do when your values conflict? – part 2 in the Valuism sequence

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace 

This is the second of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, third, fourth, and fifth parts.

Pretty much all of us have multiple intrinsic values (things we value for their own sake, not merely as a means to an end). This means that sometimes our intrinsic values come into conflict. For example, you might value:

• Both achieving ambitious goals and experiencing pleasure 
• Both your family’s well-being and the well-being of all people on Earth
• Both honesty and kindness

In cases like these, it can be difficult to maximize both values because working on one takes away from the other. If you spend most of your free time pursuing fun hobbies that give you pleasure, it may be difficult to achieve your ambitious goals; if you spend all your money on nice things for your family, you won’t have anything left to give to strangers; if you seek to be honest in all your interactions, you will sometimes say things that are unkind.

In this post, I describe how I approach dilemmas like this (as seen through the lens of Valuism – my life philosophy).

Handling Conflicting Values

When you’re in a situation where your intrinsic values conflict with each other, I think it is most helpful to avoid rejecting any of the values involved – yet we often do exactly that. We may try to dismiss (or act as if we do not have) one or more of our intrinsic values, especially if our social group or the culture around us respects some of our values but not others. For instance, if you value both ambitious achievement and having a pleasurable life, but the culture around you denigrates pleasure, you may want to assign pleasure a weight of zero (i.e., you may act as if you do not value pleasure) any time that it comes into conflict with ambition.

Rather than rejecting any of your values, I think it’s usually more helpful to carefully consider how your values trade off against each other in a given scenario.

To illustrate this with another example, many people value the happiness of other people but also value speaking the truth. Sometimes these collide. If a friend of yours writes a play and asks you if you like it, but you think it is terrible, you might feel conflicted between telling the truth and saying what you think will make your friend feel happy. If you value both truth-telling and your friend’s happiness, then both are worth taking into account in the decision.

Many people who strongly value both truth and happiness would find it worthwhile (according to their values) to sacrifice a little truth to produce a lot of happiness. They might, for example, be willing to tell a white lie to protect a friend from strong negative feelings. But they may not think it worthwhile to sacrifice a lot of truth to produce just a little happiness, for instance, by making up an elaborate lie just to make a friend feel slightly happier.

Intrinsic values can be difficult to compare – they may at first seem simply incommensurable or uncompromising. But in practice, we do often have value clashes like this in life, and so, whether implicitly or explicitly, we are forced to make tradeoffs between our values. I take the view that you should recognize when these conflicts arise and reflect carefully on which intrinsic values you value more in the given circumstance.

So when presented with such a scenario pitting the happiness of a friend against truth-telling, it can be useful to ask yourself: how much truth am I willing to give up for how much of a friend’s happiness? There is no logically correct answer to this question – finding the answer will involve paying close attention to your intuition (and, in particular, the part of your mind that assigns values to states of the world). Your intuition may be aided by thought experiments, such as:

• If I had to tell a much more severe lie, but doing so would give my friend only as much happiness as is involved in this situation, would it be worth it in that case?
• If my friend were to be made much happier than they are in this scenario, would it be a no-brainer that it is worth it to tell this small lie?

By pushing the boundaries of the scenario with thought experiments such as these, it can bring the relative strengths of your values to light.

The Subtlety of Values

The process of reflecting on the relative strength of your intrinsic values is subjective because you’re drawing on a subtle operation of your mind: the ability to assign value to different states of affairs. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to work out precise “units of exchange” for your intrinsic values, such as: “I value one happy day for a family member the same as one happy year for a stranger.” That’s okay because you can almost always make decisions without needing such precision. Furthermore, these units are unlikely to be constant anyway. And in cases where both sides of the equation seem nearly equally balanced from a values perspective, that may merely indicate that it doesn’t matter which choice you choose (from the point of view of your intrinsic values).

Empirically, I’ve observed that people’s values often seem to obey a form of diminishing marginal returns: if they try to let one value dominate over the others, the pull of other values becomes stronger. For instance, imagine you intrinsically value working towards your long-term goals, but you also intrinsically value your own happiness. You push yourself really hard at work so as to achieve your goals, but this makes you unhappy. At this point, your intrinsic value of happiness may start to gain more strength when you reflect carefully on what you value. This quirky property of values is not necessarily how you’d design a value-seeking robot, but I think it’s how many of us humans seem to work. 

A Values-Informed Decision-Making Process

I’ve observed that some of the most difficult decisions to make are ones where multiple values we care a lot about are pitted against each other (whether we realize that’s what is happening or not). In my experience, though, we can often make really hard decisions easier if we look at them through a values lens.

Here’s a step-by-step procedure you may find useful for decisions involving conflicts in your intrinsic values.

Step 1: Identify which of your intrinsic values are at play in the decision. It may help to write down a list of these values of yours that are at play. It may help to have a look at the intrinsic values wheel.

Step 2: Reflect on the relative importance of those intrinsic values to you (e.g., by using thought experiments to tease out how they trade off against each other – e.g., “would this decision be easy if one of the values wasn’t at stake?” or “would this decision be easy if one of the values was being sacrificed a bit more?”).

Step 3: Brainstorm different actions that you could take in this scenario. During brainstorming, it’s usually best to withhold judgment – just get all the ideas out that you can. Some potentially useful brainstorming prompts to try are: “what is an action that would support just one of my values?” and “is there a win-win action that looks good from the point of view of all the values of mine that are at stake?” and “is there a compromise action I could take that is pretty good from the point of view of all my values even if it isn’t ideal from the point of view of any of them?”

Step 4: Evaluate how good each action looks from the perspective of each of your relevant intrinsic values.

Step 5: Select among the actions based on how well they achieve your intrinsic values overall, attempting to take into account all the relevant intrinsic values of yours and the relative importance of each of those values to you.

As an example, recently, a friend came to me when stuck deciding between two options related to one of their relationships. After talking it through carefully, we decided that what made it so hard was that:

• Option 1 looked good from the perspective of their intrinsic values of honesty and loyalty, while

• Option 2 was better for helping them achieve their own long-term goals.

Once we had figured that out together, my friend reported feeling more clarity about the situation. Now, at least, they had a clear idea about what the tradeoffs involved were.

Thankfully, with some brainstorming, we were able to craft a third option for what to do that was able to preserve a substantial amount of all of their intrinsic values that were at stake.

Common Pitfalls

Here are some values-related mistakes I think are common during decision-making that it may be useful to be on the lookout for:

• Not noticing which intrinsic values of yours are at stake in the situation. For example, it’s easy to anchor on trying to figure out which is the “right” or “good” choice rather than reflecting on what the tradeoffs between the choices are (according to your own values) or focusing on the values of those around you rather than your own values. For instance, you might choose to cover up for your friend who has done a bad thing because of a heuristic you have that it’s the “right” thing to do, even though covering up for your friend, in this case, involves betraying other important intrinsic values you have.
• Completely dismissing one or more intrinsic values of yours that are at stake rather than balancing them based on careful consideration of how important they each are to you. For instance, you might assign no weight to your intrinsic value of having a pleasurable life.
• Not generating enough options for what choice to pick and anchoring on just the most obvious options or the ones you came up with first. For instance, you might frame a decision as “quit your job” or “stay in your role” without considering possibilities like “renegotiate your role at your job” or “transfer internally at the same company.”
• Choosing based only on what is instrumentally valuable, even when misaligned with your intrinsic values. For instance, you might choose based on what gets you the most money rather than based on what produces the most of what you intrinsically value.

So remember: the next time you’re in a difficult decision-making scenario, you may find it useful to reflect on what intrinsic values of yours are at stake, and you may want to consider using a step-by-step process for incorporating your values into the decision, such as the one outlined above.

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You’ve just finished the second post in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – click here to go to the third post.