Human Values

Human values are the perceived forms of significance, importance, concern, or worth that guide evaluation, preference, judgement, and action within human life.

The concept of value is often used in many different ways. Values may refer to personal commitments, cultural ideals, political principles, religious beliefs, aesthetic preferences, or moral convictions. APS recognises these diverse expressions but seeks to identify the organisational role that values play within human life.

APS understands human values as expressions of what matters to human agents.

Values influence how individuals and communities evaluate circumstances, interpret events, establish priorities, distribute attention, and guide action. They help determine which conditions are regarded as desirable, which outcomes are considered important, and which forms of conduct become worthy of approval, criticism, support, or concern.

Human values do not arise independently of life. They emerge from evaluative capacities that are already present within living systems. Organisms continually distinguish between conditions that support or undermine persistence. Human beings inherit these evaluative capacities while also possessing forms of cognition, language, culture, selfhood, and reflective agency that allow significance to become organised in increasingly complex ways.

For this reason, APS understands human values as developments of a deeper evaluative architecture rather than as arbitrary preferences detached from biological organisation.

Human values emerge when significance becomes organised within human forms of life and begins guiding judgement, preference, interpretation, commitment, and action. Through this process, values help structure individual behaviour while also contributing to the organisation of collective life.

Values are rarely confined to isolated individuals. Human beings live within families, communities, institutions, traditions, cultures, and societies that continually shape and transmit evaluative orientations. Through communication, education, imitation, cooperation, criticism, and participation, values become socially organised and collectively sustained.

This process gives rise to shared evaluation.

Shared evaluation occurs when communities develop relatively stable ways of assessing what matters, what is important, what is worthy of concern, and what forms of conduct are appropriate. Human values therefore provide the foundation upon which more complex forms of social organisation can emerge.

Within the APS morality architecture, human values occupy the first stage of a developmental pathway:

Human Values → Shared Evaluation → Social Norms → Moral Evaluation → Morality → Ethics

This pathway does not imply that values disappear once later forms of organisation emerge. Rather, values continue to inform every subsequent stage. Shared evaluation organises values collectively. Social norms stabilise them within expectations. Moral evaluation assesses those expectations. Morality organises collective life around them. Ethics investigates and reflects upon them.

Human values therefore help explain why social life becomes evaluative rather than merely behavioural. Communities do not simply coordinate actions. They coordinate around things that matter. Values provide the significance around which collective evaluation, normative organisation, moral concern, and ethical reflection become possible.

APS consequently places human values at the beginning of the morality architecture because they identify what matters before that significance becomes organised through social evaluation.

Human values therefore illustrate a central APS principle:

Human social life is organised not only around behaviour, but around significance that has become collectively evaluable.

Through human values, significance becomes capable of guiding judgement, commitment, responsibility, moral concern, and ethical reflection, thereby contributing to the emergence of increasingly complex forms of social and moral organisation.