Values without a valuer

What is "important" in life? A commonly accepted answer is: Getting your name down in history books, bringing progress to humanity, helping people, changing things on a major scale. 
Then, there is a sub-version of what is "important": the idea of what is "successful". "Successful" means being famous, having a triple degree in something, rich, popular, good looking.

 
Even though this concept of "important" refers to an individual, and what an individual should do - What it fails to consider is the actual individual. It prescribes what is "important" to an individual while making irrelevant the actual opinion of an individual person. 

Ethics taken as duty are experienced as an end in themselves: A person is honest for the sake of being good, he does well in school for the sake of being good, he goes on a diet for the sake of being "successful" etc'.

Philosophically he views morality as duty: as a set of rights and wrongs dictated to him from something outside himself (like society or god). 

Psychologically this view of morality puts a wedge between his self esteem and desires; because he needs to choose if he wants to be good and obedient, or pursue his own desires and goals and give up being good (which means to give up self-esteem). 

Philosophically, a proper moral code depends on man's choice to live and achieve his needs. It's opposite, a moral code prescribed as duty, makes personal goals and thinking irrelevant, and is therefore improper as a guide to life (which is what ethics in essence IS).

Psychologically, the distinction between morality from choice or from duty is not between following good morality or bad morality - rather the method by which a man accepts his moral code and why he accepts it. 
Does he choose his moral code to better his life, or does he accept it unquestionably, as something above himself to live up to? 
If a man sees morality as "the good" (i.e. "this is what I should do to be good!") and not as "the good for me" ("I should do X if I want good things for myself") then he accepts morality as a matter of duty, regardless of how good the moral code is philosophically. 

The person with the first approach ("be good!") has no explanation of why these things are important. It seems to him like there is no explanation - those things simply ARE important, even though he never reached this conclusion himself nor recall ever choosing those things. His concept of "important" is divorced from his desires and ideas. 

For many it can be difficult to grasp that a proper moral code actually depends on their choice; Many of us are educated to accept what is "good" or "bad" as irrelevant to our choice and beyond our reasoning.
Kids are taught what is "important", such as; it is important to get good grades, important to keep a safe, traditional path vs. pursuing a "hopeless" dream, important to have friends, not to upset anyone, to "get along". It is important to do "great things", to have money, important to share, important to be modest, nice, etc'. All this is demanded from a child as measurement of how good he is, without providing an explanation what makes these things good for the child. Without giving him incentive or reason to choose this course of behavior himself. [Additional note at the end regarding this point]

This sort of "education" sets the psychological state of mind for having values without a valuer. To pursue "important" things that one does not enjoy and that are not part of individual self-fulfillment, rather they stand above one's self, as a test of his worth. 

What kind of psychology leads a man in one direction or the other? I find that the answer lies in the trait of selfishness. 

A selfish person is primarily motivated to achieve his own enjoyment. And unless some enjoyment logically follows in exchange for the effort of acting - he does not move an inch. When there is something he values - he does not give it up. 
A non-selfish person gives up his pleasure and his values easily if he is taught that the good is to do so.  He does not act to achieve pleasure - rather he acts in a "moral" way for the sake of not disappointing himself - for the fear of being bad or the attempt to be good, without any further purpose - without attempting to gain something of personal importance to him, something he enjoys. 

 
For example: Suppose someone enjoys romantic relationships. And some day he learns that according to an accepted ethical principle, this kind of behavior is bad. If he is selfish he will say: "To hell with this principle, it's taking away my enjoyment. Unless I understand in what way this principle is good for my life, I say to hell with it". 
The person who sees morality as duty, however, will think: "Well, to be good I must give up my pleasure from dating. Being good is more important than my pleasure". 

In what way, then, can morality be selfishly chosen? 

As we grow up we learn that a certain course of action is required to achieve the things we aim at getting. We look for some guidance for the kind of person we want to be in order to deal with the difficulties in our lives and enjoy it, we look for some ideal or role model for guidance of the kind of person we want to be. Most people do not realize that this is their first step to choose a moral code - and not what they were taught to believe is "the good". 

The correct method to choose a moral code is highly personal: It is acting as the kind of person you are inspired to be, for the sake of achieving things you enjoy. And the process of integrating a chosen moral code to one's life goes through one's ability to understand it.

 

Most of us get educated with one bad idea or another. It is therefore important to make sure what we consider as important actually serves our enjoyment and well being. 

If there is one advice I could offer someone who wants to get rid of morality from duty it would be - focus on your pleasure, use the fullest capacity of your reasoning mind to maximize your enjoyment through the whole of your life. Learn to notice what you enjoy and what you drag yourself through in order to be "good". 
One cannot chose a career or personality that are good for him and yet make him self-alienated and bored.

The purpose of morality compatible with human life is to provide us the principles to guide our lives: to teach us the kind of person we need to be in order to enjoy our lives and sustain them.

Don't give up your life for any purpose less than that. 

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[Note: to some degree, a child always acts without fully understanding the benefit of some behavior to his life. It is the role of his parents to teach him to act in a certain way. But the right way to motivate him to do it, while he learns the importance of that behavior for himself, is to give (or take) values, and not by presenting the rule as a gauge of his worth.
For example: You can motivate a child to learn to read by promising a prize. But a bad way to motivate him would be to present the activity as an end in itself: in the form of "if you learn how to read you are good and I will love you, and if you do not you are bad and I will not hug you", which teaches him that "good" and "bad" are impersonal concepts.] 

Positive vs. Negative motivation

Overall, there are two kinds of emotional motivations: pleasant (will be referred to as "positive") and painful (will be referred to as "negative"). Either a man acts to gain pleasure, or to avoid pain. These are essentially the two forms of emotional motivation man experiences. 

For example: we can be motivated to build a house out of a sense of pleasure. We can run away from a snake because of fear. We can give money to a beggar to avoid guilt, or we can buy a gift to a friend because of pleasure. We can study for a test because we are afraid to fail it, or we can read a book because we enjoy training ourselves in rational thinking. 

These examples illustrate an additional implicit understanding - that emotions are motivational force for action. 

The positive and the negative categories of emotional motivation are not meant to play an equal role in man's life.
Negative motivation is meant to help us avoid damage - to deal with disaster and prevent it. To that extent, it is an excellent servant, and useful for our lives.
Positive motivation is meant to motivate us for the rest of our actions in life, in the pursuit of values. Values such as food, house, entertainment, friends etc'. 

Take this opportunity to stop and think for a moment: Is the pursuit of such values in your life a result of positive motivation or negative one? Are you moved in your work by a sense of pleasure, or by a sense of duty? Do you do what you think is moral out of duty, or out of pleasure? 

Motivation in pursuit of values should be from positive emotions, not from negative ones.
Assuming that the pursuit of values is the norm of every day life (what we do most of the time), and disasters are exceptional and rare, motivation from negative emotions should only be present in exceptional cases of correcting a mistake, or when you try to deal with some disaster - but not on the form of daily basis.

It is important to keep in mind that negative emotions do have a significant role, too. Suppose you did something wrong, like, say, acting unjustly to a friend. You would feel guilt, and this will motivate you to correct the injustice. Acting on negative motivation in this case is proper. 
How do you decide what is proper? Reason is always the final arbiter. But listening to your emotions is an important first step to suggest an action.

So let's look at an example of improper negative motivation: forcing oneself to do well at school, because of viewing it as an instance of the virtue of productivity. Doing well at school in most cases is NOT a matter of productivity at all (because school is not fully rational), studying becomes a constant action despite boredom and pain. "If you want to be good - you must try to be a good student. To be a good student - you must learn to endure pain". 
The result is going through years of putting an effort into school because of a desire to avoid a sense of guilt and failure. 
But the process of acquiring knowledge required for your career is pursuit of a value - not an attempt to avoid disaster or correct a mistake. Is it right that instead of pleasure, all one would feel is the pain of duty and self-repression? No. Such a clash is a call to look for a mistake in one's thinking (as I learned the hard way), not a call to continue things as the day before. 

This example demonstrates how rationalism leads to living one's life under negative motivation - out of a sense of duty to obey moral principles, not out of sense of acting selfishly to achieve one's pleasure. (The rationalist idea, in this case is to decide arbitrarily that success in school has to be, regardless of its actual nature, the virtue of productivity). 

Now what would be the long-term consequence of motivation from negative emotions in pursuits of values? Over time, it destroys everything it touches.
In schools, kids are taught that they are good if they learn despite being bored. Over time the result is that they come to hate learning. Not just learning at school, but the act of putting mental effort into anything. 

As an adult, you may start with a job you dislike, training yourself over time not to notice your boredom. After enough time, you lose motivation to do any kind of work at all, even one you could have enjoyed before. How did this happen? you trained yourself to make your emotions irrelevant to your actions. You trained your subconscious to associate "work" with suffering and self-compulsion. 

If you view morality as a duty to hold yourself to - you will continually repress personal desires in order to be "in-line" with those principles. At the end of this road, you either lose sight of what "you" is, or you throw morality completely and attempt to live without principles at all. 
The pursuit of moral values, or virtues, or becoming the hero you have in your mind - should be from positive emotions.
If it is not, that is the time to stop and think - make sure you really understand the principles you attempt to live by. Make sure you can see how those principles are good for you.  

There is only so much time that negative motivation can carry a man.
This motivation is meant as a temporary assistant - not as fuel for every-day actions throughout life. This motivation is "crash and burn", its end result is always bad if used to pursue values. 
After 4 years of stress and repression I had in the technological institute I studied in, I know. 

To the extent that a society is irrational (like bad schooling system), some conflicts are bound to cross your way. 
In a dictatorship, one's actions are motivated by fear as the only possible way to function. 
But - Taking whatever existing conditions under account, try to pursue your values by the desire to gain pleasure. It is selfish. It is good. It is what makes life worth living. 

Self Esteem, confidence and Motivation

Self esteem is required for motivation. The role of self esteem, or more specifically the self esteem we feel about ourselves in specific fields is ingrained in motivation to pursue values in that field.

The reason we are built this way is because it serves our survival. For example: Suppose you're building a house with your own hands, but you know from experience that you are bad with hammering nails to the beams, you feel lack of confidence in that field: this serves to protect you from the damage you may cause (to your life and your values). Your recognition of your own ability in that field determines your emotional motivation to pursue it. On the other hand, if you're good with hunting animals or dancing, you have high confidence in your ability to pursue that value, you'd feel motivation to pursue it. When you succeed, it reinforces your confidence, and also serves as a reward. So self esteem is both a requirement and a reward for action.

This mechanism can work against you (when a mistake is involved): one example is insecurity with "hitting on" women. In this case, the mechanism of confidence<-->motivation prevents you from not hammering nails into your hands, but potentially (if a mistake is involved) also to be too afraid to hit on women or go after something you desire. 

An example of that would be someone who expects himself to succeed at something right away without a process of learning. When he would fail (and he would, since learning is always required), he would get a sense of insecurity which would dismotivate him from pursuing that activity in the future. And it would be a false conclusion about his own ability. 

Confidence by itself, feels so great, that it can be by itself an added motivation to achieve something. Doing something well, allows you to look at yourself later on as the one who created something well, and be proud of yourself (in other words have higher self esteem). Such motivation is in the background of the desire to improve and do things well (not just "get them done"). 

Self-esteem is a general form of confidence: it does not apply to the ability to achieve values in a specific field, but to living as a whole (to your ability to live). It primarily comes from how one's actions and their result stand in relation to one's principles. Confidence in many small fields integrates itself in our mind to self esteem as a total sum. 

Achieving confidence depends on achieving one's goals, and achieving one's goals depend on one's principles (among other things). 

For example, great entrepreneurs like Herbert Dow,were guided by the principle of making a living by means of creating new products, and doing it well. Dow held this principles not as a mere intellectual idea, but as a passion for creation. He was also rational - never overlooking facts, and he had the correct principles in economics. As a result, he was successful. He was confident, and his confidence grew with his success. 
His self esteem was high because he had the right principles for living, and throughout his life - his actions matched his principles. 

To the extent a person conceptualizes certain virtues as practical to his life, his self esteem will depend on the relation between his actions and what he perceives as virtues. 
If he comes to the wrong conclusions, he will not be able to achieve his goals, and he will become insecure the more years go by. 
For example, if someone believes in mystical powers, and he thinks a man's worth is measured by his ability to possess mystical powers - he will fail time and time again in achieving his goal. He may wish for a red traffic light to turn green, but it won't in most times. He may try to guess your astrology sign, but fail most of the time. And so on. Eventually, he will not be able to achieve self esteem because his principles and ideas are not in line with reality. 

Human beings think in principles. some animals learn from experience and probability (for example, a stick can pull a banana in certain situations). Human beings form ideas, concepts and principles to condense our knowledge. 

Likewise, we use principles to guide our actions, and how we live. 
And this is why self esteem depends on principles, and the relation of one's actions and their success to one's principles.