words

George Carey, our scholarly archbishop, has been saying how important it is that society should nurture its values. "Without values," he declared last week, "such as trust, honesty, consideration for other people, love of justice and peace, there can be no individual liberty." And so say all of us, except that it was odd to hear them called values. His predecessors would almost certainly have called them virtues. But Dr Carey prefers the language of sociology to that of the Church: values and morals, he says, need "a continuous process of modelling, discussion and internalisation" leading to "a major step forward in empowering schools". Note internalisation, a sociological term for (if I have the vocabulary right) the individual acceptance of normative values, and empowered, a word increasingly in vogue among progressive carers and politicians. (By their words ye shall know them.)

The point about values, though, is that its use here by the archbishop is inaccurate and unhelpful, because a value is a measure of how much something is worth whereas he is taking it to mean an absolute quality in the thing being valued. We value - put a high value on - trust, honesty etc, but they are not in themselves values.

You may say none of this matters if we know what he means; but it does matter, for by using values he is obscuring his own argument, which is that there are "some things that are absolutely good", or pretty well universally shared. Yet the most obvious thing about value judgments is that they are not universally shared, and are a matter of individual taste and prejudice. And individual taste and prejudice are just what Dr Carey, as a religious leader, has been thundering against; as he said last week, society needs "standards that transcend the individual".

I suppose he thought the word virtue had too old-fashioned a ring - for Anglican prelates must on no account appear old-fashioned, must they?

Nicholas Bagnall