Moral values occupy a contested and generative site within the depth-psychological corpus. Rather than accepting received ethical codes at face value, the tradition consistently interrogates their origins, their psychological substrates, and their adequacy for lived human experience. McGilchrist argues, with characteristic neurological precision, that moral values are not rationally derived but are pre-reflectively apprehended, rooted in right-hemisphere sensibility and corrupted whenever analytic retrospection reconstructs them according to left-hemisphere principles. Neumann presses this further from a Jungian angle, tracing how the violent separation of conscious and unconscious has exacerbated the ethical crisis of modernity, rendering inherited moral codes inadequate to the depths of psychic reality. Winnicott, from an object-relational standpoint, insists that the child’s innate moral code is fierce, primitive, and talion-bound, requiring the humanizing mediation of adult culture. Nietzsche provides the genealogical counterweight: the very instincts that morality consecrates — pity, self-abnegation — may constitute a covert will-to-nothingness. Aurobindo situates morality as a symptom of a deeper ignorance, human good and evil being irreducibly relative until consciousness rises to a level that transcends their duality. Adkins traces the structural tension in Greek moral thought between competitive and cooperative values, demonstrating how that tension corrupted ascriptions of moral responsibility from Homer through Aristotle. Across these voices, moral values emerge not as fixed norms but as psychic and cultural precipitates whose authority is always conditioned by the level of consciousness that produces them.
Moral values are not something that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any
McGilchrist argues that moral values are not products of rational deliberation but are apprehended through a deeper, pre-reflective mode associated with right-hemisphere sensibility, against which analytic reconstruction misleads.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
it is no answer to the problem of moral values to expect a child to have his or her own, and for the parents to have nothing to offer that comes from the local social system
Winnicott contends that the child’s innate moral code is primitively talion-based and requires humanization through the adult moral framework of the surrounding culture.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
human good and evil are relative and the standards erected by ethics are uncertain as well as relative: what is forbidden by one religion or another, what is regarded as good or bad by social opinion
Aurobindo contends that conventional moral values are an amalgam of relative, culturally contingent standards that fail to address the deeper psychological and spiritual root of human conduct.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
the instincts of pity, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and projected into a beyond for so long that at last they became for him ‘value-in-itself,’ on the basis of which he said No to life
Nietzsche mounts a genealogical critique of the moral values of pity and self-abnegation, identifying their elevation to absolute value as a symptomatic expression of the will’s turning against life.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
the separation between the opposites, the poles of which can be formulated in terms of conscious/unconscious, spirit/life, above/below, heaven/earth or in other symbols of a mythological, philosophical, moral or religious character, is, in itself, indispensable to the development of consciousness
Neumann situates the moral dimension within the broader depth-psychological crisis of the separation of opposites, arguing that the exacerbation of this split has proved collectively catastrophic.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting
What one age or religion or society has deemed right in morals another has decreed to be wrong. The history of European morals since the days of Plato records very violent oscillations from one extreme to another.
Evans-Wentz documents the radical historical variability of moral standards, using this relativism to support a spiritual argument that no unenlightened moral code can claim fixity.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
The duality begins with conscious life and not with matter; the world of pure Matter is neutral, irresponsible; these values insisted on by the human being do not exist in material Nature
Aurobindo locates the origin of the duality of moral values within conscious life rather than in material nature, framing ethics as a feature of developing rather than ultimate consciousness.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
the distinction between the two complexes of values is very much simplified here; but, taken with the second point above, it suffices to show the importance to a discussion of moral responsibility of the consideration of key terms of value
Adkins demonstrates that the tension between competitive and cooperative value-complexes in ancient Greek culture is the structural key to understanding how moral responsibility was ascribed.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
we have here in microcosm the tangle of values which prevailed in the Athenian law-courts and assembly, with such disastrous results
Adkins uses the Homeric chariot-race episode as a microcosm of the broader Greek tangle of competing moral value-claims whose irresolution had grave civic consequences.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
War, being an abrogation of ethical and cultural systems, recognizes no standard of good and evil.
Evans-Wentz uses the moral contradictions of war to expose the illogical and impracticable nature of collective moral standards as ordinarily conceived.
, The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting
Values are what command our allegiance. Contemporary science seems to me governed by one overarching value, and an unquestioned assumption that governs how that value is interpreted.
McGilchrist analyses how the value-commitments underlying contemporary science — specifically the avoidance of meaning — shape what is accepted as truth, illustrating how epistemic and moral values are intertwined.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Kateb argues that Arendt had a great distaste for distinctions between morality and immorality, while at the same time a fascination with questions of evil and responsibility.
The passage presents Arendt’s complex relationship to moral values, distinguishing her existential priorities from conventional moral categories while retaining a deep concern for radical evil.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
What comes from love, as Nietzsche says (with Jesus in mind), occurs beyond good and evil.
The passage maps Arendt’s five versions of morality, noting the Nietzschean point that Christian goodness as love transcends the categories of moral value altogether.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981supporting
if she prizes existential values more than moral ones, proper concern for oneself is more praiseworthy than moral concern for the suffering of others
The passage explores the tension in Arendt’s thought between existential and moral values, suggesting that her framework privileges the former in ways that complicate standard ethical priorities.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
the use of aischron to decry breaches of the quiet virtues was recent, can have possessed only slender roots in the language as yet, and, as will be seen, inevitably gave rise to serious problems
Adkins traces how the linguistic extension of shame-vocabulary to cover cooperative moral values was historically recent and structurally precarious in Greek ethical discourse.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960aside
our overvaluing of the rhetoric of power, which often seems to be the only value that gets discussed, whether it be in relation to political values, societal discourse or even the critique of works of art
McGilchrist diagnoses a contemporary cultural dereliction of vulnerable and tender values in favour of the rhetoric of power, situating this as a consequence of left-hemisphere dominance.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside