Our Values Rise and Fall Depending on the Issue

Part V of a series March 23, 2025

Our appetite for many of our most important values expands and contracts with the issue at hand.

They look good, feel good, when considered on their own.  Their standing is confirmed by the high marks they gained, agreed upon across party lines, in the polling done by Our Common Purpose as part of its study of American values, what about them unites and divides us, and what we might do about it.

But rarely in real life does one value come into play independent of any others. The central tenet of values pluralism, the theoretical framework on which this study is based, suggests that our values inevitably smash into one another as we try to resolve major issues.  We must choose.  How much we want of one value and correspondingly how much of the other we’re willing to sacrifice.

The progenitor of values pluralism, Isaiah Berlin, states it more eloquently: “Some of the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”

Berlin himself was fascinated by the various connotations of liberty.  Many years later, the variation on this theme that arose in Our Common Purpose’s work is the profound distinction between our freedom to act and our expectation of freedom from harm.

The latter of the two, freedom from harm, turns out to be a consistent favorite in the nationwide public opinion poll focusing on 25 key American values done in September.  The survey furnishes numerical evidence for what otherwise has been theory.  The 2,500 respondents, who mirror the characteristics of the nationwide voting population, were asked by Survey USA to answer a lengthy set of questions using a sliding scale of -100 to +100.

Freedom from harm is among the very few exceptions to the general rule stated in the opening paragraph, proving to be impervious in several head-to-head contests with other values.  While there are not enough data points to be sure about this, freedom from harm could well be America’s dominant value.

Otherwise, however, Our Common Purpose has found that the strength of many