We speak of human values, understanding that these special principles which guide individual behaviors are not absolute, but at the same time certain value principles are common among all the races, creeds, and conditions of mankind. Values are used for ordering and prioritizing other thoughts and principles. Conflicts of interest and commitment are all the more difficult because the values that contend within the human conscience are not always easy to isolate.
Conflict is created by the inverse ordering of certain values. The inversion is a social perception. The inversion is negatively charged by being unexpected, by secondary perceptions of indifference, and sometimes not because of complete inversion but only parallelism or contemporaneity.
Since these are matters essentially of conscience, it is expected that individuals will resolve them. At the same time, since the conflict of values is in the minds of the beholders, it is also expected that the consensus values will be stated clearly enough to be of assistance to the individual. And so they are. We have gone down these roads often enough to routinize our thinking about them.
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