ARE VALUES SUBJECTIVE, CULTURAL OR UNIVERSAL?

 Name: Alejandra Torres

 Teacher’s name: Miss. Mariza Álvarez.

 Subject: Language

 Date: January 06, 2014.

ARE VALUES SUBJECTIVE, CULTURAL OR UNIVERSAL?

“I hope the day comes, where in Ecuador emotional skills are taught in the same way that people teach math and language skills.”

-Daniel Goleman-

We all want to be something when we grow up, but the question is; do we know how to be a human? Many of us do not know, we do not even know ourselves as well as we thought, but gradually our different sides appear, the dark one, the neutral that fills us with doubts, or maybe the one which illuminates more than a sunbeam. It’s just amazing how one person can be the mixture of millions of positive and negative aspects. Did someday us just stop and think? Which our values and anti-values are? Such a common and simple words, but them builds us, defines us and change the paths of our lives in seconds.

By searching on the internet for the definition of the word “VALUES”, I found millions of them, long, short, complicated and simple, the one that caught my attention was: Principles or standards of Behavior.

But there is a very popular phrase that helped me to understand better the meaning and the importance of our values and anti-values: "A man reaps what he sows”. When I hear this, I just imagine that our whole life is like a big field where we reap the good and bad vegetables; we have sown in our way.

But here comes the question that has been around in my head for more than 2 weeks, and honestly I cannot even answer with the security that I’m right. ARE VALUES SUBJECTIVE, CULTURAL OR UNIVERSAL? This is the topic of my essay and if I delay in writing was sincerely because I have never reach a conclusion or a single answer, I just based on what I've experienced, learned and seen in my 16 years of life.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, and your values become your destiny.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

When we talk about values, and where we take them, we can think of several factors like family, our daily living, friends, strangers, our human rights, television, the place where we live, religion, among others, but we are the ones able to acquire or not the values and put them into practice every day, for this reason I venture to say that them are subjective, cultural and universal at once.

It is impossible to imagine a person separate from the world, and the environment. Martin Heidegger used the term "dasein" to define humans as "beings- in the- world", because we will always be linked to the cultural, geogr aphical, social and historical.

Well, since we are born, we start learning the customs of our family, their values, what is good for them and what does not. And not only depends on them, but the place where we grow up, because in every corner of the world we will find different customs, that makes unique each location.

It's as simple as that, we are like little sponges absorbing: lessons and experiences that cannot always be good, but are part of us and part of what surrounds us.

We know perfectly that human rights didn't

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