I think (1) Dagon is right that if we consider a purely behavioral perspective the distinction gets meaningless at the boundaries, trying to distinguish between highly complex values vs incoherence; any set of actions can be justified via some values; (2) humans are incoherent, in the sense that there are strong candidate partial specifications of our values (most of us like food and sex) and we’re not always the most sensible in how we go about achieving them; (3) also, to the extent that humans can be said to have values, they’re highly complex.
The thing that makes these three statements consistent is that we use more than just a behavioral lense to judge “human values”.
I think (1) Dagon is right that if we consider a purely behavioral perspective the distinction gets meaningless at the boundaries, trying to distinguish between highly complex values vs incoherence; any set of actions can be justified via some values; (2) humans are incoherent, in the sense that there are strong candidate partial specifications of our values (most of us like food and sex) and we’re not always the most sensible in how we go about achieving them; (3) also, to the extent that humans can be said to have values, they’re highly complex.
The thing that makes these three statements consistent is that we use more than just a behavioral lense to judge “human values”.