A clear conscience never fears midnight knocking.

Chinese proverb

Our capacity to have values is universal. A person who lacks the faculty to value would not be a person.

We differ, of course, in the values themselves – the products or constructs of our valuing minds. Our values are reflections of our ideas of what is morally good or right: they supply us with the moral principles for our conduct in life.

The depth mind is the seat of conscience, the rather specialized faculty that tells you – often retrospectively – that you have done something very wrong.

Far from it being a bad conscience, as it is sometimes called, it is a good conscience doing its proper work.

Whether or not you choose to respond to what your depth mind dictates is a secondary issue. The result of not heeding your conscience is that its loud call becomes a whisper, and one day you will not hear it at all.

I suggest that the depth mind can analyze and value as well as synthesize. In the former respect it can be compared to your stomach, which contains powerful enzymes that can break down the meals it is fed. The analogy of digestion, the process of making food absorbable by dissolving it and breaking it down into simpler chemical compounds, seems especially apt.

With regard to valuing, it is again impossible to be precise about what goes on. What is clear, however, is that our values inhabit our deeper minds and are often obscure to us until we do something or have to choose between two alternatives.

Rationally we may believe (quite rightly) that decisions should be made on the basis of our values. Nevertheless, it is often the case that the decision comes first, and that tells us something about what our values really are.

That is why you should judge an organization’s values not by any written or oral declaration of them, but by what the organization actually does. By their fruits you shall know them.

There is another related phenomenon here, namely that sometimes and for some people the very act of decision in itself seems somehow to confer value – ‘Because I have chosen Smith as branch manager he must be good’ or, at a more serious level, ‘Because we decided to invade Iraq it must have been the right thing to do.’

Valuing is a human faculty – we all have it. What we call our values constitute one of the results of exercising this faculty. They differ widely, of course, because we as societies and individuals vary so much too.