Nnadiebube Journal of Philosophy

This paper examined rational justifications for a critical approach to human values. Particularly, it investigated how human values' strategic societal importance, the need to mediate the being-having dichotomy, divorce human value theories of linguistic ambiguities, and harmonise the conflicting and multiplicity of values are rational justifications for embarking on a critical inquiry into human values. Anchoring on critical theory, this paper argues that undertaking a critical approach to human values helps to achieve harmony amidst the multiplicity and conflicts of values and discordant value theories. This paper adopted conceptual analysis as a research design. Using this design, it decomposed the key concepts and analysed them using data drawn from previous literature archived in online and offline books, journals and datasets. The study used information relevant to the study and discarded the irrelevant information. The findings showed that human values occupy a strategic position in every society as a moral guide for humans, individually and collectively. The outcomes also revealed the need to harmonise conflicting theories of human values, bridge the being-having dichotomy, and divorce theories of human values from linguistic ambiguities towards a sustainable national human value base or template. Subsequently, this paper concluded that the success of any nation requires harmonisation of its human values in a way that minimises areas of conflict and maximises areas of concordance.

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