NPR's Talk of the Nation had an interesting talk this afternoon on "family values" and for the first time I think I have some inkling of the pro-family-values set's explanation of what they think it is: principles which support the value of families - values that value the valuable. Does not sound too cryptic.  I am in a family and think it is good.   I think that people being in good families is good.  But a little scratching of the surface soon gets you into questions of what is substantively included or excluded - what is a family, what is a good family and who decides?. Those who are family-values-indifferent (which in itself shows the political success of the term despite its vacuity through the absurdity of its opposite) say it is code for something else. I suspect this might be the case but I still think I am at sea.

Leave the word "family" aside.  "Values" ultimately mean "what someone values" and it quite distinct from "morality", an organized construct with some historical legacy, and "ethics", a middle place with is both contextual and greater than the individual. I do not know how a community can have a common "values" without them either being an intellectual sham or a result of absolute homogeneity as, perhaps, the Amish have. But, even then, the Amish do not have values but morality. By reducing the moral to a values-statement, it is reduced to whatever each person you makes of it.

This is the beauty of a civic document like the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or a religious document like the Ten Commandments as it expresses civil or religious morality which allows for individual values as to the application of the moral but is not reduced to them.