When scrutinizing an argument, one good heuristic is to focus on vague words like “many” and aim for a more robust version. The argument has several such words: “many” in #1, “strongly” and “many” in #3, “full of” in #4, “most” in #5.
For instance, does “many of my moral values” stand for 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99% of your values in that argument? How strong an impression does the argument make on you depending on which of these rough quantifiers you substitute for “many”? (Subsidiary question—when talking about “your values”, how many distinct things are we talking about?)
The “nature” vs “nurture” debate is just as vigorous in the philosophy of morals as it is regarding intelligence, so any of the above answers is probably held by some fraction of the population to be at least defensible.
Even the phrase “Christian values” is a potentially slippery one, allowing much shifting of goal posts. So the argument should probably start by unpacking that phrase into a more definite list. (Do we mean the Ten Commandments? Of these I recognize about three as describing “my values”, which would falsify #3 as far as I’m concerned.)
Similarly you would be on a better footing to evaluate this argument if you had, as Alicorn suggests, an explicit list of what you think your values are.
When scrutinizing an argument, one good heuristic is to focus on vague words like “many” and aim for a more robust version. The argument has several such words: “many” in #1, “strongly” and “many” in #3, “full of” in #4, “most” in #5.
For instance, does “many of my moral values” stand for 1%, 10%, 50%, 90% or 99% of your values in that argument? How strong an impression does the argument make on you depending on which of these rough quantifiers you substitute for “many”? (Subsidiary question—when talking about “your values”, how many distinct things are we talking about?)
The “nature” vs “nurture” debate is just as vigorous in the philosophy of morals as it is regarding intelligence, so any of the above answers is probably held by some fraction of the population to be at least defensible.
Even the phrase “Christian values” is a potentially slippery one, allowing much shifting of goal posts. So the argument should probably start by unpacking that phrase into a more definite list. (Do we mean the Ten Commandments? Of these I recognize about three as describing “my values”, which would falsify #3 as far as I’m concerned.)
Similarly you would be on a better footing to evaluate this argument if you had, as Alicorn suggests, an explicit list of what you think your values are.