What values are unique to families and don't apply elsewhere?
I thought we had a policy here that one can't turn questions around on the questioner?
But taking a crack at it, to your list of virtues, which I consider basic virtues all people should aspire to whatever their family status, I would add several that are distinctly family values. The primary one is to convert your list, which is primarily oriented to personal behavior, and recast it with a particular concern for the right education (in the broad sense) of the next generation. This involves a concern for moral behavior not only for its own sake but for its influence on children.
For example, while adults may in some societies have the right to "enjoy" pornography, strip joints, sexually graphic films, films with gratituous violence, and the like, these do not create a constructive environment, "family values" advocates would assert, for raising children, and so the community should deny itself these "pleasures" for the sake of the next generation of society. Or if not deny outright, at least discourage, shuffle off into dark corners, and denigrate, those who insist on engaging in them.
In the Republic, Plato speaks of the education of children, and condemns what in their day was the poet of gratituous violence, Homer. I consider that a family values comment. Plato wanted society to give up things that were not good for it for the sake of raising the best children the society could raise.
There are tons of examples I don't have time or energy to list. But the key, I think, to family values, at least in principle, is a focus not as you did on certain individual aspects of moral behavior but on the effect of conduct, behaviors, and productions of society (books, records, movies, etc.) on the impressionable young and opposing those things which, while perhaps they could responsibly be handled by adults, cannot responsibly be handled by children. |
