Keywords

1 Introduction: Objectives and Structure

As ‘values’ is the generic term of the European Values Study (EVS), the concept of values forms the ‘umbrella’ under which this volume presents basic research on the relationship between values, politics, and religion from the perspective of various disciplines of values research. But the concept of values is ambiguous and polysemous and can take on different functions or serve different interests.

This chapter aims to raise awareness of the problems surrounding this complex term and wishes to contribute to its differentiated understanding and a more sensitive usage – especially in public and political discourses – by providing academic reflections, findings, and materials using an interdisciplinary approach. Because of the ambiguity fundamentally inherent in the concept of values, we refrain from rash systematisations and syntheses. An overall definition of the concept of values would also contradict the heterogeneous definitions presented in this volume, as the various values research disciplines contributing to it are based on diverse concepts of values.

The aims of this contribution are realised in three steps:

In a first step, we present the concept of values of the EVS and discuss the usage difficulties that have been revealed during our study. From this discussion, we derive the character and concerns as well as the possibilities and limits of our project. The second step offers a thematical problem outline. We present the tensions and questions around the concept of values discussed by our team of authors and experts when reflecting our empirical results,Footnote 1 including a reflection on the understanding of ‘European values’ and the relationship between values and religion. In the third step, we address the question of how academic values research from the perspective of different disciplines can contribute to a deeper understanding of values and present selected definitions and theories. Finally, we conclude by drawing some exemplary consequences from the discussion.

2 The Concept of Values in the Context of Our Volume

This volume focuses on empirical studies based on the data of the EVS 1990–2017, with a special focus on the impact of religious attitudes and values on political attitudes and values. The empirical findings are embedded in contributions that reflect specific aspects of the relationship between ‘values’, ‘politics,’ and ‘religion’ from the perspective of hermeneutic and normative academic disciplines.

To make the differences between the disciplines recognisable, the authors of the volume were not given a normative concept of values by which to orientate themselves when preparing their contributions. In this way, we wanted to do justice to the range and heterogeneity of the respective approaches. As we assume that any substantial interdisciplinary research requires the making visible of differences and conflicts between the individual disciplines before any systematising, we wanted to ensure that the specific contribution of each discipline to values research became as clearly visible as possible. Recognising and confronting differences and a deeper understanding of the different approaches can then open spaces to let those questions, discussions, and desiderata – that future values research must face – emerge.

Thus, the present volume has an explorative, inductive, and interdisciplinary character. The results reveal how deep mutual ignorance, reservations, and rifts between empirical and hermeneutic-normative disciplines still are. The questions arising during the process of the study document the urgent need for further and qualified interdisciplinary collaboration. Particularly in discussions on the relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘religion’, the ambiguity of the concept of values creates more confusion than orientation and raises countless questions while demanding clarification, because all three terms – ‘values’, ‘politics’, and ‘religion’ – are contested concepts.

For example, the term ‘religion’ can refer to individual religious self-understanding (‘religiosity’), to religious communities or institutions, or to the psychological, social, or political functions of those communities or institutions (Figl 2003: 62–81). ‘Politics’, in turn, can have a normative, a descriptive, or a functional meaning. It can, for example, be defined normatively as ‘the totality of the activities to prepare and produce decisions that are binding for society as a whole and/or that are oriented towards the common good and that benefit society as a whole’ (Meyer 2003: 41). But the term can also just describe different dimensions of political acting such as the distribution of resources, opportunities for participation, and power, and can then be broken down to ‘polity’ (political structures), ‘politics’ (political processes), and ‘policy’ (political content) (Rohe 1994).

The EVS has a very traditional understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’. While the concept of politics refers to political attitudes based on theories of liberal democracies, the concept of religion focuses on religious self-understanding and religious practices. The latter has its origins in a traditional Christian understanding of religiosity. Even if these understandings explain critical queries – that is, whether they adequately reflect the contemporary transformations of the religious and political field in Europe (see Polak, Chap. 14, this volume) – they are comparatively clearly defined for our research purposes.

In contrast, the concept of values raises innumerable questions. Massive criticism has been expressed because of the indeterminacy and ambiguity of this concept, particularly by those authors who contributed to our volume from a hermeneutic-normative approach.

In light of these difficulties, this volume is based on the premise that the EVS provides essential empirical findings that should also be recognised by non-empirical values research disciplines to root their hermeneutical and ethical reflections also in empirical findings. In turn, we are convinced that the critical perspective – of cultural studies, social ethics, philosophy of law, economics, religious education, philosophy, and theology – on the social science findings opens a dialogue that could improve empirical research.

This volume documents the initial steps in such a dialogue. Thus, the heterogeneous concepts of values of the individual disciplines sometimes collide and reveal the need to raise more academic and political awareness of both the problematic nature of the concept of values and its rich potential to stimulate academic, social, and political discourses on values. In the chapter ‘Conclusions, Consequences, Challenges’ (Polak, Chap. 14, this volume), we will identify exemplary areas of further discussion. We wish to initiate debates, not to conclude them. Defining values once and for all would not only contradict our practical-theological self-image, according to which the strength of academic values research lies in the independence of the heterogenous approaches and findings, but it would also contradict one of the results of this volume: that above all it is the ambiguity of the concept of values that can motivate and stimulate societies to implement, reflect, reinterpret, reargue, and relegitimise their values – a duty that must be fulfilled by democratic societies time and again to keep values alive and justifiable. We agree with Wim Weymans (Chap. 3, this volume), who thinks that the very ‘messiness’ of the contested term can contribute to those necessary value debates that Europe needs in an era of multiple crises.

However, from an ethical approach and from the perspective of European values, the tension between the results from the EVS and the normative understanding of European values can be perceived as a weakness. This was previously criticised when we published the results of the EVS 2010 (Moser 2013). But when the European Values Systems Study Group (EVSSG) began this project, it ‘made no grand claims for any unified theory of human values’ (Arts and Halman 2011: 79). Rather, the then called EVSSG had ‘one grand theoretical idea, that is that European value patterns constitute systems’ (Arts and Halman 2011: 79) – an idea that was refuted by the results of the first survey in 1981 and resulted in the development of social scientific theories on values long before the European Union proclaimed its normative values. Additionally, this tension can also be seen as a strength that is inherent in the complexity of interdisciplinary values research, because interdisciplinary values research deliberately situates itself on several levels and distinguishes between (a) an ‘empirical-descriptive level’ that documents ‘what is the case’; (b) an ‘explicative-theoretical’ level that interprets ‘how this can be explained’; (c) a ‘normative level’ that reflects ‘what should be the case’; and (d) a ‘pragmatic’ level that asks ‘what consequences result from this’ (cf. the relation model between (social) sciences and policymaking of Arts and Halman 2011: 96–97).

In our volume, the contributions from the social sciences correspond to levels (a) and (b), the contributions from the hermeneutic and normative sciences offer exemplary approaches to level (c), and the contributions in the section ‘Future Perspectives’ (Chaps. 12, 13, and 14, Part IV of this volume) outline elements of level (d). Because of its explorative character, this volume cannot provide a comprehensive synthesis. This is an outstanding desideratum. But the tensions within our volume reflect all the problems that explicitly and implicitly characterise the controversial discourses on values that have shaped public and political discourse in the European Union for several decades. During our research process, we were able – with our teams of authors and experts – to outline those thematic fields in which further debate both in and between academia, society, and politics is needed. This volume hopefully provides a stimulating academic resource for such debates.

3 Thematical Problem Outline

We now list some of the thematic fields in which further discussion is necessary.

3.1 The Relevance of Empirical Values Research

For 40 years, the EVS has been offering comprehensive mapping and theories on the values landscape of the European population. For nearly the entire duration of this long-term EVS project, it has been criticised for its lack of a clear definition of the concept of values. Although the EVS makes no normative claim, this criticism may be justified. For example, respondents can only take a position on attitudes and issues given to them as ‘values’ without recourse to a guiding understanding of values. The acceptance or rejection of abstract ethical norms such as ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’ only come into view indirectly or not at all. For example, the results do not tell us what the respondents understand by freedom or solidarity, how they argue their attitudes, or whether normative values provide ethical orientation for decisions. Thus, with a few exceptions (for example, solidarity or democracy), the EVS provides little insight into explicit agreement with the normative values of the European Union. In turn, the narrow concept of religion does not allow us to provide any theories regarding the field of the so-called new spiritualities, which have become established as an autonomous field of religion in Europe during the socioreligious transformation of recent decades.

Moreover, the question may arise as to what kind of ‘reality’ the results describe. Are the researched values those that people really orient themselves to in their lives, or do the results only represent the behavioural response to values arising from given theories? In turn, what concept of values guides the theories on which the selected attitudes are based? In addition, little research has been done into whether actions are associated with the respective attitudes in everyday life. Moreover, in some social science interpretations, a guiding normative concept of values can be implicitly recognised alongside a descriptive one – for example, when a liberal understanding of democracy becomes recognisable as an implicit guiding concept (Pickel and Pickel, Chap. 5, this volume), or when the EVS presupposes that political attitudes should be guided by values, which is not considered consensual, either empirically or theoretically (see the criticism of Grümme, Chap. 13, this volume). In some other international social science projects, such as the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP 2018), such normative goals are even explicitly stated – for example, when values research is explicitly placed in the service of promoting social justice worldwide. Should social scientists be guided by values in their research, and how do they justify this? Is this made sufficiently transparent? And is it even possible to conduct social research free from (personal) values?

Despite this diffuse understanding of values and the justified questions, the EVS offers relevant results that the hermeneutic-normative sciences should also perceive and take seriously for several reasons. On the one hand, the vagueness of the understanding of values offers plural respondents starting points for expressing their attitudes. This openness might also explain the success of the concept of values, and not only in values research. It offers an umbrella under which ethical discourse can be conducted in a time of ethical pluralism without using the socially disavowed concept of morality, which many people associate with repressive moralising. On the other hand, the character of a replication study, which surveys the same attitudes over decades, reveals long-term dynamics and tendencies and thus value transformations. This does justice to the fact that values belong to those dimensions of culture that usually change only very slowly in core areas such as religion and politics. Finally, the attitudes to given values researched by the EVS are not based on arbitrary selection but on recognised social science theories, such as the theories of modernisation, individualisation, pluralisation, or secularisation. These have interpreted social value transformations for decades and have thus shaped the everyday discourses of the European population. In this way, the EVS provides insights into aspects of the reality of values in Europe and documents what the respondents think about those value-laden topics that are negotiated in scientific, political, media, and other public discourses. Even if this raises the question of the mutual influences and power relations between everyday discourses and expert discourses, these findings should also form an essential starting point for hermeneutic-normative values research – precisely because of their power. As Arts and Halman state (2011: 97–98): ‘Philosophers and theologians therefore cannot confine themselves to evaluating and influencing the principles and values of politicians and policymakers but they also have to know what is in the minds of the people.’

Admittedly, following Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of empirical social research and especially attitude research (Adorno 1972), the empirical results of the EVS are not ‘facts’ in the sense of immediate and objectively measurable data. But precisely because of their scientific form of power, they constitute an effective dimension of value reality and massively influence value debates. However, because from an ethical perspective the results can be misguided, they require a (self-)critical interpretation and assessment by critical social theories and normative sciences. Otherwise, empirical values research runs the risk of merely duplicating or (unintentionally) legitimising unethical world views or of being instrumentalised or even misused. Without (self-)criticism, empirical values research would contribute to a scientifically based manipulation of the masses (Adorno 1972).Footnote 2 As modern societies – and in particular politicians – are more likely to trust ‘data’ than hermeneutically complex theories or reflections of the humanities, this interdisciplinary research seems more urgent than ever.

Therefore, because empirical values research is a powerful actor in social and political discourses, its relevance should also be recognised and critically reflected upon by the hermeneutic-normative sciences. Embedded in interdisciplinary dialogues, the EVS can – like any other science – be one important instrument of self-enlightenment (Heinrich 1987).

The empirical findings of the EVS thus have an ambivalent potential. They can take on a critical function for society and move the hermeneutically normative sciences with their tendency towards the ideal to ground their theoretical-abstract approaches in reality that can be found. But without the collaboration with hermeneutic-normative sciences, they can be misused for interests other than the scientific, as methodologically they have no genuinely ethical theories at their disposal for the evaluation of their data. The ethical orientation of the individual researcher is not sufficient for ethical reflection. In turn, hermeneutic-normative scientists can sharpen their critical potential by arguing with empiricism.

This interdisciplinary cooperation becomes particularly explosive when the respondents reveal values that lack ethical judgement, or when politicians derive the actions they should take directly from the mere empirical results, especially when they orientate themselves based on majority views: for example, when the legitimacy of an anti-migration policy is derived from predominantly negative attitudes towards migrants. Without a normative critique of the results, social sciences cannot determine or justify whether such a policy is ethically justifiable, and why that is so.

3.2 The Normative Question: Ethical and Unethical Values?

Social sciences do, of course, have detailed definitions and theoretical accounts of the concept of values and refer to hermeneutic-ethical theories in theory building (for details, see section “Sociological approaches” in this chapter). Research, however, concentrates primarily on the normative or structural function of values in social contexts and the associated content and empirical manifestations. The results do not claim to be normative. Therefore, social science research on values provides information on which values societies orient themselves towards and further offers theories on how this can be understood in the context of social developments. But from a hermeneutic – especially a philosophical, ethical, and theological – perspective, such an understanding of values admittedly entails problems.

The results can be misunderstood as ‘facts’ without considering that the descriptive representations are interpreted reality shaped by theoretical presuppositions and decisions, and sometimes implicitly normative ones. For example, attitudes towards religious values can be reduced to the dimension of content and ritual, while the political ideas of religious people are not considered constitutive of a religious self-understanding. From the perspective of religious studies and theology, such a reduced approach would be highly insufficient. For Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, justice and freedom are genuinely religious values – that is, they are founded in faith, they are of normative character and consequently (should) shape the political behaviour of the believers.

Furthermore, the respondents can also represent values that contradict normative values such as those of the European Union: they can reject gender justice or tolerance towards minorities and plurality; they can advocate for the preferential treatment of men (for example, in the labour market), or for the exclusion of immigrants from participation in public goods; or they can vote for culturally homogeneous societies. Can such results then still be called values? Or would one have to develop a separate category to describe such attitudes? Are there values that from a normative point of view are not worthy of being called values? And what are normative as opposed to non-normative values?

With these questions, the ethical, philosophical, and theological critique of empirical values becomes necessary. Human values in the sense of an empirical description can differ significantly from normative human values, which refer to a normatively understood humanity and are formulated from the perspective of human rights or ethics, which always aim at universal validity and commitment. If, for example, the EVS shows a high level of rejection of immigrants and Muslims in some regions of Europe (see Pickel and Pickel, Chap. 5; Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6; Aschauer, Chap. 12, this volume), it can be concluded that many respondents do not share central values of the European Union. Conversely, can the values that possibly underlie them, such as nationality or cultural homogeneity, still be called values if they have an obvious anti-humanist tendency? Or could this rejection also be based on other values not asked about in the EVS, such as the appreciation of one’s own history, culture, and homeland, which do not have to be eo ipso anti-humanist?

The question of normativity also becomes precarious in the case of value conflicts that can result from the various political value cleavages between Eastern and Western Europe documented in this volume (see Pickel and Pickel, Chap. 5; Aschauer, Chap. 12, this volume). As value conflicts are part of the normality of a pluralistic Europe, normative criteria are needed, based on which value conflicts can be discussed and resolved to enable action. Are such criteria then not normative values in their own right? Do they themselves require normative ideas to judge them? The ambiguity and vagueness of the concept of values tests the limits of the concept and challenges its suitability and applicability for ethical, legal, and political decisions. Therefore, neither an exclusive recourse to values nor a pure semantics of values is of help for value conflicts. A differentiated clarification of what values are is needed, along with valid and binding norms.

A cultural studies perspective also exacerbates the problem of unclarified value concepts. The genesis and use of the concept of values, as used by the European Union (see Chap. 3, this volume), documents how the mere recourse to the concept of values is unsuitable for either the analysis or the solution of ethical, political, or legal conflicts. The understanding of European values is inseparably linked to historical constellations and political interests and goals. Thus, a cultural-historical approach intensifies the normative question.

So, too, does a historical perspective, which also obliges a normative-critical examination of the concept of values. Even if the totalitarian regimes of National Socialism and communism did not explicitly use the concept of values, they did refer to values such as loyalty, honour, comradeship, community, or homeland, in whose name unspeakable crimes against humanity were committed, above all the Shoah. This historically unique crime was accompanied by relativisation, abolition, and perversion of the human ability to distinguish between good and evil, law and unlaw (Arendt 2018/1963) and turned discrimination, exclusion, and murder into values.

Bearing this in mind, values research must be called upon to pay more attention to the darker sides of values and to approach the concept of values from a critical distance. According to Zygmunt Bauman (1994), social sciences in particular must acknowledge appropriate consequences from the fact that mass murders of millions took place, legitimised by the invocation of values – a process of self-reflection that has not yet taken place.

In this volume, some basic information on philosophical, ethical and juridical understanding of values will be presented (see section “Philosophical and ethical approaches” in this chapter; also Mandry, Chap. 9; Konrath, Chap. 11; Grümme, Chap. 13, this volume). However, juxtaposing different perspectives on the topic of values raises another essential question. How do empirical and normative values relate to each other? Some academic answers will be given in section “Philosophical and ethical approaches”. But to be able to take the next step of intertwining the results, the respective guiding substantive and methodological pre-understandings of the individual disciplines would have to be made transparent and discussed. Only then can the heterogeneous approaches be intertwined in a theory-guided discourse. During our research process, we became painfully aware that there is a lack of places and projects for such a substantially interdisciplinary discourse in a highly differentiated and specialised scientific landscape with its subject-specific logics. An ethical assessment of our empirical results is therefore reserved for further study.

3.3 The Question of Universal Values

Closely connected to the question of normative values is the question of universal values, that is, values that are universally valid and binding for ‘everyone’. The EVS clearly documents that the European values landscape regarding religious and political attitudes is highly pluralised, fragmented, and polarised. In particular, the findings on attitudes to democracy, solidarity, diversity, or the influence of individual religiosity on political attitudes suggest that respondents’ acceptance of universal values such as human rights, which should apply to all, is guided more by sociodemographic, regional, and historical factors than by universal ethical principles, and is thus precarious. Claims on the acceptance of universal values by the respondents, which an ethical approach aims at just as much as the values of the European Union or human rights do, can therefore only be assumed, not proved based on the EVS.

Thus, our volume has made clear the necessity of taking a closer look at the universal dimension of values in the future. From an ethical point of view, universality in this context means the general validity of ethical concepts, norms, principles, virtues, and values that can be justified by theoretical and practical reason, independent of the consent of the individual and their biographical, social, cultural, or other characteristics, and connected with a normative claim to apply to everyone (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume). Such universality underlies, for example, human rights (see Coudenhove-Kalergi, Chap. 10, this volume) or Christian ethics, which are both based on normative values such as the dignity of each human being or the equality of all human beings. In their self-image, the so-called European values also see themselves as universally valid values – a claim that is, of course, not only critically questioned from a historical and post-colonial perspective (see section “Overview”; also, Mishra 2017) but is also rejected by some religious representatives (see, for example, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam from 1990). Additionally, empirical findings suggest that the approval of universal values can also be expressed in culturally formatted, particular forms and that a plurality of values does not automatically indicate the rejection of a universal ethical orientation (see IPSP 2018: 41–57). If, however, the values of the European Union are normatively used as a basis for evaluating the empirical findings of the EVS, a discussion on the justification of the universality of these values seems indispensable. For example, whether and why the European normative value of democracy must necessarily be understood universally in its liberal form, or whether other varieties of democratic understanding could also correspond to this universal requirement, could be discussed. For even in the case of a fundamental recognition of universal values, the question arises as to how these values can be realised concretely in both spatial and temporal terms – that is, how they can find expression in individual or regional political decisions (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume).

However, if one shares Zygmunt Bauman’s assessment that humanity is currently facing challenges of ‘planetary proportions’ (Bauman 2015: 70–73), there is no alternative to the recognition of universal values such as equality or freedom, solidarity, and justice for all people. In light of the climate catastrophe that is already occurring, global migration or the economic domination of a few privileged sections of humanity over the mass of the deprived – as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in the Ukraine – are a call for universal values.

The EVS leads to the assumption that a significant part of Europe is not yet ready for such a universal orientation. Also, Zygmunt Bauman sees ‘frighteningly low chances’ (Bauman 2015: 70) of developing universal compassion or even ‘global solidarity’. Nevertheless, he states that the attempt to struggle for a universal orientation is ‘a must’ (Bauman 2015: 71), because it is a matter of life and death and the ‘naked survival of the human species’ (Bauman 2015: 73) is at stake. According to Bauman, Europe’s unique history puts it in a ‘better position than any other part of humanity to meet these challenges’ (Bauman 2015: 71), for the European Union is a result of the ‘lesson of tragedy’, especially in reflecting on its colonial history and its ‘long and entangled relations with the rest of the human planet’ (Bauman 2015: 70). In the course of its history, Europe has recognised the need to move from a ‘Hobbesian planet’ – where all struggle against all for power and hegemony – to the Kantian ‘common union of the human race’ (Bauman 2015: 68), which includes the duty to develop a universalist perspective of norms and rights. Precisely because Europe has failed in history, it is aware of ‘the price of detours and delays’ (Bauman 2015: 68) caused by a path through violence, war, and mass murder. Therefore, Europe was taught the need for universal orientation by blood and suffering. The universal claim of European values cannot be understood without remembering this history. In times of war in Europe, this important heritage must not be forgotten.

3.4 European Values

3.4.1 Genesis 

There is no doubt that the theoretical formulation of the European values can be traced back to the theories of philosophers and intellectuals, as they were developed in particular in the wake of the Enlightenment. However, they only became politically effective and enforceable in concrete historical contexts – first, after the civilisational abyss of the twentieth century, when European politicians, initially in Western Europe, were prepared to give them political recognition (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume), and second, when because of the catastrophes of war large parts of the Western European population were ready to accept them. A further dynamisation of the acceptance of universal values was brought about by the downfall of the Soviet regime and the associated search for integrating elements such as these very values (see Mandry 2011). The recognition of the universality of European values is thus inextricably linked to the historical experiences of totalitarian violence, war, and mass murder. They have been wrested from this experience.

This close connection between European values and history can be proven, for example, by the ‘Charter of the European Identity’, which was adopted in 1995 by the Europa-Union Germany at the suggestion of the then-President Václav Havel (Charta 1995). In an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1994, Havel had called for such a charter, which was to make European integration appear to the inhabitants of Europe not only as a ‘bureaucratic monstrosity’ but as a contribution to a ‘new and unmistakably clear self-reflection’ of ‘what one could call European identity’. Such a charter, according to Havel, should consist in a ‘new and really clear articulation of European responsibility, in increased interest in making real sense of European integration and all its wider contexts in the world today, and in recovering its ethos’ (Charta 1995).

Thus, in its first paragraphs, the Charter describes Europe as a community of destiny and values that has developed within the framework of a historical process of civilisation that ‘was set in motion by our ancestors and by us’ and has led to a ‘stage of development where all are interdependent’ (Charta 1995). In concrete terms, the Charter calls on every European to ‘cooperative responsibly in building a European community of peace’. The values associated with this peace-building project are ‘based on a common law in which the freedom of the individual and the responsibility towards the community have found their expression’ and exist as ‘fundamental European values in the commitment to tolerance, humanity and fraternity’. The European values therefore have less of a philosophical and more of a historical character: ‘Preserving peace, preserving our environment and organising a life of dignity for all require a common policy. Uniting Europe means responding to the historical challenge of the present and the sorrowful experiences of the past.’

In describing the European community of values, the Charter emphasises the historical location of the concept of values and therefore the need to raise awareness of, preserve, critically examine, and further develop the historical heritage of those values. This historical memory includes recognition that these values have their roots in antiquity, Judaism and Christianity and were further developed in the Renaissance, in humanism, and in the Enlightenment. Moreover, the Charter recalls that Europe has repeatedly questioned and violated its values through unrestrained nationalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. From this perspective, European values are ‘historically formed and deeply rooted preferences and criteria of judgement’ (Bauman 2015: 75).

Today, these historical roots seem to have been forgotten. In public and political debates they are often reduced to abstract norms that are to be enforced from above in their Western interpretation. It is therefore not without reason that they are met with resistance, in particular from Eastern European states that joined the EU after the implosion of the Soviet empire. The European Union failed to connect the history of this region with the European values, as this history was inadequately recognised publicly. These states are sceptical of values that from their perspective seem to be normatively imposed from ‘Brussels’. Additionally, some of these abstract values have their own history in the post-communist region – for example, the concept of solidarity, which was misused by the communist ideology of the Soviet regime for self-interest and oppressive practices.

This historical amnesia of the genesis of the European values also affects the EVS. Critics do not recognise that the values of the European Union were far from being on the horizon when the first EVS was conducted in 1980. In contrast, this new idea of researching the value patterns of the European population can be seen as one important element in developing a set of normative values on a political level.

According to our empirical results, the gap between the values of many Europeans and the European values stated in the treaties of the European Union seems to widen. In the wake of the post-2008 global financial and economic crisis, the 2015 refugee crisis and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘families of countries’ can be observed that are highly divergent in their attitudes towards economic redistribution and solidarity, intercultural coexistence, and environmental awareness. In some regions of Europe, the political goals of the EU and the values on which they are based are clearly rejected. Economic and cultural divisions across Europe point to massive value conflicts between individual countries and the values of the EU (Aschauer, Chap. 12, this volume). If and how the experience of the Russian war against the Ukraine will influence these value patterns – increase the gaps or strengthen the commitment to European values – cannot yet be predicted.

3.4.2 Content

These tensions and divisions may also have their roots in the concept of ‘European values’, which is itself a vague concept, as Wim Weymans (Chap. 3, this volume) argues in his cultural analysis of the values of the European Union.

This ambiguity starts with the deconstruction of the concept of ‘Europe’. Europe cannot be precisely defined from an academic perspective; nor can it be identified geographically, historically, culturally, or in terms of philosophical history (for example, Bauman 2015; Mishra 2017; Schmale 2015; Schmale et al. 2012). The self-understanding of Europe turns out to be a result of self-representations that have changed throughout history. As Europe is not therefore identical to the European Union, European values cannot be reduced exclusively to the European Union’s code of values. Rather, the term ‘European values’ can also include all those norms and principles, maxims and virtues, commandments and laws that have been developed by philosophers, theologians, and intellectuals in the course of the history of a region that has represented itself as ‘Europe’. Finally, speaking of European values can also refer to those values that are shared by the people in the region that today calls itself the European Union. These values of Europeans ‘are extremely complicated to establish’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 5). The EVS and the EurobarometerFootnote 3 have been trying to map these values through quantitative data based on questionnaires. While the EVS, as discussed, systematically analyses the respondents’ answers to questions referring to several domains of life without identifying values beforehand, the Eurobarometer tests whether a pre-established list of values such as peace, democracy, human rights, etc. is common among the respondents. But even such a purely empirical understanding of European values can turn out be problematic, because these values are not just a monopoly of people living in this region. A comparison between the values of people living in European countries and people living in Islamic countries documents quite a lot overlapping in attitudes (Tausch et al. 2014).

Given this confusing and diffuse mishmash, the normatively defined canons of values, formulated by the European Union, can at first sight seem unambiguous. These values are essentially laid down in the Treaty of Lisbon (TEU 2007/2016) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/2016).

Article 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon lists the following values on which the European Union is founded: ‘respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to all Member States in a society characterised by pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men.’

The central importance of these values for the EU’s self-understanding is also made clear in Article 3, when it is described as the EU’s objective to ‘promote peace, its values, and the well-being of its peoples’ (Art. 1 TEU). Once again, the preamble emphasises the historical origins of these values. On the one hand, it cites ‘the cultural, religious and humanist heritage’ as the source from which ‘the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy and equality and the rule of law have developed as universal values’. On the other hand, ‘the historical importance of overcoming the division of the European continent’ is recalled, combined with the ‘necessity of laying firm foundations for the shape of future Europe’. The commitment to values – now called ‘principles’ – plays a key role in this: ‘freedom, democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law’.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which was integrated in the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009 and thus became legally binding, also invokes these values. In its very first sentence it reads as such: ‘The peoples of Europe are resolved to share a peaceful future, based on common values, by uniting in an ever-closer union’. Referring to history, the charter then lists the following values: ‘Conscious of its spiritual, religious and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible and universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity. It is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law. It places the human person at the centre of its action by establishing citizenship of the Union and an area of freedom, security and justice.’

A critical look at the values formulated in these documents reveals that the concept of values is not clearly defined. Rather, it represents an abstract umbrella term covering various categories such as ethical norms, legal principles, virtues, or procedural-political norms without distinguishing between these categories. Quite a few of the values listed are highly ambiguous and could be assigned to heterogeneous ethical categories. For example, is tolerance a virtue, an ethical norm, or a legal claim? Furthermore, there is no clear-cut distinction ‘between values as ultimate end and as means, between the normative contents and the procedures designed to actualize them’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 4). The values of the EU, therefore, also require constant interpretation and communicative negotiation in concrete contexts and public processes. They reveal that the meaning and goals of values are subject to a process of never-ending transformation, which challenges the EU governance, when used for policies and polity-building, and as narrative tools (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 4).

If one recognises these lists as the results of political processes of agreement, however, this code of values can be appreciated in its relative indeterminacy. The openness of these values to interpretation is a strength – if they relate to public and political processes of interpretation. Given the historical and empirical diversity, the values of the European Union can then be interpretated contextually as simultaneously unifying and integrating Europe through a constant dialogue on values. Therefore, the values of the European Union formulate less a philosophically or ethically secured catalogue than a political ideal that is intended to open a common space of discourse. They are deliberately kept vague.

In view of the European history, this common agreement on such a catalogue of norms can be seen as immense progress. They are milestones in ‘a long-standing quest for normative foundations of the European polity’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 2). However, such progress is by no means self-evident, cannot be decreed from above, and must be striven for and won again and again. Therefore, the generality and abstractness of the terms are deliberately intended to allow local, regional, or national interpretations that can be linked to cultural, religious, and historical conditions. The European values are therefore not definitions but descriptions that need to be interpreted in theory and practice. According to Foret and Calligaro (2018: 4), European values can be seen as representations. As values are ‘cultural representations and points of reference about what is good or bad’, European values are ‘these values enshrined in the treaties and asserted by European institutions in their discourses’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 4).

The current revival of European values as answers to external and internal challenges of the EU – such as international migration, the weakening role of Europe in global politics, the financial and economic crisis from 2008 onwards, etc. – can thus be seen as both a chance and a risk. New national movements, with their rhetoric and narratives highlighting the uniqueness of the European identity and referring to European values, reveal the dark side of value politics. Simultaneously, the ‘reference to European values appears as a fresh way to search for normative resources to assert EU policies and politics’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 2), as they can have an enormous mobilising power. Furthermore, the universality of these values is a resource in a global era. According to Zygmunt Bauman, Europe is challenged to ‘invent humanity’ just like it invented nations to pacify religious wars in Europe more than 200 years ago (Bauman 2015). However, contemporary migration and asylum policy at Europe’s borders shakes trust in the credibility of the EU and the success of this adventure.

3.4.3 Values and Their Political Functions

The ambivalent political functions of values come into view in the previous paragraph. In their impressive volume on European values, Foret and Calligaro present a profound interdisciplinary analysis of how, by referring to values, the EU constitutes a new mode to create identity and memory and provides a new type of narrative by referring to them (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 2). According to these authors, relating to values after the failure of both the nation-building narrative and the functionalist market-orientated narrative can be a new way to legitimise EU politics and policies (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 2). From their perspective of political science, values are ideas that can shape the cognitive and symbolic map of individuals or groups and thus collective action (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 2 referring to Smith 2016: 49; see also Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume).

But such an idealistic concept of values also has dark sides and turns out to be precarious, because the recourse to values does not only promote social or political cohesion, but also has disuniting, even polarising, effects. For example, since the refugee crisis in 2015, the appeal to internal EU solidarity in distributing refugees justly in all European states has triggered massive resistance on the part of the Visegrád states. Suddenly, the limits of solidarity were up for debate. New concepts such as ‘flexible’ solidarity were invented by the European commission in 2016, demanding only the services the member states are able to provide for refugees (such as money, provision of jobs, help on site in Syria, expert help in all possible places) instead of insisting on a binding quota regulation for the admission of refugees. The European value of solidarity was put in the service of national and party-political interests. Furthermore, the conflicts over how to interpret solidarity were also based on values: while the Visegrád states defended their rejection of admitting refugees by claiming to protect Christian identity and values from an Islamic invasion, other states, international organisations, and civil society references to the values that human rights are based upon (Goździak et al. 2020). Value-based politics without a discussion on political ethics and moral reflection can thus have problematic consequences when used for political interests only.

Connecting values with political interests, however, is one of the important factors for the success of the European Union. Although its political relevance is relatively young (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume), the recourse to values became an effective instrument in the 1980s, when the EU could no longer fulfil its promise of constantly growing prosperity, which had united the member states until then. Moreover, after 1989, new orientation parameters were needed for the integration of Western and Eastern Europe (Mandry 2011). By then at the latest, the character of European values had been transformed; from ethical representations that had been derived from historical experiences meant to be interpreted regionally and aiming at gradual unification through communication, they mutated into explicit instruments of political legitimation and the exercise of power.

This explicit political use of values raises numerous questions. How can such a political enforcement of values be argued and legitimised when their historical origin loses relevance? If the European values have owed their effectiveness to concrete groups, must the respective histories and groups of origin be forgotten for the sake of the universal claim to validity of the European values? Are the historical origins of values a genuine part of their understanding? And if they are not, how might these values be alternatively grounded?

Despite the ambiguity of the political functions of values, the latter are inherent in the concept, as the struggle for values is never an individual task only, but always a constitutively and necessarily political process, like political conflicts over the distribution of power and resources or the assertion of interests (Heschl 2016). In relation to this political character of struggling for the assertion of values, political sociologist Franz Heschl (2016) empirically documented a strange paradox in EU communication, describing a remarkable depoliticisation of value conflicts at the level of the European Commission between 2000 and 2009. During this period, the process of European unification was presented in the rhetoric of the European Commission as a uniquely progressive and successful project with no alternative, in which politics mutated into a ‘low-cost administration by experts’ (Heschl 2016: 431). All citizens could benefit from the blessings of the unification process through the promotion of strategic-rational action, effectiveness, efficiency, and synergies. In this ‘one EU for all’ rhetoric, the citizens became consumers of the EU’s achievements and amenities. Differences in interests, values, and power resources became invisible and the associated political conflicts were rhetorically neutralised and thus obscured by formal strategic principles (Heschl 2016: 430). Heschl argues that this commission rhetoric made politics lose its character of conflict and turned it into a factual, technocratic search for solutions. The consequence of this fading out of political and value conflicts further led to citizens getting the impression that they could no longer bring their interests and values into political decisions and participate in decisions as moral subjects (Heschl 2016: 439). According to Heschl, world views and values no longer played a role in this rhetoric. From the perspective of hermeneutic values research, however, one would have to correct him: ethical values were replaced by instrumental and organisational values (effectiveness, efficiency, and synergies) based on a technocratic world view. From an ethical perspective, there is no action that is not value-based and thus world view neutral. Rather, the replacement of substantial ethical norms through formal strategic principles as a matter of priority is problematic.

According to Heschl, this technocratic rhetoric has not fundamentally changed. It has only been supplemented by the emergence of a ‘crisis rhetoric’ since 2010 in which the EU presents itself as a protective shield against external shocks.

3.4.4 Value Conflicts

Given this paradoxical situation – on the one hand, the EU referring to values to enforce political interests and, on the other hand, the concealing of the political character of value discourses – it is not surprising that the struggle over values has regained a prominent position in recent years. Parts of the European population have started to fight for the recognition of what they claim as their own value orientation. Nationalist and right-wing populist parties in the Visegrád states in particular refer increasingly to values to assert their political interests. They resolve this paradox by opposing the top-down prescription of values with their own values. Therefore, the current value conflicts within the EU can also be recognised as a struggle to regain the political character of value conflicts. Consequently, the debate about European values has become radicalised in many European countries since 2015. Within and between European states, values conflicts polarise the populations. Whether in France (Le Monde Diplomatique: Robert 2017), Spain (El Pais: Marín 2017), the United Kingdom (The Guardian: Garton Ash 2018), or Germany (FAZ: Frasch 2018), heated debates about the definition and validity of European values can be observed particularly since 2015. In the context of debates on migration policies and the challenges of living together in cultural and religious diversity, the protection and defence of ‘democratic, humanistic and constitutional values and principles’ such as ‘tolerance, equality, and freedom’ are called for against movements, parties, and governments that question these values (Verwiebe 2019: 1). Real as well as alleged conflicts and incompatibilities between European or Judeo-Christian values on the one hand and migrant or especially Islamic values on the other hand are at the centre of these value conflicts that in the meantime threaten the community of values of the EU (Leggewie and Karolewski 2021). However, severe value conflicts are also recognisable in numerous other areas: in the conflicts with Hungary and Poland over the understanding of democracy; in the disputes over the legal recognition of migrants and ethnic minorities, same-sex partnerships, or LGBTQIA+ persons; in the debates over the public role of religion and over the freedom to religion or belief. Finally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, value conflicts have been exploding and leading to aggression, even with violence on the streets of some European cities such as Vienna or Rotterdam, when individual freedom versus the common good was brought into a prominent position in the conflicts over state protection measures or vaccination obligations. All these value conflicts may point to a larger challenge for the EU: to remember the historic origin of European values as well as the urgent need for an internal political self-assurance and debate about European values and their interpretation.

Brexit can also be interpreted as an expression of massive and non-negotiated value conflicts. The rejection of the EU’s political and economic ideas of unity and the opposition of significant parts of the British population to the ‘Brussels Values’ are at the root of this event. According to Smith and Woodhead (2018: 34), Brexit was foreseeable: in addition to the two-thirds of respondents who rejected the EU’s bureaucracy and lamented its democratic deficit, as many as 45% felt that the ‘EU undermines British values’. This conflict of values is also reflected in the clear difference between supporters and opponents of the EU. While the former place greater value on regionality, historical and cultural memory, protected borders, and local democracy instead of bureaucracy, the latter advocate values such as a global human family, open borders, and tolerance underpinned by the law and human rights.

As in many other countries in Europe, the line of conflict in the United Kingdom runs between the universality and particularity of values. At present, this politically unresolved tension divides the populations in many countries into two parts: while one part is universally cosmopolitan, mostly well educated, and wealthy, and can therefore afford these values (the so-called ‘anywheres’), the other part (the so-called ‘somewheres’) experiences itself as economically disconnected and politically unrepresented (Goodhart 2017). By returning to nationalist and traditional cultural values, that is, particular values offered to them by the right-wing parties, the latter believe they can regain the rights and recognition they feel they have lost. These developments again let us assume that value conflicts must also be considered in the context of economic developments. As Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003) demonstrated, questions of identity politics, which also include value politics, must be intertwined with political discourses about the distribution of political and economic power and resources. Focusing on values alone might therefore serve to conceal unequal and unjust distribution. At the same time, the tension between universal and particular values also raises the questions of whether and how these can be connected and how the focus of many people on particular value orientations can be broadened to a universal horizon.

The intra-European heterogeneity of the understanding of values as a source of conflict is also recognisable in education policy. All 27 EU member states are committed to democracy and tolerance and attach great importance to the teaching of these values in their national education policies (CULT: Veugelers et al. 2017). However, a study in 12 member states commissioned by the European Parliament shows that only a few member states take the different components of education for democracy and tolerance into account systematically and in all schools. In the states’ curricula, concrete instruments and supporting measures for the teaching of common values are often not enforced with vigour. Nor do education policy measures take adequate account of this topic. Although the education policymakers of the EU committed themselves to the ‘promotion of civic education and the common values of freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination’ in the ‘Paris Declaration’ of 2015 and developed corresponding strategies to achieve this goal, the teaching of European values plays an insufficient role. According to the CULT-Study (2017), the social, cultural, and political situation of the respective EU member states is decisive in determining whether and how common values are promoted (CULT 2017: 11). For example, instead of cultivating democratic attitudes through appropriate accompanying measures in the practice of living together at school, learning is only ‘about’ democracy. For example, tolerance is taught in the abstract, not in the sense of active inclusion of all social and cultural groups in a school (CULT 2017: 35). The study also demonstrates that the international dimension of European values is superficial, knowledge-oriented, and combined with the often uncritical teaching of one’s nation (CULT 2017: 35). In this way, the inner-European value conflicts endure in schools because the European values are welcomed and demanded as abstract entities and ideals, but heterogeneously implemented or even ignored in practice.

In their abstract idealistic form, however, values are excellently suited for a function that has been increasingly resorted to both individually and politically in recent times: they function as identity markers. As identity is a ‘more complex multi-layered system of representations characterizing an individual or a social group’, values as one type of the representations can, combined with others, establish an identity (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 4). In consequence, values are used to describe cultural, social, and political affiliations rather than ethical orientations, because the recourse to values enables identification and the creation of a sense of belonging. Social, ethnic, religious, and other groups and minorities therefore resort to values in their struggle for recognition and equal rights, as do nationalist and right-wing populist groups and politicians. Values can therefore mutate into a moral weapon in identity-political conflicts if identities, belonging, and cohesion are not interpreted historically but are rather interpreted in an essentialistic manner. Such essentialised self-definitions as ‘people of colour’ and ‘culture’ or references to ‘homeland’ and ‘nation’ can then cover up internal heterogeneity and different interests within identity groups. Moreover, the appeal to values makes it possible to (seemingly) unify very different social classes and milieus as well as economic and political interests, which often results in excluding the respective ‘others’. Values as identity markers create community and, at the same time, draw new dividing lines that can mutate into division (Kohlenberger 2021). The universal value of human dignity and universal values such as the common good recede into the background.

3.4.5 The Conceptual Chaos: Problem or Opportunity?

The problem areas outlined so far reveal a conceptual deficit in the understanding of values. Therefore, the concept of values is used unsystematically and chaotically in everyday and public usage. People refer to European values and can use them to describe human rights, the European way of life, or guiding culture. Appeals to values can refer to religious traditions as well as to the Enlightenment or to a secular world view. Freedom, equality, or justice are called values just as much as health, success, and happiness or effectivity and success. The inflationary use of the concept of values raises moral problems.

So, in contemporary moral debates, values are not infrequently claimed as absolute norms in daily life. In this case, they are not supposed to be negotiable, as the concept of values would suggest based on its genesis. Rather, many people expect them to designate ‘those supreme goods that are not subject to subjective needs’ and should be ‘beyond dispute’ (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 16). They are supposed to be ‘objective’, that is, generally valid and accepted. But how this objectivity is to be argued is usually left open in such debates. At the same time, the subjective right to individual values is insisted upon. Thus, social debates on values usually remain vague in terms of content, ambiguous interpretations, abstract appeals without justification, and unresolved contradictions. Instead of differentiated ethical reflection and the formation of judgements based on rational arguments, values therefore serve a (pseudo)ethical self-assurance of individuals and groups. These contradictions result in public complaint about a general loss of values, a growing relativism of values, and even a decay of values. The need for ethical orientation in societies characterised by plural concepts of values and multiple crises becomes visible.

In some European states, the values crisis is primarily attributed to the younger generation. Consequently, new curricula of ethical education and value formation are invented, for example, in Germany, Austria, or Great Britain. Also, social multipliers in politics, in the media, in civil society, and in economic enterprises (see Coudenhove-Kalergi, Chap. 10, this volume) formulate canons of values for themselves and demand an increased orientation towards ‘guiding cultures’ and ‘guiding values’ or ‘codes of conduct’. But are these diagnoses and solutions based on an analysis appropriate to the situation? And is the focus on the crisis of values the appropriate answer to the ethical and moral needs of European societies?

Value change has been the subject of research for decades and is not historically new. Values have always changed continuously in the process of civilisation. From the perspective of interdisciplinary values research, however, the recent value change is not so much a loss of values as a result of individualisation and pluralisation of values and, consequentially, orientation crises (Aichholzer et al. 2019). Rather, given the plurality of values, modern societies are confronted with the problem of hierarchising and prioritising values in the face of ethical decisions. Values crises are thus not so much a sign of a loss of values but of a lack of ethical and legal criteria and theories that help in making responsible decisions in conflict situations.

The diagnosis of a lack of values must also be questioned. On the contrary, in light of the polarised contemporary public debates around ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’, even an excess of moralising discourse could be criticised. In relation to the numerous young activists in civil society organisations who are active in the field of climate protection and the fight against discrimination and racism (cf. ‘Fridays for Future’, ‘Black lives matter’), a general diagnosis of a loss of values also falls short. What is lacking is a meta-values discourse that refers to ethical and legal arguments. Thus, the recourse to values seems to have replaced ethical reflection. Confessions and appeals take the place of arguments and reasoned discourse. With Linda Woodhead (2021), one can observe that values almost take on the character of a religion (see section “Values as the new religion?”).

The replacement of ethical argumentation through values can also lead to what Zygmunt Bauman calls the adiaphorization of morality, which can, for example, be observed in the debates on European migration policy: public and political processes of ethical judgement become arbitrary, ornamental accessories, or they disappear altogether, and a narrow technocratic attempt at solutions takes their place (Bauman 2016). In migration policy, for example, the normative rights of refugees are no longer the starting point for debates but rather the security and protection of the native population and the economic benefits of migrants. Even if the latter are legitimate values, there is a lack of debate that weighs the rights and duties of refugees and natives against each other based on normative, ethical criteria (Nida-Rümelin 2017; Heimbach-Steins 2015).

These developments show that discourses on values no longer refer only to ‘a phenomenon of individual lifestyles’, ‘but must be located in an overarching context of social change in the twenty-first century in view of growing global and European challenges, such as those posed by wars, international migration and climate change’ (Verwiebe 2019: 2). They are an eminently political issue, not only from an EU top-down policy perspective, but also from a bottom-up perspective. However, given these value transformations, the question must be asked whether and to what extent the reference and orientation to values can and should solve political problems. Without reference to values, this will not succeed; but without taking ethical, legal, and other arguments into account, value appeals can also distract from other causes of social crises.

For example, a study by the Bertelsmann-Stiftung (de Vries and Hoffmann 2016) proves that globalisation fears have a far more decisive influence on political affinities than value attitudes, which are far more stable than fears. Fears can be used and fuelled comparatively quickly and easily by corresponding political interests. Political discourse then uses values to legitimise the respective ‘politics with fear’ (Wodak 2016). Values then are not the source of political attitudes but are instrumentalised and unfold their influence on political attitudes. These findings suggest that values would only be the secondary cause of, for example, anti-democratic or xenophobic attitudes. Addressing the fear of globalisation, which increases poverty and inequality and is therefore perceived as a threat by many, would be paramount. On the other hand, the international social science project ‘Rethinking Society in the 21st Century’ (IPSP 2018), which is dedicated to empirically researching factors that should support institutions and policies in promoting social justice, documents the central role that values and cultures play. Although locally heterogeneous, inclusive identities that are anchored in cultural values and at the same time universally oriented and open to being changed by the cultures and values of others have proved to be an excellent breeding ground for social and societal progress and greater justice.

3.4.6 Summary

The conceptual chaos in contemporary debates on values can therefore be assessed in an equally contradictory way based on these findings. There are numerous good reasons to view the indeterminacy and the politics associated with the recourse to values with scepticism and to deal with this concept in a more cautious, reserved, and, above all, differentiated manner. However, one can also see the inflation of values in public and political discourses positively. Apparently, the recourse to values is a success, and the reasons for this can and must be taken seriously. Thus, the intensified value debates also reflect a massive social need for ethical self-assurance and orientation. Due to its polysemy and vagueness, the concept of values seems particularly suited to satisfy this need, for it makes it possible to correspond to the subjective character of ethical reflections as well as to the prerequisites of ethical judgements in pluralistic societies. This desire for ethical orientation becomes problematic when subjective or political values make objective claims without any reflection. Moreover, the success of the value debates testifies to the recovery of the political dimension of value conflicts. In this sense, value conflicts can be seen as an interruption of the rationalist myth of progress promoted by the EU, reducing the citizen to a consumer of political services. Participation in value discourses enables citizens to regain their status as moral subjects. Space is created for normatively oriented negotiations of values, and formal governance processes can be critically questioned regarding the authority of decisions. The question of ethical legitimacy and personal responsibility in political decisions can be raised again. In this way, the concept of values can become a pivotal point where citizens of the most diverse value orientations meet to argue the issues. This is where a current development meets a concern that also motivated the founding figures of empirical values research – Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Gordon Allport – to give the concept of values a prominent position in the further innovative development of the social, human, and cultural sciences in the post-war period: in understanding the connections between person, culture, and society, values play a key role in the empirical knowledge of how society makes sense (Polak 2011: 24). However, values and value discourses can only unfold this potential if both are subjected to critique, to which scientific values research and educational processes contribute essential expertise.

3.5 Values and Religion

Since this volume is devoted to the impact of religious attitudes on political attitudes, we present a few considerations on the relationship between values and religion before we discuss these interdisciplinary contributions.

3.5.1 Relationship Between Religion and Values

For thousands of years, religious communities and the religious traditions upon which they are based have been constitutively linked to ideas of ethically responsible action. Over the centuries, the monotheistic traditions in particular – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – have also developed elaborate moral and ethical principles and norms. The connection between faith and reason, that is, the rational reflection of religious doctrines and beliefs and vice versa, is central to their self-understanding. Long before the European Enlightenment in the modern era, they were aware of the need for reason-guided ethical reflection and ethical education of the innate, quasi ‘natural’ morality of human beings. To this end, they developed corresponding theories and forms of practice. Their principles and criteria are based on the ethos of the faith revealed in the Tenakh, the Bible, and the Qur’an (Freise and Khorchide 2014). These teachings and theories did not speak of values, but the reflections were nevertheless based on categories such as rules and regulations, norms and principles, commandments and laws, virtues and attitudes. The concept of values was not only unknown for a long time but was and still is viewed sceptically in these traditions, especially from the theological side.

One of the main reasons for this reservation about the concept of values is the religious presupposition that moral and ethical ideas do not owe themselves exclusively to autonomous human reason, as is the case with the concept of values. Rather, they are also and decisively of heteronomous origin, that is, they owe their origin to a divine authority. Especially in pre-modern times, ‘values have not been developed, postulated, or formulated by us humans, but have come to us from outside, heteronomously, through the Torah, the Bible. They have also been passed on as such from generation to generation’ (Bollag 2014: 39). Accordingly, from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic points of view, what are called ‘values’ today, such as the equality of all people before God or the obligation to justice, are therefore essentially owed to divine revelation in the Holy Scriptures and are not arbitrarily negotiable as such.

However, these revealed normative principles always require interpretation by human reason, which is also understood as autonomous in these traditions. Thus, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, methods, teachings, and theories have also developed (written down, for example, in the Talmud, in the Hadiths, or in the churches’ magisterium or theology), which must be considered when interpreting the revealed norms. In Christianity and Islam in particular, philosophy is of fundamental importance. Thus, these religious traditions also recognise the plurality of moral norms and ethical conceptions – a plurality that is inherent in the ethics of these religions. The rules of interpretation, in turn, are intended to protect against the arbitrariness and equal validity inherent in plurality on the one hand and against fundamentalist interpretations of the sacred texts on the other. Likewise, ethical learning and ethical education play a central role in these religions.

Nevertheless, the reception of the concept of values by religious traditions will remain cautious and connected with certain tensions, since it usually rejects heteronomous or even divine specifications as origin and authority. The question of the origin and the legitimation of values – heteronomous and/or autonomous – has thus been one of the decisive reasons for the hesitant use of the concept of values on the part of religions for a long time. The loss of an absolute horizon to which all refer together – that is, the reference to a transcendent, divine reality – is also viewed critically. Since such a reference is missing in the concept of values, there is no instance before which one must justify oneself. Without such an absolute reference point, from a religious point of view there is a danger of value relativism, which means a situation in which all ethical ideas become indifferent and arbitrary. Moreover, ethical norms would then be completely socialised, that is, they would only be subject to human interests or power-relations and become arbitrarily negotiable and interchangeable. From a religious perspective, the recognition of a heteronomous divine origin of ethical norms and principles protects against these dangers. The plurality of ethical norms and values is thus by no means excluded but always obliged to return to divine revelation and its interpretations in tradition.

In contemporary secular societies, such a view is regarded with scepticism and even rejected. On the one hand, particularly in Europe, the practice of many Christian churches has shaken confidence in their ethical authority, as they have too often enforced their ‘absolute moral truths’ by utilising moral and political repression and violence. The scandals of sexual abuse of minors – including their cover-up by church leaders –, financial scandals, and others, the lack of gender justice, and the rejection of the recognition of same-sex relationships have exacerbated this mistrust in recent years (see Halman and Sieben, Chap. 4, this volume). On the other hand, countless historical catastrophes such as the plague (Gronemeyer 1996) or the wars and mass murders of the twentieth century have shaken belief in God (Polak and Schachinger 2011). Consequently, a growing number of secular people regard the conception of ethics today as a task to be guaranteed exclusively by their human reason, not by reference to any kind of divine revelation. The concept of values emphasises this subjective-autonomous dimension. However, in the futile search for absolute, objective values and their enforcement, the loss of a transcendence that is binding for all is clearly recognisable. Today, it seems that human rights have taken over this transcendent function, linked to a sacralisation of the human person (Joas 2013).

Religious communities that want to contribute to social debates and claim valid ethical convictions (for example, on sexual or bioethical issues) must therefore justify themselves in a secular context. They find themselves under pressure to legitimise their ethical convictions in a secular language, as a recourse to a divine authority has become alien to many people. This newly challenging situation becomes evident, for example, in the conflicts about the right to practise religion in public throughout Europe or in the debates on assisted suicide in Germany and Austria.

Given these ethical conflicts, it is not surprising that religious communities and churches have increasingly taken up the concept of values to translate their norms and principles into the language of contemporary ethical debates. To argue and legitimise their convictions, many religious communities are now also referring to values by emphasising that religions are a central source of values and especially of value formation. However, this usage of the concept of values is still highly controversial (see Grümme, Chap. 13, this volume; Müller et al. 2020).

3.5.2 Religion as an Identity Marker

Despite the decreasing relevance of religion as a source of values (see Halman and Sieben, Chap. 4, this volume), the close connection between religion and values has recently become apparent in the function of religion as a cultural and political identity marker. As the Pew Research Institute on Religion documents, a Christian self-understanding increasingly assumes the function of cultural identity in Western Europe (Pew Research Center 2018). It serves to distinguish the Christian from migrant and Muslim cultures through belonging to the Christian culture and even to exclude the latter. In numerous studies of religious science or the sociology or psychology of religion, religiosity is also primarily researched under the label of its identity-forming functions (for example, Werkner and Hidalgo 2016; Arens et al. 2017). Also, this volume demonstrates the complex link between religious and political attitudes (see Pickel and Pickel, Chap. 5; Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6, this volume).

From a historical perspective, this linkage is not new. Religious values in the sense of ethical ideas have always been used to legitimise the exercise of political power, right up to the justification of the persecution of the Jews or the confessional wars of modern times. Religious values also served as motivation for religious groups and movements committed to social reforms in the name of freedom, equality, and justice; think of the social movements of the churches in the nineteenth century or the current commitment of Christian churches to migrants and refugees. Religious convictions also played a decisive role in creating the European Union. While the intensity and the specific character of this impact is discussed (see Weymans, Chap. 3, this volume; Mandry 2011; Sutherland 2010; Altermatt et al. 2008; Chenaux 2007), Catholic and Protestant values in particular played a crucial role at the beginning of the formation of the European Union. This impact of values was so significant that in Britain politicians were afraid Europe would become a Catholic project (Sutherland 2010). The enormous influence of religiosity has also been researched by the social sciences, as can be seen in the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map (WVS Database 2020), which demonstrates the impact of denominational heritage on the massive contemporary cultural change and the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions.

However, the focus on identity in this well-known relationship between religiosity and both cultural and political values is new and deeply connected with the transforming role of religion in society and politics – that is, the growing politicisation of religion in society and politics (see Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6, this volume). This development of referring to religious identities to argue political interests becomes most obvious in migration and Islam policies in European states. One can even speak of ‘hijacking religion’ for political aims, while Christian churches simultaneously lose their influence on these policies. Furthermore, Christian (or Judeo-Christian) and Islamic values are claimed by individual politicians and political parties throughout Europe to be incompatible. Religion has become a means of social and political distinction (Polak and Seewann 2019). For example, Alexander Gauland (AfD, Germany), Horst Seehofer (CDU, Germany), and Heinz-Christian Strache (ex-politician of FPÖ and former vice chancellor of Austria) proclaimed: ‘Islam does not fit our values’ (Tagesanzeiger: Eigenmann 2017).

These claims cannot be proven, either from a historical or a theological perspective. The centuries of anti-Jewish theologies, including discrimination and persecution, give the lie to the harmonising talk of Judeo-Christian values and testify to historical amnesia (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 27). Nor, theologically, is a clear-cut distinction between Christian and Muslim values valid. Despite certain differences between the monotheistic traditions, Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on fundamental ethical positions such as human dignity or justice (see, for example, Hans Küng’s studies on these religions). Moreover, an empirical approach proves that populations cannot be divided into Christians and Muslims when it comes to values, as believers of both can be observed in diverse socioreligious types (Polak and Seewann 2019). The influence of religious attitudes on values only becomes effective in combination with other characteristics, such as sociodemographic ones. Religiosity is therefore only one element of a multi-layered system of identity, dependent on the social and political context.

3.5.3 Values as the New Religion?

Another link between values and religion has recently been claimed by the British sociologist of religion Linda Woodhead (Woodhead 2021). Based on decades of empirical research, Woodhead demonstrates how, during the decline of Christianity in Britain, new spiritualities, values, and non-religious commitments have replaced traditional Christian values. She claims that a kind of new religion has emerged: the religion of values. She observes this transformation process at the level of personal, organisational, and political and economic values, which are replacing religiously based values in certain population groups in Britain. Whether in political statements or in school values education, the recourse to values takes on a kind of religious function and serves as the ultimate justification for ethical behaviour. In this context, values take on a life of their own and are no longer associated with traditional religion by an increasing number of people; they have an autonomous status. On the level of personal values, this is reflected in the replacement of an altruistic ethic of love with values such as autonomy, self-determination, and self-realisation. On the political and economic level, global and national value orientations, as well as traditional bourgeois values and a corporate culture that values disruption, competition, and winning, are in conflict with each other. According to Linda Woodhead, these tensions, intensified by the online world, are leading to new ‘culture wars revisited’. In the social and political debates surrounding Brexit, these tensions became clearly visible, not least in the effects of religious identities: members of the Church of England, for example, were significantly more likely than the rest of the population to believe that the European Union undermines British values (Smith and Woodhead 2018: 34).

From the perspective of the sociology of religion, this thesis of values as a new religion seems plausible. Values take over functions once provided by churches and religious communities, above all functions of identity formation, community building, and recourse to absolutely binding ethical norms. They create group affiliation, promote belonging and togetherness, and enable orientation. Nevertheless, the (pseudo-)religious character of values leads to similar social problems and conflicts that are known from the history of religion: values not only unify, but they also divide society. If they are decreed without arguments or legitimation or do not refer to their historical origin, they are at risk of turning into ideology. They can be instrumentalised to serve to enforce personal and political, often non-transparent interests. They can lead to practices that often contradict what is verbally asserted or demanded. Think, for example, of the verbal appeals to cooperation, while in practice competition on the career ladder in companies, political parties, or universities is structurally rewarded and leads to success. Values would thus be a religion in a pre-enlightened sense of absolute, unquestioned convictions in which one believes but does not argue why one believes. Like religion, the religion of values would then require criticism of this kind of religion.

Also, theologically, such an understanding of values as religion results in numerous problems. Without legitimising and arguing their claim to authority; without reference and contextualisation in historical and contemporary social, political, and cultural contexts; and without a transparent exposition of their basic ideological assumptions about the meaning and essence of being human and of life, the abstract character of value codices has an ideological character. In light of the ideological uses by churches of their moral codes, values, from a theological point of view, like religion, are an extremely ambivalent reality. They require rational legitimation, critical and self-critical reflection, and scientific research.

4 Values: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Academic Contributions

Given the problem outlined, one might ask: if values are just a contested concept, would it not be better to dispense with the concept? If this concept obviously creates more confusion than orientation and is at risk of degenerating into meaningless phraseology, why should it continue to be used? This brings us to the question of what values ‘actually’ are. So, after unfolding the questions and problems, strengths and weaknesses of referring to values, we will present what academic research can contribute to a qualified values discourse.

From our point of view, besides the status of values in the treaties of the European Union and their success in public debates, ethical arguments oblige us to struggle for a scientifically sound understanding of values. For it is by means of the concept of values that modern societies negotiate the central questions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, be it in terms of individual behaviour, the meaning of life, or the social, cultural, political, economic, and legal conditions for a good, just, and peaceful coexistence in society.

This brings us to the question of what values ‘actually’ are. Thus, the following section presents various understandings of values as defined and discussed in selected academic disciplines. However, also academic values research does not provide exhaustive, consensual, or conclusive definitions of values. We are confronted with a plurality of definitions and a struggle to justify universally valid values and norms, even in ethical approaches. Moreover, if we could receive the academic debates about values not only in German and English literature, as we do in this contribution, but also in other European languages, the plurality of approaches would become inextricable, as the understanding of values is deeply embedded in diverse social, cultural, and historical contexts and has therefore taken heterogeneous paths of development depending on language and region. The selected approaches and models we present here are thus intended to open a space for discourse in which the social science findings of the EVS can be critically reflected upon in future research.

4.1 The Genesis of the Concept of Values

To understand the centrality of values in modern societies, it is necessary to reflect on the genesis of this concept (see also Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume).

4.1.1 Economic Origins

In both the German and English languages, the etymological origin of the concept of values can be found in economics. For example, the Germanic word ‘werϸa’ appears in the eighth century AD and denotes ‘preciousness’ or ‘price’. It keeps this semantics in the Old High German word ‘werd’ and the Middle High German word ‘wert’. From the twelfth century onwards, ‘wert’ was also applied as an attribute to persons, denoting a ‘valued’, ‘revered’, ‘noble’ person. This marks the beginning of an idealistic use of the concept of value, which is later also applied to objects that are described as ‘highly valued’, ‘desirable’, or ‘valuable’. These different meanings necessitated an ethical specification that distinguishes between non-moral and moral values: values can then be understood either as goods or as ideals (Müller et al. 2020: 162–163). Also, the German Duden online (2021) documents the economic origin of the concept of value. It defines ‘value’ as the quality inherent in a thing that makes it desirable to a certain extent and allows it to be sold or marketed. Furthermore, value as an exchange value is the social labour objectified in a commodity and whose measure is the socially necessary labour time. The term value also refers to things and objects of great value that belong to personal or common property and the positive significance attributed to someone or something. Finally, value is the result of a measurement or examination expressed in numbers or signs. The Duden online does not note any ethical meaning. Slightly different, but also revealing its economic origin, the Cambridge Dictionary online (2021) defines the term value as worth, importance, usefulness, and purchasing power. But in its plural meaning an ethical dimension shines through: ‘values’ are the ‘beliefs that people have, especially about what is right and wrong, and what is most important in life, that control their behaviour’; ‘values’ also are ‘standards or principles’. To gain a specifically ethical meaning, the term acquires attributes such as ‘moral (values)’ or ‘religious (values)’ to be attributed. ‘Values’ then are ‘the principles that help you to decide what is right and wrong, and how to act in various situations’.

In German philosophy, Immanuel Kant reflected on the distinction between economic values and ideal and moral values by distinguishing between ‘values’ and ‘dignity’, ‘more precisely, he distinguishes between price and dignity and attests the latter an absolute value’ (Körtner 2020: 132). But as an ‘absolute value’ is not only a supreme value in comparison to other values but is of a completely different quality, it consequently abolishes the concept of value. For Kant, everything has an absolute value that has a purpose in itself, that is, it exists for its own sake and is to be respected as such. Kant writes: ‘In the realm of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else, as an equivalent; what, on the other hand, is above all price, and therefore does not pay an equivalent, has a dignity’ (Kant 1983: 68). As every human being is a rational being capable of morality and destined for self-determination, a person cannot have a value but only an inalienable dignity. This means, that no human being can be exchanged or offset against other(s) and must not be degraded to an object and instrumentalised to serve the purposes of others (Körtner 2020). So, Kant distances himself from the economic use of the concept of value in relation to the human being.

The consequences of considering the human person as a value were also reflected on by the English-speaking Thomas Hobbes – without any idealistic or normative approach, but rather empirically: ‘The validity or value of a man, like that of all other things, is his price. This is determined by how much one would pay for the use of his power and is therefore not absolute, but dependent on the need and estimation of another’ (Hobbes 1998: 67). Consequently, the value of a person depends on his or her assessment, appreciation, and recognition by others. As in the market, human value then results from the dynamics between supply and demand. For Hobbes, this value is expressed in the material side of money and the immaterial – as it were, the symbolic side of social recognition.

The economic connotation of the term and the practical consequences make it understandable as to why the concept of value was viewed with scepticism in philosophy and ethics, especially in German-speaking countries, until the nineteenth century. For even in the national economy of the nineteenth century, the concept of values describes what things are worth on the market. It denotes their price and is subject to subjective preferences. In this sense, values are the ‘subjective side of willingness to pay’ (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 16), which follows the laws of supply and demand. In European philosophy, Christian ethics, and non-European moral systems, categories such as ‘commandments and prohibitions, norms and taboos, maxims and imperatives, virtues and vices, rules and regulations, rights, and duties’ (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 15) were therefore preferred to discuss ethical issues.

Despite the legitimate criticism of the economic origin of the term values, its etymology also demonstrates that the semantics of terms can be transformed, and they can acquire new or additional meanings. Critical references to etymology can therefore point to the potential abbreviations and limitations of a term but are not sufficient to reject a term in general. Such a general rejection would be tantamount to artificially fixing language and ignoring its continuous development. From an ethical perspective, the semantic transformation of concepts must also be considered because people can negotiate their ethical questions only in terms available to a society (Müller et al. 2020: 164).

4.1.2 The Nineteenth Century

Such a shift of semantics took place in the nineteenth century when the concept of values was introduced into philosophy and ethics by German thinkers. Honecker (1990) and Bambauer (2019) identify several essential reasons for its introduction. On the one hand, the great philosophical systems of German Idealism as developed by G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling were increasingly questioned. During the rapid progress of the natural sciences, all idealistic and metaphysical, non-empirical theories were dismissed as conceptually unclear and unscientific. The search for the essence of nature, which up to then had been understood as spiritual and reasonable, was replaced by a functional analysis of natural laws. Science was claimed to be decidedly value free, and nature was no longer to be interpreted idealistically, but as a ‘complex interplay between inherently non-binding principles’ that can be clearly recorded and described (Bambauer 2019: 27). This development not only led to a causal-reconstructive approach to reality and devalued nature through a reductionist world view; it also led to a gap between realities and values, since the latter do not objectively exist but can supposedly only be subjectively ascribed (Bambauer 2019).

On the other hand, the nineteenth century experienced a massive intellectual disruption, commencing with insight into the historical and therefore transformable character of (not only) philosophical ideas, which also affected ethical systems. The idea of timelessly valid, universally binding norms and principles was fundamentally shaken. This intellectual revolution took concrete shape in the moral-critical and genealogical analyses of Friedrich Nietzsche. He argued that moral ideas and concepts must always be understood in their historical context, particularly relative to contemporary social and cultural interests. Moral ideas are an expression of human interests, and in particular of what Nietzsche called the ‘will to power’: moral values serve and legitimise personal interests such as the increase of power. Nietzsche’s ideas not only radically relativised the traditional notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ but also shattered trust and belief in an absolute point of reference from which moral norms are derived and to which they must be justified. The Christian theological world view and its teleological orientation broke down: God was proclaimed to be dead; a new morality was needed (Honecker 1990). As all norms, virtues, rules, or laws are merely subjective and reflect individual perspectives, humans find themselves in a Godless situation, henceforth eternally forced to engage in what Nietzsche called the permanent ‘revaluation of all values’ (Honecker 1990: 215). This new situation, which Nietzsche called ‘nihilism’, has been confronting philosophy and ethics with new challenges since the nineteenth century, as it fundamentally calls into question the possibility of a supra-temporal, universal ethics valid for all human beings (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume).

Against this historical background, the concept of values enters philosophy and ethics. The resulting ‘axiology’, that is, the doctrine of values (Wils 2006: 404), responds to a new understanding of reality that is henceforth dominated by natural science, technology, and nihilism and rejects metaphysical thinking. Ethics is no longer concerned with facts but with values and now tries to decide on the moral correctness of ‘valuations’. According to Honecker (1990: 215), this change in moral consciousness and the crisis of values can be seen in the value ethics of Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Max Weber (1874–1928), and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950). Ontology as the foundation of ethics is replaced by anthropology, which no longer seeks theoretical speculation but the validity of values and supports the setting of preferences for actions. Ethical considerations thus become evaluative, prescriptive, and normative. The good no longer exists as such; it can only be justified as valid with arguments. While Lotze, for example, justifies the validity of values from the perspective of critical empiricism, proclaiming that the ability to feel values enables ethical judgements, Max Weber rejects such ‘psychologism’. He formulates a ‘material ethics of values’ based on Plato’s doctrine of ideas: values exist a priori like ideas. As such, they form a hierarchy of values and are recognised through a view of their essence (Honecker 1990: 215). Despite the differences in arguments, the new value ethics faces a new challenge: after the abolition of ontology, the relationship between the essence and the ethical action of human beings is broken and the need to overcome the separation between subjectivity and objectivity occurs. While Neo-Kantian philosophers insisted on the objective a priori validity of values, phenomenological thinkers were convinced of the existence of a ‘world of values’, which can be entered either through accepting values (‘Wertnehmung’, Max Scheler) or perceiving values in their being as such (Wils 2006: 405).

Because of their a priori nature, these new value ethics were initially hardly recognised in philosophy and ethics. However, they demonstrate that the concept of values is reacting to a fundamental crisis in the justification of ethical norms. Modern value ethics is a crisis phenomenon.

4.1.3 Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

As a result of this crisis, a plethora of normative ethics has been developed in the twentieth and twenty-first century to justify the validity of values and norms: existentialist, materialist, eudaemonist, communitarian, and contract-theoretical approaches, new transcendental philosophical approaches and normative ethics based on virtues (Pieper 2017: 226–252) – the list is endless and cannot be elaborated on here. In all these ethics concepts, values play a minor role or none at all. But since the 1980s, when value discourses started in the European Union, new philosophical studies on values have been published in German (Werner Flach, Hans Joas, Christian Krijnen) and the English language (Harry Frankfurt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams) area (Krijnen 2011: 549). All these newer value conceptions face the challenge of explaining the understanding and validity of values in a non-metaphysical way (see section “The nineteenth century” in this article). The crisis of the nineteenth century still shapes the discussions – in particular, when values are claimed to be normative or even universally binding, that is, objectively valid and not dependent on subjective needs and interests. How can values be recognised and justified? Do they exist as such, like ideas? How can values be recognised by people and why should they be obeyed? Or are values the mere result of lengthy, often violent processes of agreement? Can normative and objective values exist apart from concrete historical contexts? Who decides on the objectivity and validity of values? These are some of the questions not only philosophers, but also modern societies are still facing (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 16–17; Honecker 1990: 216). They form the ethical signature of our time, which is marked by the loss of absolute and definitive moral certainties and a transcendent or even divine horizon. Accompanied by the loss of significance of religion, value debates are also increasingly orientated towards immanence and dynamised by the primacy of a scientific and scientistic approach to the world.

These developments also led to a growing socialisation of human beings, which Hannah Arendt critically warned against in the context of her studies on totalitarianism in 1961. For her, the transformation of goods and virtues into values is a highly dangerous process. With recourse to Thomas Hobbes, she argues that this process also affects human beings, as their socialisation results in a radical relativism that can no longer determine absolutes. She warns that in the end of this process only power will judge what is decisive in the ‘exchange and struggle of values with one another’ (Arendt 2003: 319). Goods, ideals, and finally human beings become a value – and can, consequently, also be judged as worthless, superfluous, and allowed to be destroyed. For Arendt, the millions of dead and murdered people in the two totalitarianisms of the twentieth century are therefore also the consequence of a society that transforms everything into values.

The contemporary struggle for normative and universal values seems to prove this challenging analysis. But simultaneously it also seems to mark the fact that people are aware of the danger of relativism and the necessity of ethical judgement. Human beings are obviously capable of striving for universal values and norms; normativity and universality belong to the human ethical ‘matrix’. The awareness of the subjectivity, historicity, relativity, and contextuality of values and the renunciation of their violent enforcement can therefore also be recognised as the recognition of freedom, autonomy, and the need for caution and modesty in ethical judgements. Contemporary value discourses, therefore, take place in societies that are aware of the transformative, plural, and constructive character of values. Values do not simply exist objectively, but must be created and discussed in an active, communicative, and participatory way.

The recognition of the ambivalent character of values need not result in the rejection of universal norms and values. This can be seen not least in the globally increasing recognition of human rights after the Second World War. Despite all the failures and resistance against their comprehensive implementation, the dedication and commitment to human rights by the European Union, by international organisations such as the United Nations (UN) or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and by countless civil society organisations, bear witness to this striving for a universal ethos that applies to all human beings. In order not to let the threatening scenarios outlined by Arendt come true, the struggle for the global recognition of human rights and international legal order will therefore be of central importance in the future (Merks 2012). The increasing cultural and religious pluralisation that is transforming all societies worldwide because of migration and globalisation presents many societies with new ethical challenges in which values play a significant role. But the emergence of populist parties, fundamentalist groups, and identity politics movements, which promise unambiguity by resorting to traditionalist, tribalist, or ‘woke’ values can be seen as a sign that many people are overwhelmed by pluralisation and suffer from ethical disorientation regarding values. Values research must therefore develop ethical concepts in which universality and particularity are not opposites. Such concepts rather strive constantly for what is necessarily common and binding and simultaneously negotiate the right to uniqueness and particularity communicatively and without violence. Respect for freedom and diversity and concern for a common basic ethos belong inseparably together (Merks 2012: 222, 230).

This short historical overview demonstrates that the contemporary discourses on values are still a crisis phenomenon, prolonging the eruptions of the nineteenth century. They need academic support to avoid the risks of the concept of values being used to solve moral and ethical challenges as presented above and to assure their quality.

4.2 Academic Approaches

The success story of values since the Second World War is primarily owed to the reception of this concept by the social sciences. Following Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Gordon Allport, social science values research established itself as an innovative research branch in the 1960s. A concept from ethics and moral philosophy then became the key concept with the help of which the relationships between person, culture, and society were to be researched, and the humanities and cultural and social studies were to be further developed and integrated (see Sect. 2.5). Over time, the relevance that the concept of values acquired simultaneously on the European political level also aroused the interest of other academic disciplines. Today, values researchers can be found in communication studies, literary studies, law, education, history, theology and, finally, philosophy and ethics. The breadth of values research is vast. This results from the overlapping of values research with other academic disciplines in which values play an important role. Values research can also be found, for example, in European studies, in nursing research, or in research on values education in schools. This sometimes leads to a mixture of levels at which values are negotiated. In recourse to values, the attitudes and behaviour of individuals and their ethical justifications can be researched just as much as the institutional framework conditions in which values are conveyed in condensed form (Körtner 2020). The political level, on which questions of values are related to law, can be found in the scientific focus just as much as the meta-level of the philosophical and ethical justification of values.

For these reasons, neither a common terminology nor a consensus on the definition of values can be found within the individual academic disciplines. This is exacerbated by a lack of interdisciplinary cooperation (see Sects. 2.2 and 2.3). The following sections can therefore present only an exemplary insight into selected sciences. The diverse and contradictory approaches might increase confusion; however, from our perspective, they provide multiple contributions that can help to sharpen terminology and use the concept of values in a context-sensitive and responsible manner.

4.2.1 Overview

The German Dictionary of philosophical concepts (Kirchner et al. 2006) defines the term value as the relationship that is established between an object and a standard defined by a valuing human being. This definition is justified by the fact that all human activity relates to added value and valuation:

The distributive, deciding and goal-realizing activity of valuing expresses the relational dimension between a human being and an object (entity, process, person). Because the human being strives for a (the) good in his willing and doing, standards of valuing are formed, such as the usefulness (for instance, of a tool) or the suitability for satisfying a need. These standards are further validated in the social community, passed on through transmission and teaching, and become values themselves through abstraction. (Kirchner et al. 2006: 727–728).

Therefore, values can denote both material or ideal goods, that is, non-moral values and ideal and moral values. Values have their origin in human relations and therefore have relational, relative, and immanent character.

Such a human relations-focused and immanent-grounded understanding of values can be found in many other academic disciplines.

Communication studies, for example, understand values as those ‘culture-based qualities, ethical imperatives, moral postulates, socio-cultural orientations or civilisational standards’ that a society based on institutions cannot do without for the sake of its existence and that it must transform to maintain the validity of the social contract (Bauer 2019: 99). In this approach, the character of society is understood as representable neither in events nor in facts and data but only in the interpretation of events and their relevance. Society is the ‘pattern of exchange and discourse of its relations as well as, conversely, the marking of the patterns of relations of its discourses in their forms of interaction that are set in perpetuity’ (Bauer 2019: 99). Society is ‘what its communication is, or rather: how it interprets itself – the patterns of its interactions and the dynamics of its relations – in the context of its communication’ (Bauer 2019: 99). So, when communication studies ask about values, the communication of values and their semantic charges are the focus of attention. Values therefore only exist in cultural interpretations of events, actions, and relationships, and because communication is constantly changing, values also have an ever-changing nature.

Research in literary studies also approaches the concept of values in this descriptive way, that is, it reflects on the values that can be found in human literature but neither defines the term precisely nor asks basic hermeneutic questions. It explores so-called ‘values phenomena’ and approaches them in a rather ‘intuitive way’ (Prinz 2019: 118). Values are counted ‘as a matter of fact among the essential components of both fictional worlds and text-related plots’ (Prinz 2019: 118), because there is no agreement on these ‘values phenomena’ either in everyday language usage contexts or in academic language usage. Furthermore, it is only analytical literary studies that are dedicated to the concept and matter of value phenomena in literary studies. These analytical studies focus less on the texts themselves and more on the ‘extra-textual conditions of the production, reception and distribution of texts’ (Prinz 2019: 119). Values thus come into play in the act of evaluating texts as well as in the analysis of the contextual conditions of the creation of texts.

Political science offers diverse understandings of values. For some scientists, values come into view as ‘subjective goals of life’ and as a ‘motivational basis for attitudes and behaviour’ (Verwiebe et al. 2019: 288). In this meaning, they influence political actors, structures, institutions, and processes or, conversely, are influenced by them. Moreover, the interplay between institutional (intended) mediation and individual socialisation is of interest, that is, how values are formed in political contexts and what functions values and discourses on values assume in political processes and discourses in which the distribution of power, resources, and participation is fought over. In contrast, other scientists claim that values can never be reduced to individual ones but are always ‘collective representations’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 3). They are ‘mental representations’ of what is worth appreciating in a society as good or bad and therefore always ‘at work – even if only rhetorically – in all human interactions except in extreme cases based only on calculation or power’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 3). Therefore, a value is always produced by social convention and asserted by an institution. For Foret and Calligaro (2018: 4), ‘values appear as discursively constructed ideational and axiological signifiers for collective action’. They are therefore central for any definition of politics, ‘understood as the “activity to modify or maintain institutions that either mobilizes values explicitly or seeks to silence them”’ (Foret and Calligaro quoting Smith 2016: 8). Values can strengthen or reform institutions and ‘structure the actor’s normative purposes and (…) are used to build alliances or create cleavages, which are central dynamics of governance’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 4).

Cultural studies, in turn, also makes clear that values cannot be understood without their context, particularly without their cultural context: ‘while a value indicates what is important for people, culture explains why’ (Pereira et al. 2015: 30). Values are understood as firm convictions about what is considered good, desirable, and worth striving for in life. At the same time, knowledge of these values does not allow any statements about which concrete ways of life are associated with them, that is, how they are lived. A cultural studies approach focuses on these ways of life when, for example, Hall (1959) distinguishes ten different ‘areas of culture’ in which discussions about values are conducted in semiotically different ways and are also organised heterogeneously. Accordingly, values shape culture, especially the social customs and habits of culture. However, these can differ significantly from the norms that apply or should apply in a society. This brings the tension between norms and values into view. Norms, especially ideals and universal norms, are, in the understanding of cultural studies, ‘conceptually autonomous, are usually related to the idea of goodness and set a pattern of what is good’ (Pereira et al. 2015: 34). While cultural habits are participatory activities with authoritative features (the inherent value of customs) that determine certain patterns of behaviour and exert a normative pressure for members of a community to follow them, norms stand by themselves and have ‘complicated relationships to the other kind of norms and the value notions of good and evil’ (Pereira et al. 2015: 34–35). Thus, norms also differ from moral rules related to moral action. In this view, values form the link between lived culture and norms that should apply to all. Their power makes it possible to understand why, for example, universally valid norms are lived in different ways in different areas of life or why they are not recognised.

More recent, intercultural approaches in cultural studies reveal further problems that can become a source of value conflicts if the close connection between culture and values is not considered. For example, people may share the same values but express them with heterogeneous practices – such as when respect is expressed in a greeting with a nod, a hand on the heart, or a handshake (Hoffman 2015: 147). The acceptance and observance of universal normative values such as human rights, in turn, can fail because these are not viewed from the perspective of individualism. Thus, the Western primacy of the dignity and rights of the individual person is not recognised everywhere in the world, for instance, by philosophers who give group rights priority over individual rights, such as some African philosophers do (Hoffman 2015).

Similarly, social psychology also clarifies the inseparable connection between values, culture, and action. It demonstrates that values, moral-philosophical considerations, convictions, or ethical norms alone are insufficient to steer concrete action (Welzer 2021). Not even the cognitive insight into the rationality of values is decisive for the behaviour of most people. Much more influential are all the practical routines and habits of everyday activities and the inherited ‘mental infrastructures’ (Welzer 2021: 110) by means of which reality is perceived and interpreted. Very little that people do is due to conscious decisions. Human action is primarily pre-set by the material and cultural conditions that form the world in which one exists (Welzer 2021: 81). Therefore, in a society where it is normal to exclude Jews or discriminate against foreigners, one can agree to the value of tolerance without acting accordingly, because habitus imprints run beyond the threshold of consciousness (Welzer 2021: 82). For this reason, appeals to values and norms often remain unsuccessful. Thus, a social psychological approach explains why values such as sustainability are supported in theory but, despite the well-known fact of the climate catastrophe, play no role in the concrete consumption or travel behaviour of many people. Moreover, moral convictions and values can even be used psychologically to bring unethical behaviour into agreement and congruence with correct values (Welzer 2021: 81).

The difference between values and norms is also emphasised in legal studies. Thus, values are ‘not identical with norms, but are their basis’, and norms are at the same time ‘values that have coagulated into binding force’ (Staake 2018: 683). That means that law is also based on a legal ethos and contains coagulated values. Depending on the point of view, jurisprudence values are either defined or described as undefinable but intuitively recognisable. Staake (2018: 682), for example, defines values as ‘the result of our personal development shaped by upbringing and other environmental influences as well as our experiences’. Such subjective values can also give rise to group values, which – even if they are only relatively valid – strive to be binding for all. Staake regards the resulting relativity of values as an indispensable precondition for a discourse on values which in no way excludes the universality of values. But to define universal values, corresponding debates are required, since not all value concepts carry the same weight. Group values, for example, can deviate from objective value concepts and addressees. This brings up the question of the justification of norms in terms of coagulated values because norm acceptance depends decisively on the justifiability of the contents of the norm. Arguing the rational reasons of universally binding norms and linking them to values is necessary, as ‘the impetus and the basis of every norm-setting are the value concepts of the participants’ (Staake 2018: 683). If norms are to be accepted long term, consistent value decisions and the transparency of value bases are of eminent importance. In this context, norms often tie in with the concept of law in society. However, values are usually read into legal provisions. There is no direct link between minimum ethical requirements and legal concepts. From this perspective, the law appears as a socio-cultural reality and does not require an ultimate metaphysical justification. This by no means excludes recourse to (fundamental) values in legal systems, as for example in the German Federal Constitutional Law or the treaties of the EU, but it does call for democratically conducted discourses on values in society, in which their central values such as equality, freedom, etc. must be negotiated again and again (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 21–27). For even in legal systems that are based on legal positivism and deliberately exclude values, values play a key role in the always necessary interpretation of the law and, furthermore, its acceptance. This strong relationship between legal norms and values can be seen, for instance, in the current conflicts in Europe between religious and secular groups on the question of recognising same-sex partnerships or marriages.

The debate on values in education, pedagogics and educational science is similarly tense (Grümme, Chap. 13, this volume). Values education has always been one of the central tasks of school education and upbringing. In the countries of the EU, it is also a task to which state education policies have committed themselves (CULT 2017; see section “Value conflicts”). In a narrower sense, values education in schools is understood as the ‘totality of the pedagogically initiated discussion and reflection of values as well as the subjective acquisition of values within the institution of school’ (Schubarth 2019: 80, see also Schubarth 2010: 10). Such values education goes beyond a mere imparting of values and ‘encompasses both the school-based socialisation of values and the necessity of providing corresponding pedagogical learning opportunities’ (Schubarth 2019: 80). Values education, therefore, aims at the acquisition of values and the development of moral judgement (value competence) in order to be able to deal with the diversity of values in a pluralistic society. This values education is realised in concrete fields of social learning, violence prevention, peace education, anti-racist education, political education, or the promotion of social, moral, or democratic competencies, etc. (Schubarth 2019: 79). In this discipline, values thus come into view both as part of individual identities and learning goals and as values and norms that can be found in society and are considered relevant. To enable pupils to form appropriate competencies, knowledge, and judgement skills, critical values education must also deal with the social contexts of values and their hermeneutics and ethical justification on the theoretical meta-level.

In economics, interest in the ethical dimension of values has increased only in the last 15 years (see Coudenhove-Kalergi, Chap. 10, this volume). This interest is largely rooted in the growing need for ethical orientation and thus in the controlling function of values. Values research in economic studies focuses on companies and primarily concentrates on pragmatic questions such as value management, corporate ethics, legal projects, and their mutual relationships. These functions are discussed in business ethics and in the model of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. In this volume, Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi discusses approaches that also explicitly address fundamental ethical questions or are oriented towards existing normative values such as human rights, which is quite a new development in this area of research.

Historical approaches tend to show a certain scepticism towards the concept of values; particularly they cast doubt on the idea of authentic and common European values. On the one hand, there are ‘traditions’ such as the Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman, the Medieval and the Enlightenment traditions, which form a core European identity and an ‘idea of Europe’ within which ‘long-term continuities and communalities’ can be observed ‘that could draw the boundaries of a European ethos and serve as a foundation for the contemporary European Union’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 6; Padgen 2002). But deeper analyses reveal that this identity, including its values, is constitutively shaped by pluralism and disagreements on its interpretation and political implementation (Joas and Wiegandt 2008; Schultz-Forberg and Stråth 2010). The continuous consensus on values per se is accompanied by a discontinuity in their semantics throughout European history. On the other hand, European values have also had a ‘dark side and nurture imperialism, racism and totalitarianism’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 6 referring to Davies 1996 and Judt 2006). Postcolonial and global historical studies also question the universality and uniqueness of European values and criticise the Eurocentrism of this concept (Chakrabaty 2000; Vanhaute 2013).

A historiographic perspective on values can also lead to a sharp criticism of their contemporary usage by the European Union. Historians therefore do not define values but focus on the political instrumentalisation of this concept (Csáky and Feichtinger 2007). Historians criticise the fact that the recourse to European values in the course of European integration falls back on the nation-state pattern of the nineteenth century and is thereby guided by the – not sufficiently reflected and not admitted – idea that political unity can be established according to this pattern (Csáky 2007). From this perspective, contemporary value discourses do not express an allegedly existing community of values, but rather the will to enclose and domesticate the plurality of values in Europe. The demand for common values could therefore threaten the inner diversity of Europe as well as the various national and regional memories, and generate resistance. Moreover, the claim of common European values could also erase the memory that a European self-understanding including values already existed before the integration of Europe. And the recourse to genuine European values can give the impression that there is a monopoly on values that are characteristic only for Europe. Such a concept of ‘self-authentication’ (Csáky 2007: 25) erects new mental borders and both results in the exclusion of ‘others’, such as values, groups, or cultures, and demands ethnocultural homogenisation and assimilation. Finally, an exclusively positive reference to European values threatens to let people forget Europe’s historical experiences of the civilisational abyss in the twentieth century as constitutive for the identity for the European Union. Without this memory, European values turn into abstract, supra-temporal norms and concepts which can even block the progress of integration.

This first overview demonstrates the heterogeneity of values research in academia. There is neither a common understanding nor a consensual definition of values, and different phenomena are researched from diverse perspectives.

4.2.2 Sociological Approaches

Sociology is much more precise in pursuing the question of values. ‘What are values, how do they develop, and what are they needed for?’ are its enduring themes (Thome 2019: 47). Sociologist Helmut Thome (2019) offers an excellent overview of the theoretical debates in classical values research. According to his research, as early as 1969 Lautmann (1969) counted 180 different definitions of values, which he took from 400 relevant specialist publications. He distinguishes between object- and concept-focused definitions, whereby these represent explications rather than firmly delimited terms. The concept of values then denotes (a) either ‘objects’ that are considered valuable (so-called ‘social values’) or (b) ‘concepts’ of what is desirable (Thome 2019: 48). Thomas and Znaniecki (1958: 21), for example, define ‘social values’ as ‘any datum having an empirical content accessible to the members of some social group and meaning concerning which it is or may be an object of activity. Thus, a foodstuff, an instrument, a coin, a piece of poetry, a university, a myth, a scientific theory, are social values’. In contrast, Kluckhohn (drawing on John Dewey) defines values as ‘a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristics of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action’ (Kluckhohn 1951: 395). Essential for this notion of values are ‘affective’ (‘desirable’), ‘cognitive’ (‘conception’), and ‘conative’ (‘selection’) elements. In this sense, objects can also become such conceptual values when they are endowed with symbolic meaning, leading to an emotional and normative attachment to them, such as flags for patriots and nationalists (Thome 2019: 49).

The understanding of what is desirable raises the question of evaluation, that is, the distinction between what is merely desired and aspired to (‘desired’) and what is also regarded as desirably required and justified (‘desirable’). According to Thome, Frankfurt and similarly Joas therefore speak of values as ‘second-order desires’: values are always subject to a process of ‘reflective self-assessment’ and are hierarchically ordered according to the degree of their desirability. This process therefore always already implies assessments in the sense of ‘right’ or ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘less good’, and ‘bad’ (Thome 2019: 50). Moral, cognitive, or aesthetic standards are therefore necessarily inherent in values to evaluate ‘first-order desires’. Such evaluative standards are available to actors in any identifiable culture and are transmitted, internalised, and interpreted situationally through lifelong socialisation processes, social practices, and interaction rituals (Thome 2019: 50 drawing on Durkheim and Collins). Therefore, values are relatively constant but not static. They can change over time, as can be seen, for example, in the changing attitudes towards homosexuality (see Halman and Sieben, Chap. 4, this volume). At the same time, because of their relative constancy, values always have a normative element. They originate essentially from the human will, but always also contain an ‘ought’, which in the case of a violation of values can show itself, for example, in feelings of shame and guilt. Values are thus also closely related to personal and collective identities and, with their normative character, can also be regarded as characteristic of an individual or a culture.

From a sociological perspective, values also assume numerous functions for society. These were already the focus of attention for the founders of values research, Parsons, Kluckhohn, and Allport. They wanted to describe and theoretically interpret society’s meaning and moral resources with their values research. In doing so, they focused on the structural function of values insofar as they control attitudes and behavioural dispositions and guarantee the performance and stability of societies. From a sociological perspective, this happens because values provide human action with selection criteria for modes, means, goals and control perception (Thome 2019: 51). Values provide orientation, motivation, and legitimation for human activity and secure benefits and social status for individuals (Chong 2000: 214). On the other hand, they regulate social interaction and coexistence, providing a basis for commonality and trusting communication as shared values, and thus ensure the cohesion of a society (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 31). Sociology also distinguishes between instrumental values or means values and terminal or end values, whereby the former serve to realise the latter (Rokeach 1973). For Milton Rokeach, for example, moral values such as honesty are instrumental values and means to achieve terminal values that refer to the end-state of existence, such as freedom or happiness. Of course, the relationship between such means-end chains is controversial, as they are mutable. Instrumental values, for example, can transform into terminal ones – as Georg Simmel has shown, for instance, regarding the value of money (Thome 2019: 54); and values, in turn, can be understood empirically or transcendentally and are subject to constant interpretation. Therefore, from a sociological perspective, there can be no ultimately valid values (Thome 2019: 56). Values underlie a constant process of transformation. Intentional actions or even manipulation of values by interest groups, media, or political discourses, etc., play an important role in the change of values. These can massively change the values of a culture or society, especially since the recognition of values is closely dependent on specific reference groups: ‘People develop attitudes and values that are favoured within their reference group’ (Chong 2000: 229).

The nature of values therefore leads to the conclusion: if they are to be able to fulfil their socially stabilising functions, they must be factually, temporally, and socially generalised (Thome 2003: 7–16, 52). Factual generalisation means that their semantic content is abstracted, and the content of the value is also described via contrast formations without being related to individual actions or specific objects. This presupposes the embedding of values in comprehensive contexts of meaning and action and makes interpretations necessary in the concrete (for instance, between equality and inequality). Temporal generalisation refers to the unquestionable validity of values, that is, their normativity. Referring to Luhmann, Thome (2019: 52) speaks of ‘counterfactually stabilised expectations’ that apply without justification even in the case of value violations and without which societies lose their stability. Moreover, values can have a different degree of social generalisation, they can be privatised, particularised, culturally specific, or universalistic; that means, they can have different scope in terms of the degree of factual agreement as well as normative validity. Universalistic values (such as those underlying human rights) in particular make the normative claim that the other values mentioned above do not run counter to them. They therefore do not have to be recognised by all people at all.

The quantity, quality, and intensity of current values conflicts in Europe, as documented in this study, make it clear that these generalisation processes are hotly contested in society and that it is by no means automatically certain which values are or should be generalised in factual, temporal, and social terms. This becomes clear around value concepts in the environment of sexuality or religion, or in the context of migration and refugee policy. For example, are values that regulate sexual behaviour private? How far should they be oriented towards ethical or legal norms? What does freedom of religion mean concerning the public activities of religious people? Do national values take precedence over human rights in dealing with refugees? Finally, on which value concepts and norms should such questions be decided if values and their validity – as a sociological approach shows – are subject to social negotiation processes and struggles?

Thome (2019: 56–58) also emphasises that values should be distinguished from needs, attitudes, and norms, whereby these phenomena are at the same time in an intensively discussed relationship with values. Needs, for example, either describe human desire or longing insofar as it is not yet subject to evaluation or refer to requirements necessary for the preservation of social or biological existence. As such, they can, of course, underlie values, that is, values would then be ‘cognitive representations of human needs’ (Kluckhohn 1951: 428) and can both arise from and create needs. Attitudes, on the other hand, describe the factual view towards specific objects and are therefore assigned to persons. They have no normative claim even if many people share them. Attitudes, therefore, describe the ‘individual consciousness’ that determines a real or possible action of persons (Thomas and Znaniecki 1958: 22) but lack the normative dimension. Norms, in turn, are conceived in sociology as rules that are formally explicit or informal and have the potential for sanctions. They prescribe or prohibit actions or attitudes for specific situations and contexts and thereby enable coordinated social or institutional action. Unlike values, which are intrinsic in origin and do not prescribe action, they have a prescriptive character. From a sociological point of view, norms are therefore not coagulated, derived values, but exist, for example, as a legal order to ensure the functioning of society even when there are conflicts of values. Pluralistic societies need such externally available norms that are valid regardless of divergent values – and people who are willing to follow these norms (Thome 2019: 53–55). From a sociological perspective, a policy trying to achieve normativity by means of values will therefore fail.

Empirical values research is primarily oriented towards a concept-related understanding of values. The two most well-known and effective research traditions are socio-psychological values research (for instance, Shalom H. Schwartz) and social-scientific attitudes research, which also includes the EVS or Ronald Inglehart’s World Values Survey. While Schwartz (1994), for example, starts from universal human needs and from this concludes the universally based existence of universal value dimensions (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism), from which he derives goals for individual and collective action, attitude studies approach values from a primarily functional perspective. Strictly speaking, they investigate values as attitudes towards second-order social values that can be found in society and are accepted as an expression of values. They explore opinions on what a society considers valuable. For example, in the context of modernisation theory, Ronald Inglehart postulates a continuum of prioritised individual needs, more specifically materialistic and post-materialistic values (Inglehart 1989), which he theoretically expands in later studies to include the dimensions of ‘survival’ versus ‘self-fulfilment’ and ‘traditional’ versus ‘secular-rational’ value orientation (Inglehart and Baker 2000). This theoretical model was also taken up by the EVS and further developed and adapted (Aichholzer et al. 2019: 32).

This outline of the sociological approach reveals its strengths and weaknesses. Sociology clarifies the social origin and complexity of the emergence, formatting, and formation of values and their function. It offers insights and overviews of social value constellations. It also addresses the question of the social origins and functions of norms. For the sake of objectivity, however, it does not address the ethical question of normative values, that is, which values or norms should apply to all, independent of socially changeable and power-infused empirical circumstances and how one arrives at such judgements.

4.2.3 Philosophical and Ethical Approaches

It is therefore not without reason that numerous philosophers and ethicists, in particular thinkers from the continental philosophical tradition, criticise the deficient understanding of values in social science. They stand in the long tradition of philosophical and ethical scepticism about the appropriateness of the concept of values for genuinely ethical questions that aim at the general validity of values and norms (see section “Genesis”; see also Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume). This criticism can be summed up by Martin Heidegger when he states that ‘precisely by labelling something as value, what is thus valued is deprived of its dignity’ and ‘by assessing something as value, what is valued is only admitted as an object for human estimation’ (Heidegger 2000: 41). All valuing is subject to subjectification and thus does not do justice to either philosophical or ethical concerns, reflecting the meaning and essence of the reality that transcends merely immanent objectivity and formulating ethical norms, principles, maxims, commandments, and laws that go beyond the subjective character and are generally binding and objectively valid. If values are only a historically changeable phenomenon subject to social dynamics, they can rise or fall in price. This makes them susceptible to abuse and instrumentalisation (Körtner 2020: 130). Human dignity, for instance, would then become subject to human availability and social negotiation processes.

Philosophical and ethical approaches therefore contribute to values research with their concepts of reason, transcendence, and normativity as innate human abilities. Because of these abilities, human beings can transcend the empirical reality and enquire beyond it with their mind and intellect. They are able to ask about the meaning of existence and of life. They are capable of the idea of universal ethical norms or an absolute reality that is humanly unavailable.

Philosophers and ethicists also criticise the synonymous use of the term ‘values’ for rather heterogeneous phenomena in the realm of ethics. In particular, ‘from an ethical perspective, the equation of normative and evaluative patterns for action and decision making cannot satisfy, because norms set free the connotation of an ought, whereas values are associated with the will’ (Dabrock 2015: 62). While a norm defines a moral status that should be striven for, values can be plural and have a particular character. Sayer (2011: 23–24) also criticises the sociological focus on the desires and needs of the subject as well as the social function and formation of values which ignores the ‘reason-laden or reasonable character of values’. According to him, social sciences reveal a certain ‘aversion to normativity’ (Sayer 2011: 24) and avoid the question of why people recognise values. Furthermore, there is no debate as to whether, besides social and psychological reasons, there are also rational reasons for sharing values. In reality evaluation, judgement, and reasoning overlap, and values can thus be seen as ‘sedimented valuations’ that ‘have become attitudes or dispositions, which we came to regard as justified’ (Sayer 2011: 25). As they are not beyond reason, the question of the reasonable justification of values arises. From this perspective, value change is shaped by social transformation, but also by reasonably reflected on experience and reasonable argumentation. To share this understanding, however, it must be accepted that human beings are not a result of social conditions alone and that the human capacities for reason-guided normativity and transcendence are constitutive dimensions of human existence. In an exclusively immanent world view, there is no room for such considerations. Values can then be perceived solely as the result of human habits, interests, and power struggles.

But because in contemporary philosophy and ethics, metaphysical approaches that assume objectively existing values and norms are highly controversial or even rejected, the claim for absolutely and universally valid values and norms must be justified non-metaphysically. Therefore, recent philosophical approaches try to receive the concept of values positively, but at the same time develop theories and arguments on how to use it in an ethically responsible way. The question of how values and ethical norms are related plays a central role but – as expected – is answered in a highly heterogeneous way. Bambauer (2019: 34–36) presents some of the latest theories:

In continuing Max Scheler’s ontological value realism, younger representatives of value realism speak of ‘value intuitionism’. They assume that values can be perceived through a ‘genuine value sensorium’ (Horn 2014: 101), that is, people have a specific faculty that is oriented towards recognising values that are self-evident. But this approach does not answer why people should bind themselves to these values and how one can protect oneself from self-deception, deception, and ethical errors. Analytic philosophy does not justify the validity of values but reconstructs them through a structural analysis of value statements. According to the so-called theory of ‘supervenience’, the attributes of values supervene with natural attributes or events; that means that specific values are necessarily connected with certain actions and can be transferred to actions if they are similar. Theories of needs take a similarly reconstructive approach when they base human action on everyday needs and understand needs as the source of the emergence of values. Universal values are derived from basic anthropological needs, which are not necessarily objectively but rather trans-subjectively valid. Desire theories, according to which values are the expression of subjective desires, also argue in this way but do not justify the legitimacy of these desires. Similarly, Christoph Horn’s ‘theory of oikeiosis’ (Horn 2014) derives values from the practical self-understanding of the acting human being but expands its approach: rational and self-determined actions are presented as axiomatically good and therefore affirmed. This axiomatically ‘good’ action refers to inescapable conditions of meaning that an actor must consider if he wants to think and act consistently.

All these value theories start from the acting subject, from whom they derive and legitimise not only the existence but also the justification of values as an orientation for human action. In this sense, norms would then be ‘higher-order’ and condensed values with the claim to validity and, in this respect, principles of action that have their origin in intuitive insights, needs, desires or presumptive contexts of meaning and which stand in a relationship of fluid transition to values. Do these theories then really differ from sociological ones? Many questions remain unanswered. Do values always imply norms – and should they? Are norms always based on values – and should they be?

Theories of the justification of norms following Immanuel Kant are therefore rather reserved about such approaches. According to Kant, norms can never be derived directly from subjective-conative impulses or desires of individual actors or groups. Instead, the ethical value of actions and things must be determined and derived regarding laws that are to be formulated by practical reason. One such moral law is, above all, the famous Categorical Imperative (Kant 1983), which is why this approach can also be called the ‘imperative theory of values’. It states that one should act only according to that maxim whereby one can at the same time will that one’s action should become a universal law. According to this, normative values are to be derived from this imperative and empirically found values must be critically examined against it. Admittedly, psychoanalytical, postmodern, or most recently neurobiological findings on the character of human reason, which is far from pure or neutral but rather marked by psychological, historical, social, or biological factors, can also give rise to criticism of this model.

Recently, the theories of values presented by Hans Joas (1997) and Charles Taylor (1989, 1999) have been widely received (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume). Joas also starts with the subject and asks about the genesis of values. He sees them as the result of human self-transcendence and self-binding. It is not so much rational reasons that bind people to values as it is drastic life experiences in which people transcend themselves and bind themselves to values because of the overwhelming experience of something valuable. Values are, therefore, something passive – one is seized by them. They are emotionally charged standards by which concrete actions are judged. In this way, values also open a space for intersubjective understanding about values and broad spaces of freedom. Values are thereby made narratively plausible and thus clearly differ from moral norms, which have a prohibitive character and are justified rationally and argumentatively. Because of their experiential character, values must therefore be rationally reflected, controlled, and justified. That means they must be brought into a meta-ethical discourse with the universal claim to validity of moral norms and the always plural possibilities of interpreting experiences. Joas thus clearly distinguishes between values and norms but simultaneously presents a communication-theoretical connection between them, insofar as value commitments are the basis and condition for the possibility of ethical discourse. Accordingly, values require reason-guided, argumentative reflection and evaluation.

Similarly related to the identity function of values, Charles Taylor speaks of values as ‘second-degree desires’, with the help of which people evaluate their desires and from which they develop a ‘moral landscape’ during their life course, which has a narrative and temporal structure. Human action takes place within this landscape and always has a linguistic-narrative character. At the same time, this value path always takes place in a space shaped by traditional and collective value concepts. This space also contains ‘constitutive goods’, that is, ideas that place values in a superordinate world view and thus guarantee their meaning and value, for instance God, the idea of the Platonic good, the validity of law, etc. For their articulation and formation, individual values, therefore, require a space in which, by means of socially mediated and culturally shaped language, those historically and culturally sedimented value concepts are transgenerationally passed on and conveyed. These span horizons of meaning in which the value of ethical actions can be discussed in the first place. Even in pluralist societies, the plurality of recognised values is not limitless. According to Taylor, ‘constitutive goods’ in the sense of generally binding norms do not become the source from which individual values are derived. But they do form the framework within which a society seeks ethical orientation. They have the character of pre-findable norms. This theory raises the question as to which constitutive goods a society orients itself to in its value formation processes when the bonds with goods that were based on religious, transcendental, or metaphysical universal norms are lost.

This fragmentary insight into current value theories shows that even philosophy and ethics do not provide a universal and definitive answer to what values and norms are and which values and norms can make universal claims. There are considerations to name universal ethical norms and relate them to values, but even such models cannot avoid the recognition of the subjective character, the historical changeability, and the plurality of values. In his virtue-based ethical model, Stephan Ernst (2020), for example, speaks of fundamental moral values such as respect for human dignity, solidarity, and tolerance, as well as the preservation of sustainability, but must presuppose that this requires the willingness to adopt a moral and reasonable standpoint as such and to understand values not only as serving self-interests but as having universal validity too. The central question would thus be why moral and normative values should be desirable at all and not just a burdensome duty (Ernst 2020: 32–33). Ernst argues that the rejection of these fundamental basic values and their presumptions would damage overall reality. Not recognising these values would express the admission that someone is not interested in the common good and would thus ‘withdraw from coherence with overall reality, reason and human community’ (Ernst 2020: 34). But what if this is what people do – give priority to their self-interests and group interests?

Despite the questions that philosophical or ethical approaches also leave open, their research reminds us of essential issues that every generation that wants to act ethically must always reflect upon. Ethics and philosophy, therefore, contribute indispensably to the following topics:

  1. (a)

    The relation between values and norms (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume)

As demonstrated, the relation between values and norms can be seen in a twofold way: either values are then understood as experience-based foundations for norms and norms in consequence are sedimented values, or values and norms are perceived as opposing realities that owe themselves to different sources and regulate each other reciprocally. Therefore, the normative claim of ethics can best be met by understanding the concept of a norm as a regulative of human interpretation, ordering and shaping human behaviour in a double sense: ‘as a genitivus subjectivus and as a genitivus objectivus’ (Schockenhoff 2014: 486).

In the first case, norms are produced by human practical reason and are thus the result of historical, cultural achievement and human interpretation of existence in a historical world. They are a regulative of human interpretation, action, and design. In this sense, norms would be condensed values. As genitivus objectivus, norms, in turn, are regulations for human thought, action, and design that can be found in life and developed anew. In this sense, they describe the basic conditions and prerequisites of what is good for the personal and social existence of human beings. In a certain sense, they therefore are ‘more objective’ rules, laws, commandments, etc. of living together on this earth. These norms are also subject to historical change because what is described as good has been wrested from historical experience but is guided by the primacy of human practical reason, according to which ‘what is good and therefore what is to be done is what corresponds to and serves the personal well-being of the human being, which promotes him as a human being, develops his humanity, and allows him to be more and better a human being’ (Schockenhoff 2014: 486). Good deeds would therefore have an end in themselves for grounds of reason.

  1. (b)

    The justification of values and norms

Without going into the numerous models of justification of norms that ethics has developed in the meantime, ethics reminds us that norms and their claims to validity must not only be described but must be justified in relation to the facts and the situation. Even if there are various methods for this, or whether there can or should (not) be ultimate justifications of norms, norms neither simply exist objectively, transcending time and history, nor can they be derived exclusively from empirical circumstances. Rather, because of the human capacity for rational and transcendent thinking, people can enter a reflective, critical distance from what is historically and empirically present and, based on reasonable rules and methods of thinking, transcend reality towards something new and different from what is empirically experienced and known. What is true for norms is consequently true for values.

  1. (c)

    The relation between particular and universal values (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume)

Given the reality of culturally and religiously plural societies, intercultural ethics in particular points out that social cybernetic models that start from an unspecified appeal to peaceful, multi-cultural coexistence and living together are not sufficient. Instead, rational models of coexistence are necessary that combine the recognition of the plurality of values with the need for binding norms. Moreover, the coexistence of culturally and religiously diverse groups is a task of social order. In this context, Merks (2012) speaks of the bipolarity between particularity and universality and emphasises the need not to see these as opposites. Rather, he promotes the necessity of developing a way of thinking that brings the constant striving for the necessary common and the right to individuality and particularity into reasonable tension (Merks 2012: 222). So, how can particular values, for example, be valued without abandoning the struggle for universal, normative values? And of what kind must universal norms and values be not to induce violence to legitimate particularities? Ethics that wants to formulate universal values in the sense of universally valid norms must, therefore, on the one hand, adhere to the fact that a society cannot exist in the long run without certain commonalities in moral and value issues; on the other hand, it must also consider that such commonality cannot be developed without respect for individual freedom and cultural diversity. Therefore, concern for a common basic ethos is just as much a part of any qualified discussion of values as respect for freedom and diversity. For Merks (2012: 234–235), human rights represent a suitable normative system because they address both the indispensable right of individuals and the universality of this same right for all people. They form a universal ethical basis for modern, subject-centred societies. The goal would be the integration of cultural differences into a jointly shared ‘culture of cultures’ that rests on four pillars: (a) the will to live together, (b) the care for the material and social prerequisites of social participation, (c) the recognition of the central importance of the person, and (d) the recognition of a common legal order that is neither confessional nor religiously oriented or even bound, but can be expected to provide justice for all (at least in the sense of protecting all from injustice). This model also makes clear that an ethically responsible polarity between particular and universal values with (a) and (b) also includes pre-moral conditions: no commonality can be established by appealing to universal values and norms or a legal order alone.

  1. (d)

    The relation between values, norms, and meaning

As values provide orientation for human action, they always also create meaning or, conversely, refer to a meaning from which they derive their validity. Values are therefore always embedded in ideas of the meaning of human existence and the world. Unlike analytical or descriptive-explicative approaches, non-reductionist philosophical approaches therefore always insist on a transparent disclosure and justification of the ideas regarding the meaning of life and reality that underlie value and normative claims. Values and norms are thus always also concretions of concepts of the meaning of life and reality, and, conversely, endowed by them. So, values and norms neither merely exist nor are they only set or claimed by people. Rather, they reveal the ability of people to give meaning to life and reality that goes beyond mere material existence. In turn, such ‘structures of meaning’ are always value related. Nor do they merely exist, but they are granted the claim to validity and are therefore subject to evaluation processes. Meaning, values, and norms can thus be neither naturalised biologically, psychologically, culturally, etc., nor adequately grasped by essentialist theories of a pre-given meaning of life and reality. They must always be critically examined for their validity by means of practical reason.

For this reason, different ‘levels of value’ (Krijnen 2011: 551) can be determined, that is, a distinction can be made between more or less unconditionally valid values. Individually subjective values only apply to a concrete subject; general subjective values apply to a numerical totality of subjects who strive for them based on their natural concerns in life. In contrast, objective values – such as legal norms – apply to all subjects of a system of order or culture, regardless of the factual recognition of subjects. Another distinction concerns intrinsic values and conditional values: while the subject autonomously submits to the former and they are in themselves unconditionally valid for the subject, the latter serve to preserve life and only become unconditionally valid values in combination with intrinsic values (Krijnen 2011: 449–551).

4.2.4 Values as a ‘Formal Indicator’ (‘Formalanzeige’)?

What remains to be said at the end of this plethora of different approaches to the concept of values? From our point of view, the socially necessary struggle for ethical orientation cannot be realised either without the concept of values or with sole reference to values. The term refers to topics and questions indispensable for people to live together. In this sense, the term ‘values’ could be seen as a ‘formal indicator’. According to Martin Heidegger (as discussed by Kisiel 2006), formal indicative terms, like all basic philosophical terms, are terms that do not directly state what they refer to in concrete terms, but only give an indication that the human being who tries to understand this term is faced with a ‘peculiar task’: to transform themselves into the ‘Dasein’ (the reality, the existence) the term indicates but cannot sufficiently decipher. Therefore, the formal indicator is not universal in the sense of a generic generality under which the concrete is subsumed, but in the sense that, according to a situation, it indicates a concrete way of being (‘Dasein’) without being able to reveal it completely. Formal indicative terms can never express directly what they refer to but can only give hints of what is to be done. They do not define. Rather, they can make a claim for a transformation. But as they can never cause transformation; they just indicate. And as the transformation into existence (‘Dasein’) can only be realised by a concrete person, formal indicators can never fully represent their content, but must be done and experienced. Thus, they are formal. So, a formal indicator confronts the existential task of engaging with the facts, questions, doubts, tasks, reflections, and actions associated with this concept.

If values are such a formal indicator, they can neither be fully defined nor answer ethical questions completely, but are intrinsically connected with reflection, communication, and action – with human existence, as such. Values thus do not call for implementation or application but remind us to face ethical challenges both theoretically and practically and call for transformation. The term therefore only reveals its meaning in concrete situations and contexts. Its generality lies in its reference to a concrete situation from which it cannot be separated. Values can therefore never be defined definitively and once and for all. Hopefully, we have taken the reader into this task so far with our various approaches to this concept and have been able to contribute to an inconclusive discourse.

4.2.5 Theological Approaches and ‘Christian Values’

  1. (a)

    Theological approaches

Like philosophy and ethics, Christian theology has a critical relation to the concept of values. As a scientific reflection of historical and contemporary Christian faith in its various denominations, it is committed to the rules and regulations, norms and principles, commandments and laws, virtues and attitudes the biblical and historical tradition has developed (see section “Relationship between religion and values”). Furthermore, Christian faith is not only an ethical system but a comprehensive way of life embedded in an overall religious interpretation of reality. Therefore, Christian theologians highlight that referring to values is only legitimate in the context of ‘religious rootedness, faithful commitment and binding community forms’ and must be ‘shaped by faith and the determination for God’s salvation’ (Bittner 1994: 2154).

Nevertheless, as early as the 1980s, the practice-oriented disciplines of theology in particular began to react to the emerging political discourse on values and received the concept of values in a theologically appreciative way. Some German-speaking moral theologians and social ethicists such as Dietmar Mieth (1987), Christof Mandry (2009), Eberhard Schockenhoff (2014), Clemens Sedmak (with a seven-volume series on foundational values of Europe: Sedmak 2010–2017), and more recently Stephan Ernst (Ernst and Engel 2014; Ernst 2020) and Sigrid Müller, Stephanie Höllinger, and Bettina Baldt (2020), have contributed affirmatively to the discourse on (European) values and value ethics and presented corresponding concepts.

Müller et al. (2020), for instance, define values as a constitutive element of virtue ethics. The latter is considered the moral part of value ethics, that is, it serves the ethical examination of values. From this point of view, values are fundamental standards for the orientation of human action and therefore indispensable for the acceptance of norms as concrete prescriptions for action. Without reference to the values that norms are based upon, the latter become empty rules, are no longer understandable, and lose acceptance; ‘without values, norms remain empty of content and arbitrary’ (Müller et al. 2020: 173–174). Vice versa, without norms, the concretisation of values remains ambiguous. Values must therefore undergo a critical differentiation into non-moral values on the one hand and fundamental and end values (Müller et al. 2020: 174–179) on the other. Non-moral values are fundamental goods that represent the material prerequisites for action (for example, health, property, and physical freedom), while fundamental moral values denote the normative ‘minimum conditions of individual conduct of life and human coexistence’ (such as justice, solidarity, respect for human dignity, sustainability). End values, in turn, can be pursued directly or indirectly and must again be divided into non-moral and moral values. Wealth, for example, would be an immediate non-moral end value that must be subjected to scrutiny by moral end values such as responsibility, proportionality, etc. On the other hand, happiness in life would be a non-immediate non-moral end value that must be tested by moral end values such as moral coherence or good conscience. The concept of values can thus be regarded as a basic and essential resource of moral action, but it does not replace ethical discussions.

For Sedmak (2010: 16), values are ‘highly emotional ideas about what is desirable’ and at the same time ‘relatively general and permanent evaluation criteria’. As such, they form the frame of reference and the source of norms and ethical preferences. From an ethical point of view, they must not be the reason but rather the fundament for decisions and actions. They provide essential criteria for evaluations and are ‘conceptions of the desirable’. For Sedmak (2010: 19), three dimensions of values emerge: a cognitive dimension, which is connected to convictions; an affective dimension, which shapes value bonds emotionally; and a volitive dimension, which allows these cognitive and affective bonds to values to be understood as the result of decisions of the will. Values thus are closely related to identity and attitudes to life and are indispensable sources of moral motivation, though they require ethical examination.

Dietmar Mieth (1987), in turn, outlines a normative understanding of the extent to which values can be referred to in an ethically responsible manner. In his view, the concept of value must not be separated from the concept of the meaning of existence. Otherwise, the reference to values can turn into ideology. Values are thus commitments ‘of a recognised and acknowledged meaning of the human existence’ (Mieth 1987: 211). Whoever appeals to values must therefore clearly define and justify the term and at the same time provide transparent information about the meaning of human existence with which these values are connected. Moreover, an ethically responsible concept of values must be tied back to the personal dignity of the human being and the respective concrete historical situation. Last, but not least, its use must be accompanied by a transparent communication process about its content and justification. For Mieth, too, the concept of values does not replace ethical examination.

Practical theology also receives the concept of values in a similarly positive way, as it is obliged to deal with contemporary developments in societies in a critical and appreciative manner in order to find corresponding points of contact with theology. Since, moreover, the Christian churches have also taken up the discourse on values in their daily practice so that they can connect to social developments in a communicative way and develop their ethical norms in the horizon of modern society and thus also to be able to legitimise themselves, the scientific examination of interdisciplinary research on values is also one of the core tasks of practical theology. Finally, this theological discipline assumes that concepts that are highly accepted in a society are always also ‘witnessing notions’, that is, they reveal problems of society in a condensed way and at the same time indicate possible solutions. Values thus represent both the need for moral orientation and the answer to this need in pluralist societies. Therefore, values transformation needs not to be seen primarily as a loss of ethical orientation but as an opportunity for further moral development.

  1. (b)

    ‘Christian values’

From a theological perspective, values research is also highly relevant because of the contemporary public and political reference to ‘Christian values’ or ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in European value discourses. However, as Pickel and Pickel (Chap. 5), Polak and Schuster (Chap. 6), and Aschauer (Chap. 12) demonstrate in this volume, many people with a Christian self-image share values and attitudes that are incompatible with the Christian faith from a theological point of view – such as xenophobia or rejection of diversity. Christian religiosity continues to have a diminishing but still significant influence on political and politically relevant attitudes, even in the context of secular societies. Moreover, Christian churches play a historically relevant role in the genesis of the values of the European Union.

Even if the impact of Christian faith on the values of the European Union is hotly debated scientifically, values research cannot ignore religion, and Christianity in particular. But the results can be quite contradictory. While Weymans (Chap. 3, this volume), for example, estimates the influence of the Protestant tradition on the genesis of European values to be higher than that of the Catholic tradition and hardly attributes any importance to the influence of religion today, Mandry (2011) or Bauman (2015) emphasise the Catholic influence of the founding fathers of the European Union, which is reflected, for example, in personalism, the subsidiarity of structures and institutions, or the transnational orientation (Bauman 2015: 108) of the European Union. Others, such as Altermatt et al. (2008) even discuss the question of whether Europe is a Christian project. Religious communities, especially the churches, are also institutionally involved at the European level and have developed corresponding organisations and structures for this purpose – for instance, CEC, the Conference of the European Churches, COMECE, the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union, or CROCEU, the Committee of Representatives of the Orthodox Churches to the European Union. These institutions and platforms correspond to political representatives at the European Parliament and the European Commission, whose mandate includes dialogue with religions. Religion, therefore, also plays a significant role in the governance of the EU in connection with values (Foret and Calligaro 2018).

Today, historically genuine religious values have remained in public discourses of the European Union mostly in abstract, universalised, quasi-secular, stripped-off versions. Additionally, the values of the Enlightenment, such as religious freedom, could often be asserted only in conflict and struggle with the churches and religious communities. These struggles continue when it comes to the acceptance of human rights and their values regarding issues of gender justice and sexual orientation. But recent research also demonstrates that the political values of the Enlightenment are fundamentally owed to a biblical Judeo-Christian ethos and were by no means developed independently of it. Admittedly, it was primarily the Christian churches that fought this political ethos of the Bible for a long time and recognised values such as democracy, religious freedom, or human rights only in the twentieth century. But Nelson (2011), for instance, proves that the dominant narrative, according to which modern political thought in the West owes its existence to secularisation, is false. Instead, the political ideas and values associated with it were developed by Christians who devoted themselves to the Hebrew sources of the Old Testament. In this sense, Europe had already become not more but less secular in early modernity, insofar as a genuinely biblical political ethos (especially with its orientation towards justice and law) became politically relevant. Today, Christian values in the EU stand alongside secular and multicultural values and compete for recognition (Sutherland 2010). There are numerous reasons to explore the connection between values, religion, and theology.

So, what are ‘Christian values’? As the EU conflicts with Poland and Hungary, which repeatedly claim the need to protect Christian values from an Islamic invasion, prove, this is also a contested concept. In public and political reality, Christian values are often associated with nationalism, a traditional image of women and the family, the rejection of same-sex relationships, and diverse gender identities, or brought into opposition with modern value relativism. For Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, Astrid Mattes (2016) demonstrated that the recourse to Christian values – decoupled from the Christian churches and in the guise of an enlightened Christian-formatted universalism – was pushed above all by the Christian Democratic parties to differentiate European culture from Islam.

But such an interpretation fails to understand Christian values from a theological perspective. First, a traditionalist approach which claims an opposition between Christian and secular values ignores the idea that the latter – such as democracy, religious freedom, or solidarity – must also be examined and recognised for their theological connectivity and dignity and, if ethically responsible, can be accepted. Second, claiming an oppositional position between Christian and Islamic values is also theologically wrong. Despite all their differences, they share numerous ethical ideas and values in history and the present (Borgolte 2006; Renz 2014). Third, and above all, Christian values do not exist isolated from the Christian faith and detached from a Christian context of life. Therefore, the recognition of the equal dignity of all human beings, the appreciation of ethnic and religious plurality, and the commitment to justice for each individual and all people is inseparably connected with Christian values. Christian values do not form an autonomous moral system from which one can derive norms arbitrarily; they are not a quarry that can be used for political interests.

Even, if this normative-theological claim was not realised, as the political reception of Catholic social teaching in modern times led to a political (ab)use of Christian values independent from churches (Chapel 2018), a theologically responsible reference to Christian values is legitimate only if they are embedded in the community of life, the law, the memory, and the interpretation of the churches. Furthermore, they must be subject to criticism by the doctrines, rules, norms, principles, commandments etc. that the biblical and historical tradition provides (Polak 2020). Therefore, from a theological point of view, nationalism or xenophobia can never be justified theologically.

Nor are Christian values a monopoly of Christian churches in terms of content, since charity, justice, and solidarity can also be advocated for without a Christian background and faith. Even if certain values – for instance, the virtue of humility – were primarily propagated by Christianity, Christian values can also be justified by means of ethically autonomous rationality (Ernst 2020: 36). What would be specifically Christian about such values is the motivation through faith in God, the willingness to justify oneself before God, and the commitment to the community of faith. According to Auer (1995), there is even also the possibility of an autonomous morality that understands the Christian faith as a stimulating, critical, and integrating basis for ethical judgements. This means that Christian faith can encourage human beings to be alert, creative, and ready to engage in ethical questions. It can criticise and denounce inhumane irrationality and ideologies. And it can integrate all human expressions that can be justified as humanly beneficial and scientifically justifiable, including values. Christian values are thus plural conceptions of a good, desirable life for each individual and all, based on the Christian faith and in need of theological-ethical critique (Polak 2020).

The political recourse to Christian or Judeo-Christian values is therefore highly ambivalent. On the one hand, it reminds Europe of the essential intellectual-historical origins of modern, secular values in Judaism and Christianity, which are sometimes ignored by contemporary secular elites. This recourse also claims that Christians, Jews, and religious people want to, can, and shall contribute to value discourses. But referring to Christian values also has a dark side if their historical abuse is ignored. Churches fought the recognition of modern European values for a long time and still do. The European anti-Semitism, based on a long anti-Judaic Christian tradition (Henrix 2004), gives lie to the hyphen in the term ‘Judeo-Christian values’. Finally, the political interests associated with the appeal to Christian values very often aim at exclusion and marginalisation of non-Christian migrants and Muslims (Mattes 2016). So, an uncritical reception of the formula ‘Christian values’ seems highly problematic, as long as the historical and contemporary burdens are not adequately recognised in political rhetoric. From a theological point of view, this is regrettable, for in terms of content, in a theologically reflected sense Christian values stand for an ethical-universal orientation for the good of each human being, humanity, and the whole creation.

In conclusion, theology contributes essential historical, hermeneutic, and criteriological insights to values research. In particular, it enables a deeper understanding and a differentiated ethical critique of religiously motivated values. Because of its rational understanding of the transcendent reality, it can also pose questions about secular values that often ignore the human ability to transcend. Therefore, theology can also contribute to the question of the possibilities and limits of ethical judgement and knowledge.

5 Conclusion

Both the problem outline on the use of the concept of values and the overview of the different conceptualisations and approaches in academic values research clearly demonstrate an unwieldy variety of understandings and a struggle over values. It became clear that discourses on values play a key role in people’s coexistence on different levels: on the individual level; on the level of social institutions such as the education system, the economy, and religious communities; and on the level of political actors, processes, and institutions. The recourse to values and societal conflicts around values and their understanding is an inescapable personal and political reality in pluralist societies searching for ethical orientation.

In view of the abundance of multiple global challenges, the struggle for values will and must therefore be a central component of social and political debates. In modern societies, which do not accept the recourse to either ultimately predefined or transcendent values and in which people claim participation also in value issues, the struggle for values will therefore be a necessary and permanent condition. As we have shown, this is associated with numerous questions, tensions, and problems. Simultaneously, the success of the concept of values and academic values research demonstrates that this contested concept, despite all its difficulties, has immense potential concerning the ethical self-assurance of societies and their (political) institutions.

In this struggle for values, academic values research can contribute significantly to a more qualified discourse on values. Admittedly, this requires strengthening interdisciplinary cooperation, since the various disciplines of values research have highly heterogeneous approaches and terminologies. Sayer (2011: 36) therefore proposes a ‘post-disciplinary perspective’ that ‘goes beyond dichotomic thinking within the disciplines’. This perspective overcomes the dualisms between ‘is-ought, reason-emotion, science-ideology, science-ethics, positive-normative, objectivity-subjectivity, mind-body’ (Sayer 2011: 36). In this regard, increased cooperation between normative, hermeneutic, and empirical sciences as well as a stronger international perspective should be added. As values research in different languages can lead to new insights, the latter cooperation seems very promising. For example, Anglophone philosophical values research, with its more pragmatic, language-analytical approach, opens up different perspectives than does a transcendental philosophical German-language approach to ethics, which asks about the conditions for the possibility of ethical judgement formation. In the future, such post-disciplinary collaborations promise to provide a comprehensive, complex picture of values, their understanding, and their use, and show multi-perspective and at the same time scientifically based ways of developing ethical judgements. Essential to the reception and effectiveness of such interdisciplinary research is, of course, continuous dialogue with social and political actors and the communicative embedding of research in public discourse on values. Even then, discourse on values will remain plural, conflictual, and inconclusive. But the struggle over the central ethical question of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ will remain decisive in societies that attempt to live together in diversity, justice, and peace.