Values Instead of Virtues

“Expressive individualism, which grew out of the Romanticism of the late eighteenth century and today has an especial affinity with our therapeutic culture, assumes that all people have a unique core of intuitions and feelings within them that is then coupled with the understanding that they have the inherent right to pursue and express these intuitions and feelings . . . This attitude is, in consequence, unprincipled in a traditional sense, for its central and only principle is the self. ‘The freedom of our day,’ declared a Harvard valedictorian, ‘is the freedom to devote ourselves to any values we please, on the mere condition that we do not believe them to be true.’” [David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 66-67]