Interpersonal Value Systems (e.g. Royalism vs. Counters)

Ideally we would have a registry of individual value systems and use that for persuasion, however that does not exist. To assist I have recorded a few classes I have observed, hopefully to expedite the progress of persuasion (or realizing when you have an incompatibility).

Royalism/Royalists: the broad class of value systems that consider a certain set of individuals’ happiness or rights/prerogatives to be of a different (higher) order than those of others, regardless of any other factors. Normally manifested as slavery or second-class citizenship. Variants include blood-line style, caste system (sometimes bloodline, sometimes profession), religious, militarism. One sort of royalism not normally recognized as such, but applicable in a similar fashion, is the “me-first”/”family-first” approach, when taken to the level of accepting one’s own word or directive regardless of an objective, universally applicable reference.

Counting/Counters: the broad class of value systems that computes valuation based upon the sum of some individual attribute of an individual, prior deed, or rationally-based future potential. Variants include equal-intrinsic, plutocrats within a framework of economically beneficial correlation, democrats, meritocrats, age-based discrimination (favoring the young or the old as a class).

Tiered Utilitarians: classic issues people raise about the simplest statement of utilitarianism involve the question of aesthetic pleasures vs. functional or life-sustaining attributes, and how you measure this utility. Tiered utilitarians tend to answer part or all of this by asserting functional characteristics or groups of achievements or states into progressive tiers, where the most important tiers are asserted to deliver the most or most fundamental happiness. If these individuals also have a universalist-type counter value system, then you often hear these individuals advocate for everyone being fed, clothed, etc. as a precondition for any luxury spending.

Metric Utilitarians: roughly the reverse of the tiered, who assert that it is a more or less common case that some individuals may inherently have more intrinsic happiness than others, and that by whatever means/metric we measure utility, we should not consider ourselves bound to equality of distribution etc. as long as the overall metrics are optimized.