Most decisions are hard because you don't know what you value
You have been stuck on a decision. Maybe you are stuck on one right now. You weigh the pros and cons. You ask friends. You sleep on it. You make a spreadsheet. You sleep on it again. The options blur together and you feel no closer to resolution.
The standard diagnosis is that the decision is "complex" — too many variables, too many unknowns, too many trade-offs. But philosopher Ruth Chang argues that the real problem is different. In her work on hard choices, Chang (2017) makes a distinction that reframes the entire problem: hard choices are not hard because you lack information. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par — neither is objectively better, and no additional analysis will break the tie. The options are genuinely comparable, but the comparison does not produce a winner.
This is where values enter. When two options are on a par by every external metric, the deciding factor is internal: which option better serves who you are trying to become? Chang calls this "volitional commitment" — the act of putting yourself behind a choice not because it is objectively superior, but because it aligns with the values you have chosen to live by. The decision stops being a calculation and becomes an act of identity.
Most people never reach this step because they never did the prerequisite work. They don't have an explicit values hierarchy. They have vague intuitions about what matters, but nothing precise enough to filter a decision through. And so they cycle — analysis paralysis not from too much information, but from too little self-knowledge.
The mechanics: values as decision filters
The concept is deceptively simple. When you have a ranked list of your values and you face a choice, you ask: "Which option best serves my highest-ranked values?" The option that serves your top values wins, even if it performs worse on lower-ranked values.
This is not a new idea. Benjamin Franklin described a version of it in his 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, outlining what he called "moral or prudential algebra." Franklin's method: divide a sheet of paper in half, list reasons for and against, then strike out pairs of equal weight until a balance remains. But Franklin himself acknowledged the limitation — the method treats all reasons as commensurable, as though you can weigh career advancement against family time on the same scale.
The values-based approach solves Franklin's problem by introducing hierarchy. Not all considerations are equal. Your values tell you which considerations matter more. When career advancement conflicts with family time, you don't need to calculate — you need to know which you ranked higher and why. If family is your top value and career growth is third, the decision is not easy (you still feel the trade-off), but it is simpler. You know what you are choosing and why.
Harry Kraemer, former CEO of Baxter International and author of From Values to Action (2011), built an entire leadership framework around this principle. Kraemer identifies four practices — self-reflection, balance, true self-confidence, and genuine humility — and argues that self-reflection is foundational because without it, you cannot identify what you actually value. His central claim: values-based leaders do not agonize over decisions because they have already done the harder work of clarifying their values. The decision becomes an application of principles already established, not a discovery process conducted under pressure.
Why decisions degrade without values: the exhaustion problem
Every decision you make draws on the same finite pool of cognitive resources. The research on this is contested — the strong version of "ego depletion" proposed by Baumeister et al. (1998) failed to replicate in a large-scale multi-lab study (Hagger et al., 2016) — but the practical observation holds: people who make many decisions in sequence tend to default to the easiest option, not the best one.
Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso (2011) documented this in a study of 1,112 judicial parole decisions. Judges granted parole approximately 65% of the time at the start of a session. By the end of a session — after dozens of decisions — the approval rate dropped to near zero. After a break, it reset to 65%. The status quo (deny parole) requires no justification; granting parole requires active reasoning. As the judges' capacity for effortful reasoning declined, they defaulted to the path of least cognitive resistance.
Values-based decision-making addresses this problem directly. A values hierarchy functions as what Gerd Gigerenzer calls a "fast-and-frugal heuristic" — a simple rule that produces good decisions without exhaustive analysis. Gigerenzer's research program at the Max Planck Institute has demonstrated repeatedly that simple decision rules, applied consistently, often outperform complex analytical methods. His work on fast-and-frugal trees shows that a three-question decision protocol can match or exceed the accuracy of models using dozens of variables — particularly under conditions of uncertainty where more data creates more noise rather than more clarity.
A values hierarchy is exactly this kind of heuristic. Instead of weighing every factor in every decision, you ask a short sequence of questions: "Does this serve my highest value? If both options serve it equally, does one better serve my second-highest value?" You stop as soon as one option wins. The decision is not exhaustive, but it is principled — and under uncertainty, principled decisions consistently outperform exhaustive ones.
The sacred values problem: when trade-offs feel impossible
Not all values-based decisions are simple applications of a ranked list. Some decisions pit values against each other in ways that feel morally impermissible to even consider.
Philip Tetlock's research on sacred values (2003) identifies a specific failure mode. Sacred values — honesty, loyalty, human life, freedom — are values that people treat as having infinite weight. They refuse to trade them against secular values (money, convenience, status). Tetlock distinguishes three types of trade-offs:
- Routine trade-offs pit two secular values against each other. These feel straightforward. Should you spend money on a vacation or save it? You weigh costs and benefits.
- Taboo trade-offs pit a sacred value against a secular one. These provoke moral outrage. How much money would it take for you to betray a friend? The question itself feels offensive.
- Tragic trade-offs pit two sacred values against each other. These produce genuine anguish. Do you prioritize honesty or loyalty when telling the truth will harm someone you love?
Routine trade-offs are where values hierarchies work cleanly. Tragic trade-offs are where they earn their real value. When two sacred values collide, the only resolution is knowing which one you have ranked higher — and accepting the cost. Without a pre-established hierarchy, you will oscillate between the two values indefinitely, paralyzed not by complexity but by the refusal to acknowledge that even sacred values have a rank order in your life.
This is uncomfortable. It requires admitting that you would, under extreme conditions, compromise one deeply held value in service of another. But the admission is not a moral failure — it is moral clarity. The alternative is pretending all your values have equal weight, which guarantees paralysis whenever they conflict.
Schwartz's value theory: why trade-offs are structural
Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values (1992, refined 2012) provides the empirical foundation for understanding why values conflict and how trade-offs work. Schwartz identified values organized in a circular structure based on their motivational content. Adjacent values on the circle (like achievement and power) are compatible — pursuing one typically supports the other. Opposing values (like self-direction and conformity) are in structural tension — pursuing one necessarily comes at the expense of the other.
The practical implication is direct: some values-based trade-offs are not personal failures of prioritization. They are structural features of the values themselves. If you value both benevolence (caring for close others) and achievement (demonstrating competence), you will inevitably face situations where they conflict — the late night at work that means missing your child's event. Schwartz's model predicts this conflict not as a sign of confusion but as a consequence of holding values from opposing regions of the value circle.
This matters for values-based decision-making because it normalizes the discomfort. The goal is not to eliminate conflict between your values. The goal is to have a ranked hierarchy that tells you how to resolve the conflict when it arises — and to make that hierarchy before you are standing in the middle of the trade-off with adrenaline clouding your judgment.
The pre-commitment advantage: decide before the moment arrives
The most effective values-based decision-makers share a common practice: they make value-level decisions before the specific situation demands them. The decision about which value takes precedence is separated from the decision about what to do in a particular case.
This is the difference between a policy and a judgment call. A judgment call happens in the moment, under pressure, with incomplete information and emotional interference. A policy was made in advance, when you had the cognitive space to reason clearly. Values-based decision-making converts recurring judgment calls into policies.
Consider a hiring manager who values both team harmony and intellectual honesty. Without a pre-committed hierarchy, every time a team member raises a difficult truth in a meeting, the manager faces a real-time trade-off: do I support the truth-teller (intellectual honesty) or protect the group dynamic (team harmony)? This is exhausting. With a pre-committed hierarchy — "intellectual honesty comes first; I will protect honest dissent even when it creates temporary discomfort" — the decision is already made. The manager still feels the tension, but the behavior is not in question.
Kraemer's self-reflection practice serves exactly this function. His recommendation to end each day by asking "What did I say I was going to do, and what did I actually do?" is a calibration mechanism — it detects drift between your stated values hierarchy and your revealed behavior. The drift is inevitable. The detection is what matters.
Values-based decisions and your Third Brain
This is where values-based decision-making intersects with AI in a way that most people miss.
When you externalize your values hierarchy into a system that an AI can access — a written document, a structured prompt, a decision framework in your knowledge base — you create something powerful: a decision partner that remembers your values when you are too tired, too emotional, or too pressured to remember them yourself.
The ValueCompass framework (Rao et al., 2024), grounded in Schwartz's theory, demonstrates that AI systems can be measured for alignment with human values across decision-making scenarios. But the more immediate application is personal. If your AI assistant knows that you rank autonomy above financial security, and creative work above status, it can flag when a decision you are considering violates your own hierarchy. Not to decide for you — but to ensure you are deciding as yourself, not as the depleted, pressured, or socially influenced version of yourself that shows up at 4 PM on a hard day.
This is not delegation of judgment. It is externalization of values into a system that holds them more reliably than your working memory does. The same principle that made Luhmann's Zettelkasten powerful — an external system that remembers connections your brain forgets — applies to values. Your Third Brain does not replace your moral reasoning. It ensures that the inputs to your moral reasoning (your own values, in their ranked order) are consistently available when you need them.
The protocol: write your values hierarchy as a structured document. Include the ranking, the reasoning behind the ranking, and one concrete example of how each value has guided a past decision. Store it where your AI tools can reference it. When facing a significant decision, prompt the AI with the decision context and ask: "Based on my stated values hierarchy, which option is most aligned?" Compare its analysis with your gut reaction. When they diverge, examine why — the divergence is where the real self-knowledge lives.
From decision to alignment
Values-based decision-making does not eliminate difficulty. It eliminates a specific kind of difficulty: the paralysis that comes from not knowing your own basis for choosing. When you know your values and their hierarchy, hard choices become principled choices. You still feel the trade-off. You still pay the cost of what you did not choose. But you know why you chose what you chose, and you can endorse the reasoning tomorrow morning.
The previous lesson established that other people's values differ from yours — and that assuming otherwise causes persistent misunderstanding. This lesson established that your values, once known and ranked, become decision infrastructure — fast, principled filters that replace exhaustive analysis with aligned action.
The next lesson — L-0636, Living in alignment with values creates energy — addresses what happens after the decision. When your actions consistently match your values, you experience a specific kind of vitality. When they consistently don't, you experience a specific kind of depletion. The decision is the mechanism. The alignment is the outcome.