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ANNOTATION:
The problem of free will
OK, perhaps "refutation" is too strong a word. However, I think you're missing an important insight in your discussion of "ultimate human values". You say "The supreme goals, or values, of human life are, in the last analysis, set by an individual in an act of free choice." Yet this overlooks something fundamental about the nature of choice. What is it that makes us choose A over B? It's no good to merely say that "choice" or "free will" does it for us. There has to be some kind of rationale behind a decision. Or to put it another way, to make a choice, you have to decide which outcome would be more valuable to you. To put it yet another way, you have to measure the options up against whatever *GOALS* you're striving to achieve.
If you disagree, then consider - how could it be otherwise? What kind of free will is it that makes chooses between the various options on the basis of nothing at all? Answer: a random number generator. I trust that your conception of free will is something a bit grander than a dice or lottery machine.
To re-iterate, the problem is that to decide upon "ultimate goals" you need to have pre-existing "meta-ultimate goals" to base your decisions upon. Yet "meta-ultimate" is a contradiction in terms.
So how does the whole thing get started, we may wonder? Well there are two kinds of answer I could come up with, and I'm afraid I haven't yet worked out which I prefer.
1) Ultimate goals are *not* things we can decide for ourselves, if they were then we would be back in the grip of that contradiction above. Instead, our ultimate goals, like those of animals, are "hard-wired".
2) Ultimate goals don't really exist - they are a theorists' fiction. It is mostly true that goals are hierarchical, but the hierarchy is not a strict one, and the higher up the goal, the more abstract it is. Instead of having some gleaming Ultimate Instruction locked away in our brains, there are a whole host of competing high-level goals, interacting and competing.
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