Charles Taylor on the reality of values

"What is real is what you have to deal with, what won't go away just because it doesn't fit with your prejudices. By this token, what you can't help having recourse to in life is real, or as near to reality as you can get a grasp of at present. Your general metaphysical picture of "values" and their place in "reality" ought to be based on what you find real in this way. It couldn't conceivably be the basis of an objection to its reality." 

[...] 

"If we cannot deliberate effectively, or understand and explain people's action illuminatingly, without such terms as 'courage' or 'generosity', then these are real features of our world."

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), 59, 69

Hans Joas om historieberättandets etik

"We cannot make plausible and defend our value commitments without telling stories – stories about the experiences from which our commitments arose, stories about other people’s experiences or about the consequences a violation of our values had in the past. Biographical, historical, and mythological narration in this sense are not just a matter of illustration for didactic purposes, but a necessary part of our self-understanding and of our communication about values. The insight that in the case of the communication about values a strict separation of genesis and validity is impossible should not lead to an exaggerated understanding of their separability in the case of cognitive and normative validity claims, but instead inspire us to take seriously the connection between narration and argumentation in all attempts to justify values. What we need is a structure of argumentation that is ‘genealogical’ because of the contingency of the genesis of values, but not ‘destructive’ in the way Nietzsche and Foucault thought it to be."

Hans Joas - Value Generalization. Limitations and Possibilities of a Communication about Values. s.91