The twentieth century has brought changes to human culture that far surpass any witnessed in all the millennia of past human history. Led mostly by science and technology, the result of modernity has been an advance of all aspects of human knowledge and a revision of human culture as modern individuals have tried to learn how to coexist in a dangerous world made ever smaller by electronic communications and global economic interdependence. In this paper I will attempt to examine some of the ways modern thinkers have tried to address the ethical problems caused by the "revaluation of all values" (to paraphrase Nietzsche) that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to show how a private traditionalism can coexist with a public relativism and skepticism as a postmodern response to the modernist dilemmas. The conclusion that I hope to support is that values, while ultimately not subject to official sanction, are also not a matter of absolute individual choice. The consequences of acting on personal preferences need to be considered interpersonally and neither "absolutely" nor�in either the religious or secular sense�"finally.� For responsible decision-making to take place, therefore, projected actions and attitudes need to be modeled aesthetically in ways that educate the will as well as the intellect.