I. While she did not often use the term - from the beginning of her speech, Dr. Battle urged us to adopt and/or assumed some fundamental values:

• beauty - the beauty of the audience gathered today
  diversity is our strength - so diversity and strength are to be valued (instead of, say, the lack of diversity and weakness)
  what we can do together - two values here: accomplishment and cooperation (because cooperation can lead to greater accomplishment

Questions:

Values:

• is accomplishment always a good or value? (Hitler accomplished a lot, exploiting the cooperative energies of millions of people - but would we necessarily value these accomplishments, however rooted in cooperation they may have been?)
  Is cooperation always a good or a value?
  Is accomplishment a value "in itself" (an intrinsic good, something we desire for its own sake) - and/or something we value because it leads to / is the means of achieving / some other good /value?
  (If we value something because it leads to something else - philosophers call that something an extrinsic good - something that has value not for its own sake, but because it is necessary for achieving something else that is of value.)
  Is cooperation an intrinsic good, and/or an extrinsic good?

Metaphysics: are such values real?

Epistemology: how would we know whether such values are "really real," possibly/potentially "real," thoroughly unreal, etc.?

Similar questions can be raised about additional values enjoined in the speech:
 

• the value of service to others (why should we value this? what kind of value is this - intrinsic / extrinsic / or?)
  Let us resolve to care about each other a little more...
  [Martin Luther King, Jr.] tried with love to make freedom ring.
  Dr. King argued for a campaign of nonviolent resistance to the injustices of segregation and racism - an approach to realizing freedom for all that is root, as we have seen, in both the philosophical and religious traditions of the West (see the Web page on King's Letter from Birmingham Jail).
  Why are love and freedom to be valued?
  Why is nonviolent resistance - based on taking seriously the injunction from Jesus and Jewish law to "love one's neighbor as one's self" - to be valued more than the direct use of violent force, as some other leaders of the civil rights movements have argued?
   

II. Dr. Battle provided at least two arguments:

a) Explicit: We have a right to our own answers to the questions life presents us - and diversity and accepting diversity helps us respect the answers others give.

Formal rephrase:

• Explicit Premises:
   
  • We have a right to our own answers to the questions life presents us.
    Diversity and accepting diversity help us respect the answers others give.
    [Implicit: diversity and accepting diversity will help us recognize others' right to their own answers.]
    [Implicit: A right is something we must recognize.]
    
• [Implicit] Conclusion: We are required to pursue diversity and accepting diversity [so that we will thereby recognize other's right to their own answers].

Questions:
 

• Is this a sound argument? That is,
  a) are the premises clearly / likely to be true?
  b) do the premises force the conclusion to be true (is the argument logically valid)?
  Metaphysical question: are "rights" real?
  Epistemological question: how would we know whether rights are "real" or not?

b) In response to the question "whether or not Dr. King would be satisfied with what has happened in the U.S. in the area of race relations," Dr. Battle made two comments.
 

• i) She noted that some critics have noted that the job (of achieving racial equality) is not complete - and from this concluded that not much progress have been made, more needs to be done, etc.
  ii) She countered by saying that "It will never be complete - we should never be satisfied" with where we are in seeking equality, no matter how far we may have come.

So, at least implicitly, the fact that we have not arrived at perfect equality
 

• is not grounds for concluding that we haven't made very much progress, but rather
  simply the result of having an ideal (racial equality) which we will never fully achieve.

Buried in here, however, is a logical problem: the speaker shifts
 

• from (1) the initial meanings of "complete" and "satisfied" as used by the critics who seek to measure whatever progress we may have made towards racial equality from the standpoint defined by the state of race relations in the 1960's and the criteria of equality espoused by King,
  to (2) different senses - senses of the terms at work in the more general question, "Do we ever fully achieve our moral/ethical/social/political ideals?"

If the critics use the terms in the first senses (1) - and the speaker argues that they are mistaken, but using the terms in the second senses (2) - then the speaker's argument fails to address the original point.

(In logic, these shifts involve the fallacies of equivocation and irrelevance - and possibly straw man.)

These are common logical errors - but this is precisely why we want to note them and avoid them wherever possible.

III. Sources of morality?

If there are such things as values - where do they come from?

Dr. Battle suggested two:

a) Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of racial equality was one based on "the Divine plan."

This is perfectly in keeping with King's argument in the Letter.

But: is religion necessarily a reliable and helpful source for moral values?

b) Instead of/in addition to looking for "the next Martin," Dr. Battle hoped to "awaken the Martin in all of us." This might be understood in part as an appeal to some sort of moralconscience.

But again:

metaphysical: is there such a thing?

epistemological: how could know that such a thing exists - i.e., as an independent, reliable moral authority, and not simply as the artifact of our social conditioning, personal interests, etc.?

Might there be other sources of values for us to consider?