The confusion between values and principles in constitutionalism of rights - The case of the Higher Values of the Spanish Constitution

Abstract

In this brief article I would like to draw attention to an issue that generally goes unnoticed in our daily lives, something that has become a cliché of language and that, for that very reason, is not given much importance; I am referring to the confusion between two very different notions but which for reasons of mere linguistic custom we tend to mention almost always as an inseparable pair: the notions of principles and values. These are two concepts, as complex as they are different from each other, which we use all too often but which, as a rule, we do not know how to define, yet we rush to put them together as if our ignorance of them were dispensed with by their accumulation. It is as if mentioning them en bloc deepens their moral sense to refer both to ourselves and to social phenomena or institutions.