@Daryl
I would say that a religious system is more cohesive than a secular value system, I wasn't speaking to the quality of the moral doctrine. Communities don't exactly come together to celebrate, and commune around Voltaire, though maybe they should.

"I agree. That is why I envision service to the public interest as including respect for liberty, self expression, and personal agency to the extent it is compatible with civil society and social progress."

Can you please elaborate on this, do you think that individual expression and liberty is alright, unless it threatens civil society and social progress? And how do you define social progress? because progression could be for the better or the worse, such was the case for the latter period of the Roman Empire for example.
That is a very easy claim to make unless you know intuitively what social progress looks like, and people need freedom of speech, and liberty to temporary civil society's norms of the sake of real progress, so if I understood you correctly, then I would say I have to disagree.

"Politics and enlightened wisdom are (or ought to be), IMHO, all about rationally balancing competing and/or conflicting conflicts and morals in complex modern societies"

You can't have morals without values, so I would say the value proceeds the morals.

I would also argue that it is almost an oxymoron to suggest that valuing individual liberty, for example, could be a tyrannical absolute. There are some values that cannot be balanced, you actually need liberty, and freedom of speech to have all the other values, and to mediate between them.

I am surrounded by leftists in my art program, most of them do ascribe to intersectional feminism, are socialist, have typically read or are at least familiar with the works of Karl Marx, and at least one of the other major postmodern philosophers, usually Foucault. They, for the most part have a relativist moral view, and only see the west as an unjust hierarchy, that oppresses. That is what we are taught, that is what my fellow students believe, and their art reflects their beliefs, so to suggest that I may be biased, though it could be true, suggests I haven't done my due diligence. It could be the case that we are dealing with different leftists, it's not like they are all the same. I would say that the different, to borrow a Nietzschean term, Slave Moralities, that are pushed in the Universities don't simple coexist, they mesh together perfectly, and that is because they come from the same types of theories. Intersectional Feminism comes from Critical Race Theory, and Critical Gender Theory, which are subsections of Critical Theory. But it seem to unless you are making the "no true Scotsman" claim.

@Daryl
I would agree with your definition on social progress, my assumption was that you were referring to social progress as social justice, which would be converting hierarchies into egalitarian, non-meritocratic, anti-hierarchical clubhouse of excess compassion, with a weekly circle-jerk about how diverse and virtuous everyone is. Maybe I am more biased than I think... It's the art school.

I see what you are saying, when I bring up values vs morals, I will adopt your definitions, as they they are the proper way of using the terms anyhow. I think what I may have meant by my use of "value" might be most closely related to the idea of a first principle. In which case I may have to restructure my argument, so thanks for that.

Let me just give you an example of how ridiculous some of the ideas are: During an art critique a male student displayed his drawing in a frame on the wall. The main criticism were not the formal qualities of the drawing (like line, shading, composition, etc.), but that the frame was displeasing because it is patriarchal. It is patriarchal because it borders, encloses, protects and divides the image from the viewer/ the wall/ the outside world.
I wouldn't call this thinking a product of liberal thinking, this is from Critical Theory, which is leftist in nature, because it is anti-hierarchical, liberalism is not.

And the "no true Scotsman" claim was coming from the assertion that "rightists" are often incapable of differentiating between differing denominations of leftism, which on average, I can agree with. You went on to say that we see leftists quite differently, and I may have made an unnecessary logical jump based on a low resolution conception of your statement, so that was my fault.