Six years ago, I participated in a roundtable focusing on one of the recommendations of the Oxford Martin Commission’s excellent (and still relevant) report Now for the Long Term: to establish through dialogue a set of shared global values, which would guide us to fulfil our collective vision for how we want our world to be.
I remember feeling deeply inspired at the same time as I grappled with its enormity, saying that what we were aiming for was nothing less than extending our in-group to go past our family, our organisation, our profession, our community, our nationality, our ethnicity, our ideology, to encompass all of humanity. I added that it would require a deep understanding of how we evolved from hunter-gatherers who cooperated only with people whom we knew personally in our tribe to the web-based communities today who work together to achieve a common goal with people whom they’ve never physically met.
Having an all-consuming day job that had nothing to do with this meant that I didn’t progress much further, but the tantalising idea that we might one day build a universal set of shared values for humanity – transcending everything that divided us – kept bobbing up from time to time in my head.
There may well be a set of global values – or even ubiquitous virtues – that are shared by all of us. But I’ve changed my mind about it being desirable to ever aim for a single configuration of those values. Julian Baggini’s metaphor of the mixing deck is one that I find particularly helpful:
In the studio, producers record each instrument as an individual track, playing them back through separate channels. By sliding controls up or down, the volume of each track can be increased or decreased. The moral mixing deck works much in the same way. Almost everywhere in the world you’ll find the same channels: impartiality, rules, consequence, virtue, God, society, autonomy, actions, intentions, harmony, community, belonging and so on. The differences between cultures is largely a matter of how much each is turned up or down.
Just as we can appreciate different melodies and rhythms, so can we appreciate that there is more than one good way to live. Baggini warns against confusing pluralism with relativism, though:
Just as in the recording studio, it simply isn’t the case that anything goes. More than one moral mix can work but many more than one won’t.
[For example,] it is impossible to turn everything up to ten: some values clash with others, at least when they are at equal volume. Similarly, when some values are turned down low, they become inaudible, which may be the price to pay for a harmonious overall balance.
He goes on to write that navigating thoughtfully across cultures requires a “good ethical ear”. As in music, we do this by increasing and widening our exposure to the full range of moral concepts:
The goal is not to come up with a mix that will be the favourite of everyone in the world but to make our own the best it can be.
What values might you experiment with in your moral mix?