Book Update #6 – Moral Agency Chapter
In book one of my guidebook series, I am writing about how we can develop our intellectual, ethical, and emotional resources to embrace ecological and social limits and advance the transition towards sustainable, democratic, and secure societies.
This latest writing update is a reflection on finishing a chapter about ethics and values.
What topic did you write about and what was the experience like?
I recently completed a chapter currently titled “Cultivating Our Moral Agent Identity and an Action Plan for Long-Term Well-Being.” I define a “moral agent” as someone who regularly asks and pursues ethical questions about themselves and the world, deeply explores their value system with the intention of making it more conducive to their own and others’ long-term well-being, and works to align their actions with their values. This chapter is about how we develop our moral agency: our ability to notice, question, deconstruct, and synthesize the ethical significance of our reality, and to act on it.
By building this aspect of our identity, we empower ourselves to critically evaluate what our culture teaches us and imagine fundamentally different societies. The chapter envisions a self-development program for individuals and offers a platform of policy goals for long-term well-being inspired by ecological economics, human needs, and other research domains that we can pursue together as a social movement.
I’ve been working on this chapter since late 2023, and the completed draft is 42,000 words. I don’t think I’ll ever face a tougher writing challenge than this, both for the remainder of this book or even the rest of my life. It was uniquely difficult because the topic of values seems so abstract. At the beginning, it was unclear how to concretely discuss moral agency or provide steps we can take to align our values with the lives and societies we wish to create. I didn’t find many actionable thinking tools after scouring hundreds of articles about ethics and our inner worlds, so I tried to create some of my own.
Why did you write about this topic?
Values are fundamental drivers of our behavior and they are increasingly considered deep leverage points for addressing the crises we face. Sustainable, democratic, and secure societies embody particular kinds of values, so to build these societies we need growing numbers of people to embrace these values. Pursuing valued goals is also central to feeling purpose in life, something we’re naturally interested in. Yet the key question of how to access our values, redefine them (if needed), and act in greater alignment with them never seemed to receive an in-depth answer within the academic literature I reviewed. I was spurred on by many questions:
How often do we consciously explore our values? Are we aware of the core facts and assumptions that influence them? How do we translate our values into the goals we hope to achieve? Do we have conscious goals for our personal life? Do we have civic goals that motivate us to make an impact on our society? How often do we check that our actions align with our goals? When ethical dilemmas arise, and one or more cherished values must be traded off against others, do we have a fair and thorough process to reason through that complexity?
Most of us spend far too little time exploring our value system or talking with others about the values currently embodied by our society. Changing how we live and transforming our societies can feel impossible, but that shouldn’t be surprising when the ethical beliefs that shape us are so rarely subject to scrutiny or discussion. What if we build a social movement that pulls growing numbers of people out of those habits of passivity and helps us cultivate our moral agency? What if we make it a cultural norm to consciously evaluate the values we want to live by, seek out more nuanced definitions of these values, and frequently recheck our value-action alignment? I believe these active habits address many of the roots of our crises, and if they catch on there’s no telling what we could achieve.
What are some things you learned or wrote about?
After working on these ideas for more than a year, my feeling is that there are no secrets to accessing and reorienting our values. The ingredients seem somewhat obvious to me: well-thought-out questions about our beliefs and where they come from, sincere attempts to answer those questions (including by taking in and reflecting on new information and perspectives over an extended period of time), and a willingness to change how we think and act when the results of our investigation suggest it is warranted. Moral agency is critical thinking applied to the realm of ethics. The process is not beyond our ability; we just need to understand the transformative power of consciously engaging with our values and put in the work required.
I loved writing about particular values like freedom, responsibility, and wisdom, and exploring how the concept of limits is essential to each of them. I believe limits-informed values are the foundation of sustainable, democratic, and secure societies. The crises of ecological overshoot, authoritarianism, and various kinds of insecurity are all manifestations of unbalanced relationships we have with the natural world, each other, and ourselves. We have been consuming resources and emitting pollution much faster than the planet can sustainably accommodate, and allowing wealth and power to become concentrated among a smaller and smaller minority of the population. The resulting scarcity for most and abundance for some create barriers to everyone meeting their needs. Limits are the tools we use to establish the balance we’re missing.
One big topic in the chapter is the struggle required to live a values-aligned life and build societies that respect appropriate limits. Though it’s true that inaction on the crises we’re facing will have unfathomable costs, many people assume that fact is sufficient to motivate action. However, taking action has its own costs—putting in effort when progress is uncertain, for instance, or having to let go of something you cherished. I think that unless we’re prepared to pay those costs, such as accepting new ways of defining justice, freedom, and other values in light of limits, then we won’t take action to support the transition even if the alternative is to lose everything we care about. But by acknowledging these challenges and discussing them with others, we develop more reasonable expectations and become more prepared to transform ourselves and our societies.
An excerpt from a discussion of wisdom:
Wisdom means having a broad and nuanced understanding of oneself and the world that facilitates our pursuit of long-term well-being for all. It is clear-sightedness; note that this does not mean having a clear answer to every question or problem, but rather an appreciation for the process required to understand them and an acknowledgement of why many do not have clear answers. What is that process? I believe it’s the critical learning framework outlined in the last chapter: fairly and thoroughly considering all relevant context that is reasonable to collect, and determining the significance of a fact, idea, or claim according to a reasonable interpretation of the evidence. We gain wisdom by applying critical thinking to the realm of ethics (i.e. questions about what is important and which actions should be taken or avoided), with a commitment to fairness that extends beyond considerations of fact to also apply to the perspectives and interests of different stakeholders.
Some may think of wisdom and intelligence as the same thing, but they are not. Someone who possesses a skill for learning things quickly or has substantial knowledge in certain areas may still lack the understanding that is characteristic of wisdom. Indeed, an intelligent person could live their entire life without really exploring its significance or could even direct their knowledge towards being selfish, never gaining awareness of the harmful impacts of their actions on themselves or others. A society with enough intelligence will probably become technologically advanced, but only a wise society will know how to use that technology in a way that helps rather than destroys humanity. This is because a wise society will recognize the need for limits and learn to cultivate good lives within them.
If you’re interested in reading a draft of this book and providing feedback, please subscribe here at freedomsurvival.org.
Check out the previous post, which discussed personal life and civic goals that can empower us to live purposeful lives and pursue our long-term well-being.