Embracing the Values of Sustainable and Democratic Societies (part 1)

Book Update #2 – Values Chapter

In book one of my guidebook series, I am writing about how we can cultivate our intellectual, ethical, and emotional resources to embrace ecological limits and advance the transition towards sustainable and democratic societies.

What topic are you writing about?

I’m working on a chapter about why we’ll need to become more conscious of our values and actively work to align them with the sorts of values upon which sustainable and democratic societies are built.

Why are you writing about this topic?

Citizens of wealthy countries like the United States inherit consumerist, individualist, and anthropocentric values in which limits either don’t seem to exist or are regarded as harmful and deserving of strenuous opposition. Societies that respect ecological limits would likely require a significant amount of their population to embrace values informed by and supportive of these limits. The public’s support for the transition (i.e. willingness to join social movements to push it forward and vote for post-growth political candidates) depends on our ability to elevate limits-informed ethical systems. We must begin to reflect on and discuss our values with an open-minded approach that allows us to redefine and reorient them.

I also believe that a rapid, all-encompassing societal transition poses serious complexities which will stymie any social movement that lacks a nuanced understanding about what justice entails on a finite planet already in ecological overshoot. There will be plenty of ethical questions without clear answers and cases in which we are deciding between non-ideal options. We’ll need to prepare for these challenges in order to avoid paralysis or deep division, and find ways to move forward.

What are some things you are thinking, learning, or writing about?

Emotional swings and guiding questions

Every time I start planning a new piece of writing, I’m saturated with feelings of overwhelm. Sometimes I’ll fear that I don’t have much to say about the topic. Other times I have a difficult time handling how much I want to say—it feels like the writing will never get done. And it does tend to take a few months beyond what I think is acceptable. But it does eventually get done. And the thought of putting together a chapter about limits-informed ethics is very exciting—rethinking the fundamentals of how we live seems essential for transforming society. I love asking “what is life about?” and drawing others into the same reflection. In my view, it’s a way of turning off autopilot, becoming more aware of how we see the world and how we spend our time, and opening up the possibility of change.

A question I repeatedly ask myself is how I can make this chapter useful and novel enough. Those who analyze our ecological crises often trace them back to the values held by wealthy countries. What I haven’t seen is a deep, nuanced discussion about how we should respond—if we take seriously the idea that current values are one of the roots of our crises, then we must explore how can we change what we value. To what extent is such change possible? How do our current values serve us or fail to do so? How might different values serve us better? What research exists on the topic of value shifting? Are there multiple ways to conceive of a “value shift” that would suggest varied approaches (e.g. changing how we interpret existing values rather than instilling new ones)? What sorts of challenges to our values might the transition pose? Which ethical complexities are we not yet acknowledging or preparing to work through?

These are the kinds of questions I want to respond to. The chapter will incorporate and expand on my piece about creating an ecological and democratic definition of freedom, my essay about creating a culture that can support the transition, and an as-yet-unpublished essay I’ve written about the complexities of climate justice. I think the resulting discussion could be useful in a number of ways: it should help readers reflect on their values, consider whether new ways of thinking are warranted, recognize some ethical challenges presented by the transition, and learn how to make more thoughtful decisions in the face of those challenges.

Research journey

I’ve been working on the beginning of the chapter, where I introduce the themes we’ll discuss.  In order to make accurate generalizations about ethics and values, I read a number of articles that provide a broad overview. That includes relevant Wikipedia articles (which can offer helpful summaries of a topic like this and this), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles (including about value theory, ancient ethical theory, African ethics, personal identity and ethics, metaethics, and moral epistemology), and the Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on ethics. I love the overviews that encyclopedias can provide.

One section of Britannica’s article made me laugh out loud. It is the section on “ethical egoism,” the idea that “Everyone should do what is in his own interests.” The author points out that adherents of “ethical egoism” are forced to claim that others’ self-interested actions benefit rather than damage our own self-interest. Otherwise, this theory would be self-defeating. The following paragraph bluntly begins with this: “Unfortunately for ethical egoism, the claim that everyone will be better off if each person does what is in his own interests is incorrect.” That’s where I laughed out loud, because it was so matter-of-fact and sounded to me like the narrator meme (see below). Maybe you had to be there.

There are numerous everyday cases of constrained self-interest that lead to collective benefits, like when large numbers of commuters choose public transit rather than the personal benefit of their own car, which prevents traffic congestion that would make everyone worse off. But the phrase “collective benefits” doesn’t really capture the full magnitude. Life in a society is only possible when we work together and place limits on our actions (consider, for example: laws).

It’s important that I clarify something: being selfish, or pursuing what we want with no regard for the consequences, is frequently not the same thing as pursuing our self-interest. Self-interested action is a natural and necessary part of life and it can be ethical, depending on the context. Sustainable and democratic societies require an adequate balance between individual interests and collective interests. How do we achieve it? I think that part of the answer is shifting from narrow self-interest to enlightened self-interest (e.g. interpreting self-interest primarily as individual and collective well-being rather than either personal power or pleasure). Another likely part is shifting further beyond enlightened self-interest towards some level of ecocentrism, where we recognize inherent value in non-human animals and natural environments.

I’ve also read a number of papers on “inner transformation for sustainability,” written by scholars who share my conviction that values and the worldviews they help to structure are essential leverage points for a societal transformation. This field seems to be in its early stages, but growing. What its articles offer at this point is support for my argument that values must be sufficiently aligned to create sustainable and democratic societies, but there isn’t a lot yet in terms of frameworks for understanding and shifting values. I have put together a few that I think could support fuller ethical analysis and decision-making, and they’ll be a large part of this chapter.

I’ve seen scholars assert that conscious value shifts may be possible and must be pursued while others argue that such shifts seem infeasible. I haven’t yet read enough to get a sense of whether one side has more adherents, but I believe we’d need to get specific about the type of shift in question to gain any clarity. In certain cases we might be looking to help people redefine a core value (like I discuss in my piece on redefining freedom). In other cases we might be trying to change the importance of a particular value relative to another (say, prioritizing increased well-being over certain kinds of freedom). Maybe we’re trying to change the way that someone practices or honors a particular value (e.g. expressing patriotism by joining an activist movement) or the way we expect society to do so (e.g. honoring equality by recognizing a greater role for government in ensuring basic needs for all are met).

What’s one takeaway?

Ecological ethicist Peter Brown argues that a goal/ethos/metaphor is one of the main components of a value system. I currently think of this goal as our aspiration for our society and its institutions, a vision that can be distilled into standards for how we should live our lives. I recently reflected on how few of us have a conscious goal for our society that we feel in some way responsible for contributing to. If the value system of most everyday people often lacks this component, then our ethics remain very underdeveloped; at best, we mainly think about the rightness of our actions in the context of our immediate relationships and little beyond. It’s no wonder that larger societal problems only continue to worsen. The people who do tend to have a goal for their society are the superrich; they establish organizations and employ groups of people to actively shape societies in ways that serve their narrow self-interest. Our society’s problem-solving capacity is stunted when so few citizens have a goal/ethos/metaphor as a north star for their value system, and we end up missing out on a major part of our identity when our ethics fail to extend into the collective realm.

If you’re interested in reading a draft of this book and providing feedback, please subscribe here at freedomsurvival.org.

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Check out the previous post, which highlights some of the ideas and research from my chapter on developing a “critical thinking identity” to advance the transition.