The Values Project

The Values Project is an interdisciplinary inquiry into how individuals, groups, and institutions should understand and conduct moral life under conditions of persistent value pluralism. The project starts from the premise that value disagreement is not merely a temporary obstacle to be overcome, but a deep and enduring feature of human lives and of the lives of institutions. Against this background, it asks how ethical reflection, moral agency, and institutional responsibility should be understood once we accept that agreement about what matters most is often partial, fragile, or unavailable.

At its core, the project addresses a second-order moral question: not which values should prevail in particular cases, but how individuals, groups, and institutions ought to relate ethically to diverse and competing values when no single ordering of those values can be assumed.

The work of The Values Project is organised around four interconnected programmes, each of which can stand alone while also informing the others.

Individual Moral Agency

This programme examines what it means for individuals to live well and act responsibly in the presence of competing and sometimes incompatible value commitments. It explores how moral agency should be understood when no available option fully satisfies all relevant values, and how experiences such as regret, ambivalence, and moral residue should be interpreted within a morally serious life. The aim is to clarify what ethical responsibility requires of individuals when moral life cannot be rendered fully harmonious, including for those whose moral identities are shaped by collective and institutional contexts.

Collective Decision-Making

This programme focuses on moral responsibility in situations where decisions are made jointly rather than individually. Many of the most ethically complex decisions in contemporary life are collective in form, involving participants with different roles, expertise, and value commitments. This strand examines how individuals ought to relate morally to collective outcomes they regard as justified yet morally costly, and how compromise, dissent, and accountability should be understood when value disagreement persists.

Institutional Moral Life

This programme examines institutions as morally significant actors operating under conditions of deep value pluralism. Using the moral life of the university as a central case study, it explores how institutions should act, justify themselves, and sustain legitimacy when internal and external value conflicts endure. Rather than assuming that institutional morality consists in expressing a coherent set of values or achieving consensus, this strand investigates alternative normative ideals such as transparency about value conflict, accountability for moral costs, tolerance of principled disagreement, and restraint in moral self-presentation.

Societal and Communal Value Pluralism

Beyond the level of individual agents, collective bodies, and institutions, The Values Project is also concerned with the moral life of societies themselves. Contemporary societies are increasingly marked by deep pluralism, political polarisation, competing moral vocabularies, and declining confidence in shared sources of authority. Public life is often shaped by disagreement not only about policy outcomes, but about the values, histories, and forms of legitimacy through which collective life is organised and justified. This theme explores how societies sustain ethical and political life under such conditions when agreement about the common good cannot be assumed. Questions include, what forms of public reasoning, institutional trust, and moral restraint become important under conditions of persistent disagreement? How should societies understand responsibilities toward those who hold fundamentally different moral or political commitments? And what kinds of ethical frameworks or practices might support coexistence, cooperation, and public legitimacy without requiring deep moral consensus? This strand is particularly interested in the ethical conditions that make plural democratic and civic life possible when disagreement remains enduring rather than transitional.

Relationships Across Levels

These different ‘levels’ of value pluralism and disagreement are not independent or fully distinct. They overlap and interact. The Values Project is also concerned with the relationships between these different levels of moral life and the ways in which tensions, responsibilities, and forms of disagreement move across them. Moral conflicts experienced by individuals are often shaped by institutional structures, institutional decisions are influenced by wider political and social pressures and societal disagreements frequently become visible within organisations, professions, and everyday forms of collective life. At the same time, similar ethical questions may appear differently at different levels. Concepts such as responsibility, legitimacy, compromise, accountability, care, freedom, and trust may not carry the same meaning when applied to persons, committees, institutions, or societies. The project therefore seeks not only to examine each level independently, but also to understand how they interact, where tensions recur across contexts, where they diverge, and what this reveals about moral life under conditions of pluralism more broadly.

Together, these programmes aim to develop ways of thinking that make moral life under conditions of disagreement more intelligible, demanding, and constructive—for individuals, for groups, and for institutions facing decisions that matter.

This research is funded by the MOH Family Foundation.