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, the project 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.

Rather than seeking to resolve value disagreements or to identify correct moral outcomes, The Values Project focuses on a second-order moral question: how individuals, groups, and institutions ought to relate ethically to diverse and competing values when no single ordering of those values can be assumed. It explores how moral seriousness, responsibility, and justification can be sustained under such conditions, and what kinds of relationships with moral values agents and institutions should seek to cultivate.

The activities of The Values Project are organised under three interconnected and overlapping themes: individual moral agency; collective decision-making; and institutional moral life.

Individual Moral Agency

This theme examines what it means for individuals to live well and act responsibly in the presence of competing and sometimes incompatible value commitments. Much ethical theory presupposes that moral deliberation aims at identifying a single right answer, or that moral failure consists primarily in inconsistency or weakness of will. This strand challenges those assumptions by asking how moral agency should be understood when no available option fully satisfies all relevant values. Central questions include: What kinds of moral orientation are appropriate when we face genuine value conflict? How should regret, ambivalence, and moral residue be understood—as failures of agency, or as appropriate responses to loss? What distinguishes morally serious engagement with competing values from rationalisation, evasion, or self-deception? By addressing these questions, this theme aims to clarify what ethical responsibility requires of individuals when moral life cannot be rendered fully harmonious, including for those whose moral lives are shaped by participation in collective or institutional decision-making.

Collective Decision-Making

This theme explores how moral responsibility should be understood when decisions are made jointly rather than individually. Many of the most ethically complex and consequential decisions in contemporary life are collective in form, involving participants with different roles, expertise, interests, and value commitments. While procedures of ethical deliberation and justification are often emphasised in such contexts—particularly in areas such as clinical decision-making—less attention is paid to the normative structure of participation itself when value disagreement remains unresolved. This strand asks how individuals ought to relate morally to collective outcomes they regard as justified yet morally costly. What obligations do participants have to acknowledge the values that are overridden in collective decisions? How should compromise, dissent, and minority positions be understood normatively within legitimate decision-making processes? The aim is not to offer procedural solutions, but to develop a more adequate conceptual account of collective moral agency—one that can make sense of responsibility, accountability, and moral seriousness under conditions of enduring disagreement.

Institutional Moral Life

Institutions play a decisive role in shaping the moral landscape of contemporary societies, particularly in contexts marked by polarisation and contested legitimacy. This theme focuses on the moral lives of institutions, treating them not merely as instruments or aggregations of individual choices, but as morally significant actors with distinctive responsibilities. Taking the moral life of the university as an initial case study, this strand reflects on how institutions should understand and enact their relationships with values under conditions of deep pluralism—both internally, in their governance, teaching, and community life, and externally, in their public roles and responsibilities. Rather than assuming that institutional morality consists in articulating a coherent set of values or achieving internal consensus, this theme examines alternative normative ideals, including transparency about value conflict, accountability for moral costs, tolerance of principled disagreement, and restraint in moral self-presentation. The university provides a particularly rich site for this enquiry, given its dual role as a space marked by internal contestation about values and as a public institution subject to external moral and political scrutiny.

Summary

Across all three themes, The Values Project seeks to develop conceptual frameworks that can support ethical reflection, justification, and responsibility in a pluralistic and polarised world. Its ambition is not to overcome value disagreement, but to 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