Setting Goals

There are only a handful of ways in which people make value judgments (ethical decisions). They may pursue formal consequential analysis, deciding which actions lead to the best outcomes. They may pursue “virtue analysis,” asking which acts accord with virtues they hold dear such as courage or honesty. They may follow certain guidelines such as the Golden Rule or appeals to various rights. They may be guided by intuition. They may be guided by peer pressure or the traditions of a group to which they belong. We should first appreciate that all five ways are legitimate: philosophers have argued for millennia for each of the first three (though individual philosophers often favor one over the others), psychologists tell us that our subconscious thought process are valuable (though they can also hide motives that we would consciously disdain), and anthropologists study how group traditions are often (though not always) advantageous. An interdisciplinary approach can appreciate that most humans have recourse to each of these five approaches in their life. We can thus potentially understand why another human might emphasize a different approach – or just different consequences or rules or virtues – in a particular situation.

Fortunately, much of the time different approaches point in the same direction. Honesty, for example, receives strong justification from all five approaches. Just as we can never prove (almost) any scientific hypothesis, we can never be entirely confident of any ethical conjecture. But we should recognize that there is broad consensus on a range of issues: We naturally spend most of our time debating issues that we disagree on. On such issues, mutual respect can guide a search for common ground and for policies that offend as little as possible. Often common ground can be identified that reflects the key elements of seemingly contradictory perspectives.

Hirsch Hadorn, G. et al. eds. (2008). Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research. Springer,has much to say about goal setting, much of it related to inputs from stakeholders and practitioners as well as academics, but it uses different terminology than goal-setting: interpreting the common good, deliberation, participation, cooperation, agenda-setting, and so on.