Differences in Values

Authors may differ about how they think the world should work. The interdisciplinarian must be careful to disentangle such value statements from statements about how the world does work. In some cases the interdisciplinarian can then focus on the latter. But in many cases – especially if the interdisciplinarian hopes to achieve a policy recommendation with wide appeal – the interdisciplinarian must try to achieve common ground with respect to values.

Interdisciplinary scholars have devoted much less attention to integrating values than to integrating insights into how the world works. Repko (2011) discusses values briefly, drawing upon Rick Szostak, Unifying Ethics, 2005.

A first step here is to appreciate that there are five broad ways of making any ethical decision:

· Consequentialism: An act is judged to be good if it has good consequences.

· Virtue Analysis: An act is judged to be good if it accords with certain virtues such as courage or duty or compassion or honesty. (Different people may value different virtues, and these often conflict.)

· Deontology: An act is judged to be good if it accords with some guiding rule such as the Golden Rule, Kantian Categorical Imperative, some list of Rights, or any other (Be kind to strangers).

· Tradition: An act is judged to be good if it accords with a community’s traditions

· Intuition: An act is judged to be good if it makes one feel good (or doing otherwise would make one feel guilt or shame).

Several important points should be made about these:

· They are independent. Yet they are commonly justified in terms of each other

· There are good reasons for following any of these approaches, but none is perfect

· They often point in the same direction. Honesty, for example, achieves strong justification from all five. It is thus a mistake to think that respect for diversity is incompatible with support for certain ethical principles.

· Nevertheless, differences can occur within as well as across types of ethical analysis. There is no perfect ethical statement

· Most people use all five of these in combination but with differing relative importance in different aspects of their life.

The ethical matrix approach often advocated in bioethics is a simplified version of this approach. It guides researchers to evaluate procedures in terms of the competing outcomes/values of well-being, autonomy, and justice, and to appreciate that different actors stress different outcomes/values.

Once interdisciplinarians have identified the source of ethical disagreement in a particular situation, they may be able to employ the techniques that were applied to scholarly insights above:

· Organization. If a virtue approach disdains a particular policy because of concerns over process, but a consequentialist approach applauds the results, the interdisciplinarian can investigate whether a different process can achieve similar results.

· Transformation: Conflicting rights can be placed on a continuum: freedom to act versus freedom not to be hurt by others. The same can be done with other rules or also virtues that conflict. (The Aristotleian Golden Mean suggests that the best path will generally fall between extremes.)

· Redefinition. Ethical terms are often very emotive. Clarifying how authors are using terms such as freedom or justice may yield common ground.

· Extension. Interdisciplinarians can seek policies that appeal to the widest range of rules, virtues, and traditions