Course Description
In this course we apply scientific methods and principles to questions of value. By questions of value we mean questions about what each of us wants. Here we define "want" broadly to include both material and less tangible (e.g., ethical) aspirations, and to include both ends and means. Accurately discerning and effectively realizing value is how humans live and die well.
We speak of living and dying because these are ongoing in each of us, and we've evidence that acknowledging them as contemporaneous is essential to success in either. We address living and dying well because we perceive other human concerns to be subordinate and derivative. We adopt a scientific approach because we perceive it to be uniquely sound means to address this topic, because we perceive few people to be aware of its qualification as such, and because we consider it yet to be utilized to full potential.
People live and die well by discerning and realizing value—by knowing and getting what we want, and by wanting what we get. Each of us does these less than perfectly: we sometimes get what we think we want and feel less satisfaction than we anticipated, do what we think sufficient and fall short, or fail to accept and embrace what is.
If we stop to reflect upon such disappointments we realize that current approaches to value are flawed. Again and again we think we know, only to discover that we're mistaken. Though we work to learn from experience, we rarely delve deeply enough to question underlying ideas about how we know. When we do, we're often quick to respond with long-held, well-practiced justifications that we’ve yet to critically examine, and that may be poorly able to withstand careful scrutiny.
We live in an era of unprecedentedly rapid, large, and novel changes—many of which we’ve instigated and continue to drive. Today more than ever before humans live and die well by cultivating proficiency in bringing to awareness, questioning, and evolving to be more adaptive ideas about value, especially those pertaining to how we can know it, and know how to realize it. Only to the degree that we rely upon sound means for knowing what we want and how to get it can ideas about these things be basis for living and dying well.
As researchers in diverse disciplines, including history, philosophy, ecology, economics, sociology, linguistics, biology, psychology, and more synthesize an emergent valuescience, we're acquiring an increasingly reliable method for discerning value and for realizing value. With this course we participate in this venture by studying its development to date, by extending that work with our own inquiries, by applying findings to evolve what we think, feel, say, and do to live and die well, and by communicating to others what we’ve learned so that they, too, may benefit.
We touch upon many topics, surveying data and concepts important to living and dying well even though some have yet to become widely known, and acquiring at least rudimentary understandings. Each of us can nurture these seeds as we deem advantageous with further study and practice. Though we explore possibilities of universal human values, even values universal to life, we aim to be descriptive rather than normative, and to avoid even appearance of advocating any value or set of values beyond those implicit in valuescience. Successful participants end the course asking more questions more persistently than we did at the outset, and practicing valuescience more consciously, competently, and consistently.
If you are engaged or want to engage in inquiry and practice we outline here, we welcome your partnership in valuescience.
For a more detailed course description please see: Course Description.
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