Aaron Karp

An autonomous citizenry would be more likely to seek a nuanced understanding of its society and our collective problems, participate in campaigns to elect champions of public interests, and have the resilience to overcome the challenges involved.

Changing how we live and transforming our societies can feel impossible, but that shouldn’t be surprising when the ethical beliefs that shape us are so rarely subject to scrutiny or discussion. What if we build a social movement that pulls growing numbers of people out of those habits of passivity and helps us cultivate our moral agency?

I suggest that our personal life goals should be to “lead an examined life and pursue long-term well-being for ourselves and our loved ones within ecological and social limits.” I suggest that our civic goals should be to “create ecologically sustainable, functionally democratic, and secure societies.”

If we can learn to navigate the ethical complexities of our non-ideal world, we will be much better prepared to transform it.

My goal is to provide frameworks that help people to think more deeply about where their values come from, how well these values resonate with the societies we must create, whether their actions align with their values, and how to achieve greater value-action alignment.

Our society’s problem-solving capacity is stunted when so few citizens have a goal/ethos/metaphor as a north star for their value system, and we end up missing out on a major part of our identity when our ethics fail to extend into the collective realm.