Universal Values

In his recent talk, Elder Cook spoke of how difficult it is to establish universal values about proper behavior, particularly when there are so many conflicting thoughts on the subject. As part of an exploration of those thoughts and others, I have been watching a Youtube series called Crash Course: Philosophy. (This is where I learned about the Euthyphro Problem that I blogged about a while back.) While watching this series, I've learned that the are many, many different ways of thinking, and there are great merits to most of them. Many of them seem reasonable and almost convincing, which is troubling because, as Elder Cook said, many of them conflict with each other.

I think it would be nice if everyone believed in God and His teachings (and interpreted those teachings in the same way) so we could establish some universal values and a common moral code. But that's not the way God made the world, and that's not the way He made us. He sent us to Earth with blank slates, so to speak, to figure out what we can on our own and to learn how to learn from revelation. He also gave us the freedom to believe what we wish to believe and reject the beliefs that we wish to reject. Still, I believe that God's values are universally applicable, whether they're universally accepted or not.

The world we live in is a tricky one, mostly because most people behave according to different sets of moral rules. Sure, it would be nice if everyone would accept the same values, but what we value is part of what makes us unique as individuals. We each have our own beliefs about what we and others ought to do, and that can be a beautiful thing, assuming we can all still manage to work together most of the time. None of the values a person cherishes may be universally accepted, but many core values are widely accepted, such as the values of freedom and of life. Perhaps if we, as individuals and as societies, placed more emphasis on these core values than we place on some of the less widely accepted ones, we could get more people to accept those values until they become truly universal. Elder Cook said that it is hard to establish universal values, but he didn't say it was impossible. If we all accept a set of values, and encourage others to do the same, perhaps they could become universal values.