Foundations
The Foundational Values Framework
What Helps Humans Flourish?
The CODA Project starts with a simple question: What deserves to guide our lives?
Rather than looking to religious doctrine, ancient authority, or a predetermined set of rules for the answer, I decided to look at the human story itself.
What has helped human beings survive, adapt, learn, build relationships, create communities, solve problems, and flourish?
That exploration led me to five concepts that appear repeatedly throughout human experience: Cooperation, Empathy/Compassion, Fairness, Integrity, and Curiosity.
I call them the Foundational Values.
Why “Foundational”?
To be clear, I didn’t simply make a list of values I personally admire and select my five favorites. These are modern English words I’m using to describe some complex human capacities that appear to have contributed to our evolution, adaptation, survival, and flourishing across cultures and throughout human history.
And they’re foundational in another sense.
Many of the other values we admire can be understood as growing from combinations of these deeper values. Responsibility, for example, can emerge from Integrity, Cooperation, and Fairness. Acceptance can draw upon Empathy/Compassion, Curiosity, and Fairness.
My goal isn’t to squeeze every good quality neatly into one of five boxes. I’d like to ask a more interesting question:
Why do we value what we value?
The Foundational Values give us a framework for exploring the answer.
The Five Foundational Values
Cooperation
Human beings accomplish things together that none of us could accomplish alone. Cooperation allows us to share knowledge, divide responsibilities, solve common problems, build communities, and work toward goals that extend far beyond ourselves.
Cooperation asks: How can we work together to make things better?
Empathy/Compassion
Empathy helps us recognize and understand the experiences of others. Compassion encourages us to care about what we discover and then respond to suffering when we can. Together, they remind us that our decisions affect people whose experiences may be very different from our own.
Empathy/Compassion asks: What are others experiencing, and how should that matter to me?
Fairness
Humanity has long depended upon expectations about sharing, reciprocity, opportunity, and how members of a community should treat one another. Fairness asks us to look beyond what benefits ourselves and to consider whether people are being treated justly.
Fairness asks: Are people getting a fair chance and being treated justly?
Integrity
Communities depend on some degree of trust, reliability, and consistency between what people claim to value and how they actually behave. Integrity challenges us to examine that consistency in ourselves and to not merely demand it from others.
Integrity asks: Do my choices and actions reflect the values I claim to hold?
Curiosity
Our ancestors survived partly because they explored, experimented, noticed patterns, learned from mistakes, and adapted when circumstances changed. Curiosity keeps that process alive by encouraging us to question assumptions, seek evidence, consider different perspectives, and remain open to discovering where we might be wrong.
Curiosity asks: What don’t I know yet… and am I willing to find out?
A Lens, Not a Rulebook
The Foundational Values Framework doesn’t provide automatic answers. Instead, it gives us different ways to examine a question.
What does Fairness ask us to consider? What might Empathy help us notice? Are we acting with Integrity? Could greater Cooperation lead to better outcomes? What questions does Curiosity suggest we haven’t asked?
Sometimes those perspectives will point in different directions. Reasonable people may weigh them differently or reach different conclusions.
That’s where evidence, reflection, discussion, and judgment come in. The goal isn’t to replace religious commandments or inherited dogma with five new commandments.
The goal is to have a better lens through which we can examine what we believe, what we value, and how we choose to live.
And Yes, I Could Be Wrong
These five values weren’t revealed to me by a higher authority. I don’t claim that they’re the final five, the perfect five, or the only possible way to understand human flourishing.
These values are my attempt to discern some of the fundamental capacities that helped human beings get this far.
As I continue exploring history, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, evolutionary science, and human experience, my understanding of the Framework may change. New evidence may challenge it. Better arguments may improve it.
Good!
A framework built on Curiosity should be curious about itself, right?
The bottom line is that the Foundational Values aren’t intended to give us the final answers. They’re intended to help us ask better questions and then make more thoughtful choices about what deserves to guide our lives.