The Ontology of Values and Values Education

At present there is enormous interest in values issues and in the question of how we may attempt to resolve our differences over them. Accounts and details of what Thomas Nagel (1979) called the great “mortal questions”, such as the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, genetic cloning, and the tensions and possibility of reconciliation between different ethnic and religious groups in our societies, appear on the front pages of our newspapers and on the television almost daily. It is inevitable that students in our educating institutions will want help in coming to decide what they ought to think about these and similar issues, how they ought to judge, which way they ought to behave in respect of these and those other values issues “of great pith and moment”, with which their lives, and that of their community and its future health, stability and progress, are increasingly beset.