To pursue our mission of wellbeing, we build ethical capacity.
Wellbeing is never secured by good science or good intentions alone. It depends on our ability to reason well about values, and to do so together to make good public policy decisions. That ability is what we mean by ethical capacity, and cultivating it is one of our key skills.
Concretely, we help individuals, communities, and organizations build the capacity to explore and communicate their values—to name what matters to them, to understand why, and to articulate it in terms others can engage.
A Heterodox Approach
Our approach is intentionally heterodox—interdisciplinary in spirit; pluralist in practice; drawing on the best of the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. The questions we care about—how to live well with one another and with the more-than-human world—do not respect disciplinary borders, and no one framework holds a monopoly on moral insight. Rather than talking past one another, we help people establish shared moral ground: a common footing from which individuals and groups can identify and address the moral issues genuinely at stake in an issue or controversy.
Shared Moral Ground and Deliberation
Shared moral ground, even in the face of sharp disagreement, improves deliberative decision-making. So many social disputes and policy debates stall not because the facts are unsettled but because the values beneath them go unspoken—displaced into proxy arguments about data, law, or procedure. By naming and engaging those value-laden issues directly, we help deliberation reach the questions that are actually dividing people. The result is decision-making that is more honest about what is at stake, more equitable in the interests it considers, and better able to serve the wellbeing we are working toward.