82 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
leaders from different cultures plus surveys of the values rated most
highly by people in a number of countries around the world. Kidder
identified eight shared moral values: love, truthfulness, fairness,
freedom, unity or inclusiveness, tolerance, respect for life and
responsibility (Kidder 1994: 18).
These two ways of developing a global ethic, valuable as they are,
cannot achieve maximum inclusivity because they use values common
to the selection of faiths and cultures on which they draw. These involve
only a part of humanity even if it is a large part. What about the rest of
humanity? This limitation led Prozesky to explore a fresh path towards
a global ethic, based on something shared equally by all people: human
nature as revealed in cross-cultural experience, illuminated by human
brain science and supported empirically by cultural evidence of moral
convergence of the kind cited by Küng and Kidder (Prozesky 2007,
47-49, 2014: 283-301).
By nature people in all cultures want to thrive; they want to
experience sustainable happiness and avoid as much suffering as
possible. Experience shows that these desires cannot be achieved alone
but depend on the support of others. Conversely, they can be harmed by
the enmity of others, as we also all know from personal experience.
Sustainable thriving therefore is a matter of understanding and managing
our relationships with others in ways that increase the level of support
we give and receive from one another, and reduce or even eliminate
enmity. We can live selfishly and earn the enmity and at times bitter
hostility of others, or we can live supportively and earn their friendship.
The human brain provides us with the equipment to acquire from others,
through our moral development, an understanding of this most
fundamental of choices, make it and to learn from the results of
whatever choice we make, which takes us from biology of the human
brain into culture and the creation of the future (Prozesky 2007: 65-97).