A lot of people have written to me privately over the last few weeks to ask if I was planning to contribute to something called Pagan Values Blogging Month.

I thought this a curious question, since I blog about values all the time. I've also published a book about ethics and values, and my work has been quoted by numerous other writers (see the entry on Wikipedia for the list) and most recently my work was featured on the OBOD website, among the Mount Haemus Lectures and in an article on Ethics and Values in Druidry. Perhaps the reason I was asked if I would contribute to the blogging effort is because this is the kind of research I specialise in.

(Apologies for all that blowing of my own horn there...)

I first noticed the "Pagan Values Blogging Month" on alfrecht 's blog, and I have enjoyed his work so far. As I googled around a bit, I found that the idea seems to have originated here, on a blog written by someone called "Chrysalis". I searched around Google and found lots of other contributions. I'm sorry to say I liked very few of them. But instead of complaining about them, let me offer my own contribution. Here's a short passage from the manuscript of "Book the Fifth", which I have been writing for the last few months.


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The study of ethics is the study of everything that is important to us. It's the study of the reasons why we do the things we do, and why we should do the things we should do. To study ethics is to study our lives, our ideas about who we are. Yet it is also to study our lives in a primarily normative way, which means we are not just observing how we live and then attempting to interpret what we observe. We are also deciding how to live, and then putting those decisions to the test of practice. Ethics thus has an element of invention and creativity, no less than in art, or architecture, or music. Yet it also requires systematic reason. That requirement is not a form of oppression, as might be believed by those who think spiritual knowledge comes only from instinct and intuition. To be honest by studying ethics with systematic reason, we can become aware of complex and difficult problems, sometimes intimidating problems. But we can also liberate and enlighten ourselves in a very special way. Ethics looks at our relationships and communities, how they work, how they don't work, how to change them, and even what it really means to be in a relationship at all. This opens the way to a surprising amount of real discovery. To study ethics is to investigate, in a sustained and serious and yet adventurous way, what life is supposed to be about.

Just as the goddess Isis revealed herself to Lucius Apulius with many different names, [link] so there can be more than one ethically significant way of being in the world. There doesn’t have to be only one true way; there can be many true ways. In general, the values which are needed to create, sustain, and uplift our relationships are the values which successfully pass through the gateway of the Revelation.* Values like courage, friendship, and generosity, can accomplish this. Values like hubris, miserliness, and resentment probably can’t. As already noted, nihilism and misanthropy certainly can’t. For most ethical decisions, all we will need is a straightforward list of the virtues that are good for our relationships, and the vices which aren’t. And for this purpose, there are many cards we could pull. We could choose the Heroic virtues (courage, generosity, friendship), or the Classical virtues (courage, temperance, prudence, justice), or the Seven Grandfathers (Wisdom, Truth, Humility, Bravery, Honesty, Love, and Respect). It could be almost any similar list, in accord with what makes the most sense in the time and place where you life, and the kinds of relationships in which you are involved.

But there can be more to it than that, too. For a system of ethics grounded in revelation is also a spiritual thing. Since discovering the revelation happening all around me, I feel as if I finally live in a livable world. Almost everything around me has a presence to reveal, and a story to tell. I also perceive the ways that I participate in their stories. If more people became able to see that everything and everyone around them is openly and generously offering its presence to everything else, then people will perhaps have a means to create a better understanding of each other. If we see that each of us is also revealing ourselves to others, all the time, perhaps we will acquire greater self-understanding too. Through those two understandings, perhaps our problems and conflicts will become more manageable, less daunting, easier to solve, easier to forgive and easier to heal. We will be able to look at one another, and see what we’re doing, and hear what we’re saying, and know that all of us, together and apart, are just experimenting with different ways of revealing to each other the same essential human presence. And so we keep experimenting until we find a way that works. It’s like a dance that never ends, a long, everlasting, wonderful dance, in which the music is always changing, and the steps always changing, and the rhythm is always changing, yet there is always music and always dancing going on. When we see that we are all adrift in the same ocean of loneliness, yet all the while we are showing the same message of presence to each other, then perhaps we will become closer to each other. More than that, perhaps the lives that we live, together and apart, will be more satisfying and worthwhile, for ourselves and for each other, and for all of life on Earth.

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* The term "revelation" takes on a specific spiritual and ethical significance in this text, which perhaps I will explain in a future blog post.