The first value map
This selection is a starting point, not a canon. It translates the current assumptions into values that can be tested in ordinary life. Every value requires reasons. None should rule alone.
Self-determination
Section titled “Self-determination”People should generally be free to shape their lives, bodies, relationships and paths. Interference requires reasons, especially where no involuntary harm to others is involved.
Self-determination requires informed consent and real options. It is not the same as disregard for others. Its main tensions are with care, fairness and shared consequences.
Awareness
Section titled “Awareness”A good life requires attention to our own experience, to other people and to the forces that shape our thought and behaviour. These include feelings, habits, social norms, media and technical systems.
Human experience can take many forms. Awareness means remaining open and attentive to what we experience.
Inquiry
Section titled “Inquiry”We want to find out what is true and sound. We distinguish observation, interpretation, assumption and value judgment. We show what is established, what seems plausible and what remains open.
Inquiry can conflict with belonging, comfort or personal certainty. It does not require emotional distance, but it does require a willingness to change when the reasons are good enough.
Suffering, vulnerability and dependence give us reasons to take responsibility for one another. Care recognises that people are not always independent, strong or fully able to decide.
Care must not turn into paternalism. Good care protects people without needlessly taking authorship of their lives away from them.
Fairness
Section titled “Fairness”Freedom is credible only when rules, opportunities, burdens and power can be justified. People affected by decisions need a voice, decisions must be open to challenge and minorities cannot simply be overruled.
Fairness does not require identical outcomes. It requires differences to be explainable, reviewable and changeable.
Future responsibility
Section titled “Future responsibility”A decision is incomplete when it shifts its costs elsewhere, onto other living beings or onto future generations. Freedom in the present needs a longer horizon.
Future responsibility must not reduce present life to a sacrifice for an abstract future. The difficulty is a fair balance between current needs and long-term consequences.
What remains open
Section titled “What remains open”Pluralism, dignity, connection, beauty, play and courage are not absent because they matter less. It remains open whether they are basic values of their own or follow from the six described here. That question belongs in the next revision.
A value becomes more reliable in OpenValues only when its reasons, failure modes, conflicts and concrete experiences are documented.