For the Good of the World

Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face?

Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not impossible extreme, might be extinction?

To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world: climate change, technology and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects.

If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement on how the world's various problems are to be confronted – at least managed, if not solved – the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia – the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and fifteenth centuries CE.

About the Author

A. C. Grayling is Master of the New College of the Humanities, UK. He has written and edited numerous works of philosophy and is the author of biographies of Descartes and William Hazlitt. He believes that philosophy should take an active, useful role in society. He has been a regular contributor to The Times, Financial Times, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Economist, Literary Review, New Statesman and Prospect, and is a frequent and popular contributor to radio and television programmes, including Newsnight, Today, In Our Time, Start the Week and CNN news. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum at Davos, and advises on many committees ranging from Drug Testing at Work to human rights groups.