I value the truth, and, more importantly, I value the process of seeking the truth. Scientific methods, despite every misstep, are the best methods we know for developing and understanding truths about the universe around us and ourselves—that is to say, they give us the best ability to predict what will happen in the universe and in our social systems.
I value the physical world. The physical world around is is the ultimate source of truth in the universe, and, while our understanding can never fully capture that truth in all its manifold complexity—to do so would take a system larger than the universe—still we can, collectively, approach some kind of asymptote of understanding and ability to predict the world around us both physical and social.
I value the people around me and the human species as we are, alive, today, and tomorrow. I value that as many of us and our children as possible are as healthy, happy, and safe as possible, and I have dedicated my life to doing what I can to make us all healthier, happier, and safer. I believe that understanding the physical and social worlds is valuable precisely for the reason that that understanding offers our surest path to those outcomes.
(The future beyond that is our children’s and our children’s children’s responsibility, just as our health, happiness, and safety today are our responsibility and not our great-grandparents’. Our duty is to set our children and grandchildren up for success as best we understand that, but not to trade their health, happiness, and safety for those of hypothetical far-future many-times-great grand-children.)
I value democratic methods of decisionmaking. Like science, politics is also a method for understanding the social world, the impacts it has on the physical world, and the impacts of the physical world on it. Politics is the arena in which we define what it means for us to be healthier, happier, and safer, and who gets to be that. Democratic decisionmaking methods, despite every misstep, provide the best ways we know for developing what it means for us to be healthier, happier, and safer and understanding how that might be achieved, and for spreading those benefits to as many people as possible.
I value capitalist and socialist economic methods and structures to the extent that they serve the other values. These methods are among the best economic methods we have found so far for distributing high-quality, safe, and wholesome physical goods to as many people as possible, and capitalist methods do the best job of any economic methods we have found so far of turning basic human self-centeredness to socially-beneficial ends.