Search For Value Consensus

With the rapid expansion of capital and widespread application of information technology, the human society has entered the era of globalization stepped from "national history" into "world history". Not only has the globalization broken through the traditional pattern of human communication, but it also has brought extremely profound influence to people's values, causing the difference in values of all nations and civilizations and sharpening the values conflict generally. As a consequence, based on the fact that we have the "intercommunity of species" and the purpose of seeking communication and cooperation in diversification and difference, it has undoubtedly become a difficult challenge to abate the values conflict and realize the harmony and progress of the human society. The facilitating of value consensus, which can contribute to creating favorable moral environment for the human society and building a harmonious communication atmosphere, is the spiritual support for continuing to keep peace and development as the theme of the times.In the context of globalization, the values conflict can be interpreted as the concept conflict among foreign cultures and different civilizations. And it is characterized by the universality of conflict areas, the diversity of conflict forms and long duration of conflict abating. The factors which cause and intensify the values conflict consist of ubiquitous interest contradiction, distorted communication relationship among subjects and the difference of historical and cultural tradition and social system. Now there are two main means for abating values conflict, to establish the value identification or pursue universal values. However, both of the two means are trying to or will finally turn to making some special values (mainly referred to western values) generalized and absolutized, which will obviously do harm to human peace and development and make the values conflict worse. The value consensus is definitely not, it means that different subjects of values could basically come to an agreement on a certain value or a kind of value through mutual communication, but not to demand that different subjects must have identical values.Certainly, the value consensus also faces many theoretical difficulties as a way to exploring conflict abating, such as the value subjectivity and the commensurability of cultures and languages. However, these difficulties would not block the consensus reaching fundamentally. Furthermore, it is an undeniable fact that there already has certain realistic bases of the possibility of value consensus. First, the global integration of world economy provides physical basis; secondly, the development of modern information communication gives technical support; thirdly, increasing frequent communication as well as cooperation create favorable social conditions; fourthly, the common concern to problems of human kinds helps to generate the value consensus.Since all theoretical difficulties of the value consensus can be overcome during the discuss and the possibility bases can be proved, the crucial point is to make the value consensus finally realized. Certain theoretical principles must be followed during the process of reaching value consensus:insisting on the principle of "tolerance, mutual trust, harmony but not uniformity" to establish understanding and dialogue among subjects; implementing the principle of "limited active and gradualism" to keep reasonable tension among multiple values; basing on the principle of "utilitarian appeal consistent with ideal cherished wish" to pursue the harmony and progress of human civilization. In the meantime, it is a real and promising route of reaching value consensus to establish a sharing value system based on human's mutual identification, generation, standardization and benefit on the basis of abiding by the three principles.