The Live and Let Live Moral Principle inspires and invites all people to be excellent humans. The Movement embraces and promotes the Moral Principle to achieve the goals of optimizing human happiness and well-being while minimizing suffering. Such a goal is necessary if we are ever to achieve a lasting peace.
The following seven aspirational values are suggested for those aspiring to be excellent humans. This is a non-exhaustive list. Individuals may want to add other aspirational values that suit their personal preferences.
While members of the Movement may offer advice about how others should live their lives, as the Moral Principle is voluntary, all members of the Movement oppose importing any of these aspirational values into the law, thereby mandating others to adopt them. All competent adults should decide for themselves how best to live their lives so long as they do not aggress against others or their property.
The Live and Let Live moral aspirational values are as follows:
- High Character: Being of high character means embodying our values, motivations, and virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance, with ongoing effort to improve being the most important aspiration.
- A Commitment to Thinking Win/Win: We always seek ways to align our self-interest with the interests of others to achieve mutually beneficial results. Carefully listening to others is an important skill to be refined to realize this aspirational value.
- Open-mindedness: Be open-minded; it is the best way to learn and improve. Being willing to consider different or new ideas, opinions, and conclusions from the ones we currently hold, we strengthen our own views or modify them when it makes sense.
- Tolerance: Act in accordance with the Legal Principle – don’t aggress. Accept, cherish and value that people look, speak, celebrate, love, think, act, and live differently, be open to everyone being the way they feel is best for them and that we are perfectly imperfect.
- Voluntary Kindness: Care; be generous, compassionate and helpful towards others in need even when we are not required to do so and there is nothing tangible to gain, except in support of creating peace.
- Civility: Maintain a dignified demeanor of friendship, politeness, goodwill and respect towards others, setting an example for others. Agree to disagree in a calm and respectful way and treat others as one would want to be treated.
- Commitment to truth, facts and rational thought: Pursue knowledge about what is objectively true about nature and the universe while we also expand the limits of human knowledge.
- Building high levels of trust with others: Be in integrity. Honor our word. Be trustworthy. Act in ways that demonstrate integrity and encourage others to do the same. This builds trust.
- Justice: Be fair in all our interactions and/or transactions. While perfect justice is a moving target, however, we can still make headway toward it.
- Consistent Self-Improvement: Recognizing we are all imperfect and make mistakes that we enthusiastically own, accept full responsibility for, and constructively learn from, we are on a life-long process of improving ourselves. We practice and work towards being excellent humans.
These aspirational values are voluntary and support creating global freedom and peace. By embodying these values, the Live and Let Live Movement community can optimize happiness and decrease suffering.
