ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I describe some practical strategies—from religion to professional ethics—that have been used as guides or aids in reaching judgments about how people ought to behave and how to define preferable futures. They are drawn not so much from the work of futurists as from ordinary life and from the work of other professionals and social thinkers who have analyzed values and ethical rules of conduct. They are samples of what is culturally available to deal with value questions. They involve appeals to some legitimating source that some people use in their everyday lives to justify their judgments of the good and bad.