Celebrating our
Common Moral Compass

The power of fundamental principles

If the argument is to be made for a unifying set of core ethics that can be shared and understood, they require to be codified. The necessity of clear codification is exactly the process undergone in the creation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights. It was necessary to codify them in order to act on them.

The "power" of the UN Declarations is in the fundamental nature of the Declarations themselves. It is possible to argue about the implementation of Human Rights and the successes and failures of their promotion world-wide, but no individual or organisation has seriously proposed another competing list. There are no alternatives or rival Universal Declarations of Human Rights. The UN Declarations are Human Rights. Because as they are fundamental, they are almost impossible to challenge as they provide an established benchmark. The principle is exactly the same with the Moral Compass.

It is to address this fundamental gap in ethical understanding that the Centre for Defined Ethics was formed.