Values are not what humanity is, but what humanity ought to be

The Distance Between Is and Ought

On 25 November 1949, a day before the Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution, B.R. Ambedkar rose to warn his colleagues about the document they had written. The Preamble promised justice, liberty, equality and fraternity to a society divided by caste, scarred by Partition and largely unlettered. He did not pretend the promise described the country as it was.

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.

Ambedkar understood that a constitution, like every statement of values, is not a photograph of a people but a portrait of who they mean to become. Values are not a description of what humanity already is; they are the standard by which humanity measures how far it still has to travel, and the force that pulls it forward.

The topic rests on one of philosophy's oldest distinctions. In the eighteenth century David Hume observed that writers on morality slide, almost without noticing, from statements about what is to statements about what ought to be, and that no amount of fact can by itself prove an obligation. Humanity is, as a matter of fact, often selfish, fearful and violent. Honesty, compassion and justice are not summaries of that record; they are norms held up against it. If values merely described us, we would need no ethics, no law and no conscience, for there would be no gap to close.

Every civilisation has expressed its values in this aspirational form. Indian thought calls the moral order dharma, from the root that means to hold or sustain: it is what keeps a society together precisely because it does not happen by itself. Plato built his Republic in speech, as an ideal city against which real cities could be judged. Kant asked each person to act only on a principle that could be willed as a universal law, a test no actual society passes in full. Gandhi's list of seven social sins, published in Young India in 1925, from politics without principles to science without humanity, reads as a catalogue of ways humanity falls short of what it should be. In every case, the value is stated as a demand, not a description.

History confirms the gap with painful clarity. Societies that preached equality kept slaves; societies that revered the divine in every being practised untouchability; nations that celebrated liberty colonised others. Values have often been written down in the wake of their violation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was drafted by a world that had just witnessed the Holocaust and two world wars. The ideal of human dignity was proclaimed loudest exactly when it had been most completely betrayed. That is the clearest evidence that values point to where humanity ought to stand, not where it is standing.

Yet the topic can be pushed too far, and a fair essay must ask whether values are wholly absent from human nature. Here the antithesis is strong. Adam Smith opened his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 by noting that however selfish man may be supposed, there are principles in his nature that make him care for the fortune of others. The primatologist Frans de Waal has documented consolation, fairness and cooperation among chimpanzees and bonobos, suggesting that the roots of morality are older than our species. Every day, strangers donate blood, return lost wallets and rush into floods to save people they do not know. Values, in this sense, are part of what humanity is.

The two positions are reconciled by Aristotle's distinction between potential and actuality. An acorn is not yet an oak, but the oak is already present in it as a possibility. Compassion, fairness and courage exist in human beings as seeds; values are the name we give to those seeds fully grown. The "ought" is not imposed from outside but drawn out from within, which is why it can move people at all. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed this hope when he said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. The bending is not automatic; it happens because people hold up an ideal and refuse to accept the present as final.

Building upon this, institutions are the means by which a society turns its "ought" into its "is". The Indian Constitution even separates the two. Fundamental Rights are enforceable, while the Directive Principles of State Policy, under Article 37, are not enforceable in court but are declared fundamental in the governance of the country. They are a constitutional "ought" addressed to the future. Over seven decades, many of them have hardened into reality: the right to education became Article 21A in 2002 and was given force by the Right to Education Act, 2009. In Minerva Mills (1980) the Supreme Court held that the balance between rights and directives is part of the Constitution's basic structure. A living constitution is, in this sense, a machine for closing the distance between is and ought.

For the individual, and especially for the public servant, values work as a compass rather than a map. The Nolan Committee in 1995 named seven principles of public life, among them selflessness, integrity, objectivity and honesty, not because British officials already lived by them but because scandals showed they did not. In India, Satyendra Dubey, an engineer with the National Highways Authority, wrote to the Prime Minister's Office in 2002 about corruption in highway contracts and was murdered in 2003. His courage showed what an official ought to be; his death showed what the system then was. The Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 is a partial attempt to make his ought a little more of our is.

There is, however, a danger in the gap. When an "ought" is proclaimed but never pursued, it decays into hypocrisy, and people learn to distrust all values as masks for interest. When a group claims sole authority to define the ought, values harden into dogma and are used to persecute dissenters. Ambedkar's answer was constitutional morality, a term he borrowed from the historian George Grote: a shared commitment to the processes of reasoned disagreement, so that the ought is debated in public rather than dictated from above. Values remain humane only when they stay open to question.

Today the ought is being stretched in new directions. The Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 pledge to "leave no one behind", a promise that the present world economy plainly does not yet keep. Climate change asks the living to accept duties towards generations not yet born, a value no earlier age had to articulate. Artificial intelligence forces societies to decide what fairness, privacy and accountability ought to mean when decisions are made by machines. In each case, humanity is writing its values ahead of its conduct, as it always has.

Ambedkar's life of contradictions has not ended, and in a sense it never will, because the ought always moves ahead as the is advances. That is not a failure of values; it is their purpose. A humanity that already was what it ought to be would have nothing left to strive for. Values are the promise humanity makes to itself, and civilisation is the long, unfinished work of keeping it. The measure of any generation is not whether it has arrived, but whether it has narrowed the distance it inherited.