The 24 Dispositions

I mentioned the 24 Dispositions in an earlier posting. These were drawn together by an inter-faith group in Birmingham as a basis for religious education. Here they are.

Being Imaginative and Explorative

This disposition requires lateral thinking, the capacity to see things differently, together with the capacity to see the promise and potential of the world about us

Appreciating Beauty

This disposition requires a deep sensitivity for the world about us, an awareness of the nature of human responses, and the capacity to make qualitative distinctions.

Expressing Joy

This disposition requires an awareness of human affective responses and certain expressive capacities, for example, in music, in language, in body language.

Being Thankful

This disposition requires an awareness of relationships of dependence and of not being wholly self-sufficient and in control of our own well-being. It requires a willingness and expressive capacity to acknowledge the relationship of dependence and the good that flows from it.

Caring for Others, Animals and the Environment

This disposition requires an awareness of the needs of others (and other things) together with a feeling that these needs matter, and the will to do something about them.

Sharing and Being Generous

This disposition arises out of an awareness that others may be dependent on us, the sense of wholeness that may come from our relationships with others, and the will to please others.

Being Regardful of Suffering

This disposition arises out of the affective capacity for pity, as well as out of an attention to the situation and condition of the other and the will to help or to maintain one’s solidarity with the other.

Being Merciful and Forgiving

This disposition presupposes the recognition that the unity and solidarity that exists between all people and all things is readily broken through aesthetic and moral offence. It also presupposes an acknowledgement of offence, the desire for unity and the will to bring it about despite the cost it may entail.

Being Fair and Just

This disposition depends on a recognition of the claims of equity and consistent reasoning, together with the will to restore and to maintain the state of equity.

Living by Rules

This disposition presupposes that the world behaves in law-like ways and that the society on which we depend requires rules for its very functioning. Whilst it is acknowledged that the rules of nature are given (heteronomous), it is supposed that: A] The rules of society are collectively agreed and therefore binding, and B] The rules of personal behaviour are self-imposed (autonomous). A law-abiding disposition depends on the will to live the ordered life.

Being Accountable and Living with Integrity

This disposition is the capacity and willingness to be answerable for one’s actions, formally and informally, to others and to oneself. Integrity presupposes that one would always act in such a responsible way even if one could or would not be held publicly to account.

Being Temperate, Exercising Self-Discipline and Cultivating Serene Contentment

This disposition requires a good deal of self-knowledge and a mastery of the affections to ensure these affections are proportionate and subject to reason.

Being Modest and Listening to Others

This disposition presupposes self-knowledge and an understanding of others together with a capacity to evaluate what each one can contribute to cultural life. As such, it avoids

false modesty on the one hand, and boastfulness on the other.

Cultivating Inclusion, Identity and Belonging

This disposition recognises that human beings are never isolated selves but exist and can thrive only in relation to others. This relationship ranges from the intimate relation of two people to the relationships that constitute families, groups, communities, nations and world. Deliberate exclusion prevents others from developing relationships through which they can thrive.

Creating Unity and Harmony

This disposition recognises that different people/creatures have different interests, needs and capacities, and as such they can also frustrate one another and cause aesthetic, moral and religious offence. The disposition also requires the desire and skill to restore relationships.

Participating and Willingness to Lead

This disposition presupposes a self-knowledge and an appreciation of what one can contribute to collective life, together with a willingness to be proactive.

Remembering Roots

This disposition recognises how the past can shape the present and the future through its promise and obligations. It notes what the possibilities of human life are and hence what defines human life.

Being Loyal and Steadfast

This disposition presupposes an understanding of the needs of others and a willingness to offer them support in the face of opposition and destructive powers.

Being Hopeful and Visionary

This disposition might reasonably be linked to being imaginative and explorative. The attitudes of expectation and anticipation are fundamental to some forms of religious life and contrasts sharply with the mood of despair. The disposition of being hopeful should be distinguished from being fatalistic in which everything is determined and from a reliance on ‘luck’ in which people depend on chance.

Being Courageous and Confident

This disposition should be contrasted with foolhardiness on the one hand and with cowardice on the other. It requires a good understanding of situations, coupled with selflessness and a commitment to the well being of others.

Being Curious and Valuing Knowledge

This disposition arises out of a fundamental human interest in which knowledge is valued for its own sake. Affectively, it involves a love for others and other things, just as they are, and in all their complexity. This should be linked to a determined will to discover this strange complexity.

Being Open, Honest and Truthful

This disposition presupposes an understanding of others as ends in themselves and therefore not to be manipulated or used without their agreement. An affection for the truth and for the well-being of others underwrites the integrity of any communication and the clarity of its meaning.

Being Reflective and Self-Critical

This disposition presupposes an awareness of the confusions of motives and the comforts of fictions. It requires a will to eschew such comforts as false consolations and a determination to be clear about what is the case and to evaluate rightly.

Being Silent and Attentive to, and Cultivating a Sense for, the Sacred and Transcendence

This disposition understands that through language and concepts, human beings impose their own structures on the realities that confront them. This imposition secularises the realities and renders them amenable to human domination. Attentive silence is enabling the realities to ‘speak’ for themselves.