If we lived in an ideal world, what thing would you value the most?

This is what we were asked in my RE ethics class today. The overall question was ‘what we would include in our ideal life?’ We had to go around the whole class and say one thing that we would value most in our ideal life and why. I was amazed by what the class came up with collectively. Most common things included friends and family which I can understand, but what astonished me was the amount of people who said materialistic things such as having money and a nice house. I was the only person in the class who said a value that was not selfish and was for the benefit as the world as a whole. In my idea world, the thing I would value the most would be world peace.

My reasons being that world peace would mean people would no longer have to live in fear of things such as terrorist attacks, and needless deaths would no longer occur. Also, I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but if there was world peace then the whole would could live as one and be happy. My final and most important reason is that all the money that is wasted on nuclear weapons could be spent to help overcome poverty, and improve the destroyed environment. When I came out with the words ‘world peace’ I think people were thinking ‘why? This is an ideal world; you could have anything you want’. In an ideal world materialistic things would not matter, the elements that matter most are things such as poverty that those people find easy to be oblivious to, this is mainly because they feel there is not a direct effect on them. This ignorant view is one I will never understand.