What core values must we uphold if mankind is to survive and prosper in an increasingly complex and fragile world?

Rushworth M. Kidder traveled the world to interview leading thinkers, artists, educators, business people, and religious and political leaders. In this book you will meet: a Buddhist monk, a former president of Harvard, a Chinese author, a top American business executive, and many others from diverse cultures.

The author asked each person the same question: "If you could develop a global code of ethics, what would it be?" Based on the twenty-four interviews presented here, Shared Values for a Troubled World identifies eight universal values necessary to create the moral conditions necessary to create the moral conditions for a sustainable twenty-first century: love, truthfulness, fairness, freedom, unity, tolerance, responsibility, and respect for life. And as Harlan Cleveland so eloquently tells us in his foreword, "[The global code of ethics that emerges from these pages] is not, as the author keeps reminding us, the answer.

But it is an answer to the primordial question about the twenty-first century: Can we, the world's peoples, come together on ethical common ground that doesn't permit the human experiment to end with either a bang or a whimper?"