Ethics for the new millennium

Presents a discussion with Rushworth M. Kidder, President of the Institute for Global Ethics. Kidder considers the central ethical issue of our time to be the continuity of the human race, because of the way that technology today enables us to leverage individual decisions. His concern is that we are raising an entire generation of people without their own built‐in sense of ethics. The major global priority is to understand and reinstate the concept of community and what it means to live within a community. Argues that there are five core values that people keep coming back to as we raise this question. People talk about love or compassion, kindness or caring; they talk about honesty, integrity, truth telling; they speak of fairness, equity, justice; they talk about responsibility and accountability for one’s actions; and they talk about a sense of respect, tolerance of diversity, and a willingness to appreciate other people. These are all critical and we should be optimistic about making progress into the next millennium.