How did ethical thought take shape as a mental or emotional approach to life? In this paper I will focus particularly on developments from a few centuries before until shortly after the turn of the axial common era in East Asia, India, and the Middle East. In these regions at that time, the notion of ethics emerged as an aspect of the perception of the cosmos as an organic entity comprising various forms of existence. People came to see love and justice and the quest for harmony and peace as moral norms pertaining to the nature of existence and one’s relationship with others. In contrast to East Asian thought, which tended towards a passive notion of the communal body, Middle Eastern and Christian thought had a more active orientation. Yet, both intellectual spheres developed ideas about harmony and peace within the framework of notions about the relationship between self and other and modes of existence. The modern period saw the birth of theories of evolution concerning the universe and different forms of life, but even within that context there continued to be a strong sense of ethics.
In contrast to the situation in earlier times, however, at present, people have come to regard human beings as entities that move simply according to their own volition, or according to circumstance, or by some system. Ethical action as such has been lost. There is a need to reformulate the human enterprise not only in terms of the relationship between self and others, but also the relationship with the natural environment.
