"Ethicist Sissela Bok seeks to persuade us that our late-century global tragedies are indeed different from the accumulated woes of our predecessors in this way: they are global; they cross boundaries; in a very real sense, they endanger life itself. . . . She urges us to come down from our trees--those vantage points of realism, pacifism, or utopianism from which we view events--and join in the effort to construct dialogue from the building blocks of our shared humanity, shaped as they are from what she claims to be the universally-held conviction that survival is based on three irreducible values: 1) all people, in all societies, espouse the need to be mutually supportive and loyal to their fellow members of the group; 2) all people, in all societies, decry violence, betrayal, and deceit practiced on members of the group; 3) all people, in all societies, demand a form of justice that distinguishes between `right' and `wrong' and that is `fair' in its application of the group's rules to all its members. Bok wants us to see that this spare and yet stringent value set, when extended to apply beyond prevailing ethnic, religious, or national boundaries, offers the only hope of a negotiated ceasefire on the battlefields of war, disease, and environmental degradation."—Harvard Review