This chapter argues that certain conventional discourses of sustainability, along with related frameworks for intergenerational ethics, create conceptual barriers to realizing the goals of genuine sustainability and intergenerational flourishing. Early Confucianism provides a model of intergenerational ethics that may better align with these goals. In particular, early Confucianism offers a relationally grounded ethics that conceptualizes community diachronically and emphasizes the importance of building and sustaining harmonious, flourishing human communities over time. These Confucian ideas resonate with relational and communitarian approaches to intergenerational ethics and sustainability, which can helpfully supplement existing frameworks for intergenerational ethics by emphasizing shared values and concerns, including commitments to common intergenerational projects.

When we think about faith as a relationship with god, rather than a set of propositional beliefs, this changes the way we think about ethics. We think about ethics more as a set of practices and orientations than as rules. The chapter considers this claim through examining the way evangelical Christians come to understand their relationship with Jesus, and more briefly through Catholics who seek to understand what it is to be a modern Mexican, through Amazonian shamans who want to know their spirits, and modern magicians. When we focus on religion as something people do, rather than just what they believe, we must approach ethics as a series of incremental interpretations of how people make sense of who they have become in the world, rather than a carefully considered set of logical arguments.

Throughout his life, Martin Buber insisted that his dialogical thinking was “not the result of reading but of personal experience.” This emphasis on his own generative experience does not vitiate the fact that, as Buber likewise acknowledged, “in all ages it has undoubtedly been glimpsed that the reciprocal essential relationship between two beings signifies a primal opportunity of being, and one, in fact, that enters into the phenomenon that the human being exists.” Although historical antecedents pointed toward Buber’s dialogical thinking, its crystallization occurred during the tumultuous years of the First World War, when he underwent a conversion, personal as well as intellectual, from the mysticism of his prewar writings to his signature postwar dialogical thinking.

This chapter introduces human exceptionalism, explores various attempts to distinguish humans from other animals, and reviews a variety of ethical positions about human relations with other animals.

Chapter 1 starts with a challenge that we seem to approach the current conditions of the world in which there is a simultaneously receding interest in issues of The Good, and an intensification in commitments to The Good. To move beyond the impasse of what could be characterised as a thoughtless relativism and a suffocating foundationalism, the author outlines the rationale for relational ethics. In this case, the ultimate value is placed on the nourishment of relational processes, the original source of moral value. However, in the contemporary world of conflicting traditions, recognition, awareness, and talents are required for encouraging and sustaining this process. Herein lies the major challenge for education. Sweeping reform may not meet this demand, as ethically consequential education can and should be integrated into the daily practices of school life. The chapter concludes that educational ethos, curriculum design, pedagogies, and evaluative practices are not simply techniques of knowledge transmission. When ethically informed, they hold the potential for life-giving transformation of global communities.

Chapter 2 argues that relationships are integral to a person’s life and constituted in human’s well-being. As both human life and well-being have non-instrumental values, relationships cannot be instrumentalised. Thus in our relationships with others, we connect to the intrinsic value of them as persons. Insofar as we appreciate other people as such, that value and other people become part of our own life. In this way, human relationships can enlarge our horizons and enrich our lives. These interpersonal relationships are ethical because they involve a form of caring. An awareness of ethical relationships in one’s well-being can determine an openness and attentiveness to others. In this sense, others must be regarded as whole beings, not as assemblage of their identity labels or roles. This commitment to being-with and to ‘we’-ness is transformative and transcendent, and such ethical relationships can be nurtured through caring education and radical love. This includes learning to be directed at cultivating human qualities; curriculum to offer unmediated experiences of others through humanities subjects and activities within the humanities domains; and pedagogy to feature listening and dialogue. Most importantly, schools should be set up as caring communities where members can collaborate and develop a sense of ‘we’.