Abstract

The paper argues that the world is facing a condition of moral recession with profound and debilitating consequences in all spheres of life. Highly specialized social sciences are failing to address the issue of the moral conditions in a systematic manner. Differentiation, a master sociological process, has relativized the world to the extent that issues of morality and ethics are assigned to specialists, i.e., theologians and moral philosophers. It is only the extreme cases of inhumanity and moral depravation that bring the moral issues to public attention. Defining the value of life as a key moral value, and discussing the deaths and human suffer­ings in the seemingly endless wars, the paper draws attention to the need for shared global moral values to underpin a global society.