This book is about learning how to live the good life. Part biography and part philosophical inquiry, it is a fresh, original interpretation of the intellectual world of the largely forgotten, eighteenth-century professor, Adam Ferguson. Although less well-known today than his famous Scottish contemporaries, Adam Smith and David Hume, Ferguson was considered their equal in the 18th century. The book shows how Ferguson, who grew up speaking Gaelic and English, and spent a decade ministering to a Highlander regiment, developed a distinctive, cross-cultural approach to moral philosophy that is relevant for doing comparative ethics in today's global village. The premise is that life in the twenty-first century is plagued by a moral disorientation that has affinities with the materialism, privatization, social fragmentation and spiritual crises that were emerging in 18th-century, urban Scotland. Like his peers in medical science, Ferguson pursued what was then known as moral science with a particular concern to diagnose and treat moral "dis-ease." The book contends that his moral philosophy lectures became strikingly modern experiments in recovering moral moorings-disclosing epitomes of moral dynamics, investigating the use of moral terms in ordinary language, and crafting moral principles, such as probity, which preserved classical moral virtues but also incorporated the practical wisdom of 'peoples of the mountains.' Although focused on re-discovering Ferguson as a full-blown ethicist before his time, the book is also intended as a primer for the reader's own quest for living a life which is emblematic of ethical integrity The primary audience for this book is philosophers, historians, religious studies scholars who specialize in ethics, eighteenth-century English literature scholars, and social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists) who focus on the eighteenth-century.

How does one speak about the really big questions of our time - waging war, making ends meet, and preserving the planet? What does it mean to think ethically in a world marked by fear of terror, economic anxiety and ecological meltdown? Can revisiting the moral wisdom of the historical Jesus or learning about the moral perspectives of our global neighbors help us address our fears?In ""Ethics in a Global World"", Jack Hill connects the dots between what Jesus said long ago and what we experience today in a radically new way by linking the voice of Jesus to unheard voices of contemporary, largely marginalized, social and political movements. He draws on his firsthand experiences living overseas to introduce readers to the moral thinking of Pacific islanders, Jamaican Rastafarians and a new generation of South Africans. If Americans are to live the good life in the global village, he argues, we need to be in creative dialogue with neighbors overseas, and that dialogue will enable us to experience our own American moral heritage, as well as the Jesus tradition, in fresh ways.