Globalization in part means that a lot of people are walking into the room and in some cases becoming influential or even dominant voices in the conversation. Sometimes they are like party-crashers coming in and pushing people around, scooping up the valuables and eating up the food in the frig - bribing political leaders, undermining traditional economies and the ways of life that are interwoven with them, replacing them with new economic models that effectively exploit developing countries for their labor and resources.

An ethic that emphasizes relationship and community can be concerned with protecting the individual's interests, but always with an eye to trying to reconcile those interests with those of others. An ethic emphasizing rights and autonomy should be concerned with promoting enough community to foster a motivating concern for everyone's rights, not just one's own.

If I knew me as somebody else, I would hate me just as much. Why have a double standard?

Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

To this day I don’t know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

The Confucians paid a great deal attention to ritual, highlighting the ones that expressed the sorts of affective attitudes one wants to cultivate, engaging in them with keen awareness of their value for shaping and reshaping the self, and insisting on the need to be emotionally present to their significance for one's relationship to others. If we Americans want to rebuild our capacities for a shared life, we would do well to pay attention to all this.

But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.