Thus states the declaration Towards A Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration, which sets forth "a common set of core values" found in the teachings of the world’s spiritual and religious traditions. More than two hundred religious and spiritual leaders, scholars, and activists representing the majority of the world's spiritual and religious traditions signed the Global Ethic at the meeting of Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders during the 1993 Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. Central themes of the Global Ethic include:

Men and women and their institutions are not living in heart and action the core values found in the teachings of the world’s spiritual and religious traditions. As a result, agony is being experienced everywhere on Earth. Manifestations of the agony are associated with each of the themes mentioned above.

People do not have a right to life, safety and the free development. The twentieth century is the bloodiest in human history with 260 million dead in war, armed conflicts, and genocide. The principal victims have been civilians slaughtered in lawless savagery, both random and planned. The rough proportion of civilians to military casualties has risen from 10 civilians to 90 soldiers in World War I to 50/50 in World War II, to 90/10 today. Many countries, including powerful industrialized countries, have committed crimes against humanity. In addition, countries have developed weapons that kill mostly civilians, including land mines. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction threaten irreparable damage to human civilization and Earth’s ecosystems.

Poverty is another form of violence. Forty million people die each year in developing countries, and nearly half of these deaths are from preventable infectious diseases or illnesses. Nearly a tenth of the deaths (4 million) are of babies under a month old and another tenth of the deaths are children under-five. A pregnancy is about 16 times more likely to kill in a developing country than in an industrialized country. A third to a half of the population of the world’s poorest countries do not have access to health care; 1,000 million people lack clean drinking water and nearly 3,000 million have no sanitation.

The biosphere and the very foundations of life are being exploited ruthlessly. Six billion humans and their economic efforts to meet their needs and wants now dominate Earth. Eighty percent of the planet’s original forests have been cleared, fragmented, or otherwise degraded. Between one-third and one half of the land on Earth has been transformed from its natural state to human uses. Since the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increased recklessly by nearly 30 percent. Humans now "fix" (combine with carbon, hydrogen, or oxygen) more atmospheric nitrogen than do all natural processes combined. More than half of all accessible fresh water has now been put to use by humans. By transporting fauna and flora across natural barriers, humans have caused enormous ecological damage. Rates of species extinction are now 100 to 1000 times those before humanity’s domination of Earth. Humans may already have erased thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of species even from the seas. There are no places left on Earth that have escaped human influence, and environmental gains are being overtaken by the pace and scale of population growth and economic development.

People and the commonweal are robbed and dispossessed. Inequities in the world have risen steadily for nearly two centuries and are now so large that they must be seen as robbery and dispossession. The 10 percent of humans living in the "least developed" counties subsist on $0.70 per day; the 13 percent of humans living in "industrialized" countries enjoy $74 per day — more than 100 times the income of the poorest. The richest 20 percent of humans enjoy 86 percent of the goods and services produced, and the poorest 20 percent subsist on 1 percent. People in Europe, for example, spend $155,000 million on cigarettes and alcoholic drinks every year, and people in the United States spend $35,000 million annually on weight loss programs. The world’s poorest need $20,000 million to eliminate starvation and malnutrition in the world.

Throughout the world, corruption and bribery are robbing from people and the commonweal. Most industrialized countries have experienced massive bribery scandals in recent years. Corruption has been identified as a major obstacle to the transition to democracy and market economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Much of the failure of international development programs to improve the economies of the world's poorest countries is now widely attributed to corruption. Only one country (the United States) made it a crime to bribe foreign officials. Many countries still subsidized foreign bribes by treating them as tax-deductible expenses.

Women, men, institutions, states, and religious communities do speak lies and stir up hatred. Governments lie to their people as, for example, in the famous US Watergate scandal. Corporations lie and mislead through their advertising; the tobacco industry is a case in point. Religious and ethnic hatred fuel most of the forty wars raging currently. Over the last decade the percentage of countries documented as committing massive human rights violations increased from 55 to 66 percent. The percentage of countries responsible for deaths from torture increased from 22 to 27 percent and, for extra-judicial executions, the percentage increased from 17 to 25 percent. The percentage of nations responsible for "disappearing" individuals more than doubled, from 9 to 20 percent. Since 1983 the world population of refugees has grown at 10 to 20 percent per year reaching an estimated 25 to 50 million.

Women, men, institutions, states, and religious communities do degrade others and lead them into sexual dependency or immorality. Although men sometimes experience degradation by women, women are much more often the victims of degradation and discrimination by men and male dominated governments, corporations, and religious or spiritual organizations. In no country do women have political status, access, or influence equal to that of men. Men hold 90 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide, and consequently women’s needs and interests are given inadequate in political and economic decisions. Discriminatory restrictions on women’s ownership of assets, education, employment opportunities, physical and social mobility, contribute greatly to the plight of women. More than two thirds of the world’s poor are women. Furthermore, women are victims of domestic violence, female genital mutilation, and other violations of basic human rights by men and male dominated institutions.

The world need not be in the agony it is in currently. The basis for a global ethic already exists in a common set of core values found in the teaching of world’s spiritual and religious traditions. The challenge is to help men and women and their institutions to live these core values in heart and action and thereby to alter human consciousness and create a new global order. The new global order is not emerging from traditional solutions, and if it is to develop, the world’s spiritual and religious traditions will need to cooperate as never before and provide strong and courageous leadership.