ABSTRACT
Framing an issue as a crossroads is one ethical resource that surfaced in what the German philosopher/historian Karl Jaspers (1953) named the Axial Age. Between the ninth and third centuries BCE, the emergence of several wisdom and faith traditions across multiple cultures signaled a qualitative shift in human social and cultural development: Confucianism and Taoism in East Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism in South Asia, the Hebrew prophets in Judaism in the Ancient Near East and the philosophers in Greece. These ancient wisdom and faith traditions in the Axial Age gave rise to remarkable developments in ethical resources and spiritual perspectives that transformed human culture at that time, and continue to provide an invaluable ethical legacy that still permeates our societies and economies today.
