Book excerpt: faces the urgent problem of determining what political and social conditions must be preserved in order to ensure a continu. ing thriving economy. "2 And the ethicist, we may add, can draw on all of those problems and quite a few more characteristic of situations when traditional communities struggle with the impact of sudden and unprecedented wealth as well as with a technological transformation of their society of singular proportions. Hong Kong is truly a society in transition, a society whose time is running short and which therefore cannot afford to wait long before it has to make decisive choices, choices also in ethics. The time factor which is so infamous in various ethical dilemmas applies here to the society as a whole; it may also account for some of its not just morally significant shortcomings. II. Ethics in a Cross-cultural Perspective The authors of this volume are scholars and researchers based in Hong 3 Kong who have been living and working in the territory for many years. They are not only representative of the increased research interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum of Hong Kong universities, but also of the inter disciplinary approach which has become the hallmark of work in applied eth ics. As is well documented, ethics research, at long last, has left behind its disciplinary confines and, even more so, the philosophical ivory tower and begun to permeate the full scope of the academic and scientific agenda.