Volume 29, Issue 2, Fall/Winter 2009
Hak Joon Lee
Pages 97-119
Toward the Great World House
Hans Küng and Martin Luther King Jr. on Global Ethics
IN A CRITICAL CONVERSATION WITH HANS KÜNG'S GLOBAL ETHIC, THIS ESsay studies the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr.'s communal-political ethics for the theory and praxis of global ethics. While Küng's global ethic, due to its quasi-Kantian method, reduces thick religious descriptions into minimal moral codes (ignoring the structural dynamics of globalization, reifying grassroots religious movements), King's ethics points us toward a constructive global ethics that consists of four synthetic components: vision (the world house), principles (human rights), virtue (love, justice, etc.), and transformative political method (nonviolence), which more adequately explains the dynamic relationship of global ethics and the grassroots movements of a global civil society.