Critique and Limits
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Küng’s project has not remained without criticism. Three objections deserve particular attention.
The first objection: Küng levels the differences. He constructs a harmonious picture that suppresses the real differences between the religions. A Buddhist who denies the self and a Christian who believes in the immortal soul have fundamentally different anthropologies. How can they agree on a “global ethic” if they are not even speaking about the same human being?
Küng’s reply is convincing: differences exist within each tradition as well. There are progressive and fundamentalist Christians, liberal and orthodox Jews, reform-minded and traditionalist Muslims. The differences between a liberal Muslim and a liberal Christian are often smaller than those between a liberal and a fundamentalist Muslim. The global ethic is not a description of what all religions actually believe – it is a regulative idea of what they can agree upon when they share their best insights.
The second objection: the global ethic is Western universalism in new garb. The “universal” values Küng finds are in truth Western-Enlightenment values – now merely projected onto other cultures that supposedly hold them too.
This objection misjudges Küng’s method. He does not begin with Western categories and then check whether other cultures have them too. He studies each tradition from within and only then finds the convergences. The Golden Rule was formulated by Confucius before the European Enlightenment had even begun. If the same structure is discovered independently, it is not Eurocentric but anthropologically universal. This is recognition of equal originality, not projection.
The third objection: the global ethic is too abstract to be practically effective. The four demands are so general that they decide nothing. Everyone is for “nonviolence” – but what does that mean concretely in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Everyone is for a “just economic order” – but is capitalism or socialism more just?
This objection hits a sore point. Küng provides orienting principles but no ready-made answers. Concrete applications must be worked out dialogically. This is not weakness but consequence: ethics is developable, not dogmatically closed. But it is true that the mediation between general principles and concrete situations remains underdeveloped in Küng.