Outlook: The Global Ethic as a Task
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 stands at the transition to Volume III. The questions he raises shape the following decades.
Can there be integration without assimilation? Decolonial studies will radicalize the critique of universalism. But they too cannot sustain relativism – whoever demands “justice for the oppressed” invokes a universal standard. The question is not whether but which universality.
The ecological crisis requires a global ethic. Climate change respects no national borders. Without a common ethical basis, global cooperation is impossible. Küng’s intuition was correct: particular solutions are not sufficient for universal problems.
Digitalization and artificial intelligence present new challenges. What would a global ethic for the digital realm look like? Do the four basic demands also apply to AI systems? These questions were not yet foreseeable in 1993, but they will become central to the twenty-first century.
The systematic lesson from Küng’s project: universality is possible as a regulative idea that develops dialogically. This is Hegel’s method – truth as process, not as finished result. Universality is not given at the outset; it emerges through the dialogue of cultures. But this dialogue presupposes that there is something common to be discovered. The Golden Rule shows: this commonality exists. The task is to explicate it ever more fully and apply it ever more concretely.