Faced with the ongoing tragedy of poverty, ethicists call for effective measures of global justice to set up just institutional structures. Their arguments for a transnational obligation to help however remain contested, one of the main reasons for that being the lack of motivational support for trans-national visions of global justice. This articles suggests that the debate will gain new and helpful insights if it studies the motivational mechanisms at work in the dominant religious and cultural traditions, asking: How do (...) these particular traditions conceive of social justice; how do they motivate their adherents to extend solidarity? And how can the similarities surfacing in their motivational strategies be informative for the quest to devise a motivationally saturated account of global justice? The article demonstrates the potential of such an concrete-universal discourse in an exemplary manner by staging a dialogue between public Christian Social Ethics and African Ubuntu Ethics. (shrink)

Faced with the ongoing tragedy of poverty in our world today, many have long called for a common standard of global justice. Such a standard should not be tied to any one particular strand of justice conceptualizations and it should yet be in harmony with the central motivating beliefs of the various concerned moral worldviews. The article reframes global justice thinking by approaching a core problem, namely motivating people to care for distant needy strangers, in a concrete intercultural manner: it (...) sets out to study and compare the motivational underpinnings for an expansion of social justice, in an exemplary fashion, within two long-standing worldview traditions, namely Christian social ethics and contemporary Confucian ethics, in order to gain a more realistic impression of what a commonly shared and motivationally backed notion of global justice may look like. While the former expresses a universal concern for the poor, the latter has recently attracted interest, since Southeast Asian countries managed to lift millions of people out of abject poverty. As both traditions consider loving communal relationships to constitute the foundation of all justice considerations, the article inquires how this quest shapes each tradition’s way to motivate their adherents’ compliance with a vision of global justice. (shrink)

Armut ist immer noch die grosste Todesursache weltweit. Jahrlich sterben ca. 18 Mio. Menschen an ihren direkten und indirekten Folgen. Christliche Sozialethik will Armutsursachen aufdecken und dazu beitragen, dass diese durch die Etablierung von gerechten globalen Strukturen uberwunden werden. Globale Gerechtigkeit aber muss mehr sein als ein blosses Konstrukt westlicher Ethik. Sie muss als Ergebnis eines kulturubergreifenden Dialogs das bestimmen, was verschiedene Weltanschauungen konsensual als gerecht und zugleich realisierbar erachten. Die Arbeit untersucht in diesem Sinne christliche, afrikanische und konfuzianische Ethiktraditionen (...) auf ihr Verstandnis von Gerechtigkeit und Armut. Im Dialog mit der aktuellen philosophischen Diskussion erarbeitet sie konkrete Bausteine einer interkulturell erprobten Theorie globaler Gerechtigkeit. (shrink)