News > April 24, 2008

By Caitlin Brooks | Staff writer

Kevin Jung, assistant professor of Christian ethics at the Divinity School, has received a Theological Scholars Grant from the Association of Theological Schools and Lilly Endowment for up to $12,000 for his project, “Moral Limits to Social Practice: Historicism and the Problem of Common Morality.”

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Kevin Jung, assistant professor of Christian ethics at the divinity school, received a grant from the Association of Theological Schools and Lilly endowment. (Mary Kate Wagner/Old Gold & Black)

Historicism, Jung explains, is a way of viewing ethics that espouses the idea that morality and ethics are products of historical societal convention.

According to Historicism, morality is not a universal law, but it’s rather the result of centuries of tradition and social custom. Under this logic, morality can and does differ from society to society.

Jung will use the Lilly Grant to support his research during the summer to refute this philosophy.

“Some philosophers point to morality in America and say that it has arisen from the specific needs of Americans,” Jung said.

This is, in part true, but what I really want to prove that is it is not the needs of Americans so much as basic human needs across cultures, across religious beliefs, that we all share by virtue of being human.

“These are the grounds by which we need to look at cultural moralities.

“For me this project is important because increasingly our culture is becoming morally relativistic.

‘In an age of human rights awareness, this relativism is dangerous,” he said.

Jung’s research will delve into the appropriateness of social practice as a primary basis of morality. Some of the sources of common morality Jung will examine are truth, empirical facts and historical justification.

He will achieve this through in- depth conversation with prominent scholars in the field, including David Leder of Harvard, as well as extensive reading.

“This type of research is not that of science.

“I don’t have to perform experiments or travel to foreign places. I have to travel in the minds of many people, many interlocutors,” Jung said.

“I’m arguing that a common and a historical morality can coexist and complement by checking on each other. I hope to demonstrate that there is common reality that we all have access to whether one is a Christian or not, religious or not, we have a moral responsibility to respect the elements of common morality.”

As a requirement for the Lilly Grant, Jung will present his research findings at a forum provided by the Association of Theological Schools in February 2009. Jung joined the faculty of the Divinity School in the fall of 2007.

He previously taught religious studies at William & Mary and religious ethics and social thought at DePaul University, the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and the University of Chicago.

Jung is the co-editor of two books, Doing Justice to Mercy: Religion, Law, and Criminal Justice and Humanity Before God: Contemporary Faces of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Ethics. He currently works out of his office in Wingate Hall.