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Prepolitical Moral Foundations

of a Free Republic

Pope Benedict XVI

In the acceleration of the tempo of historical developments in which we
live, two factors, it seems to me, stand out above all others as character-
istics of a development that, earlier, began only slowly. The first is the
formation of a world society in which individual political, economic,
and cultural powers depend, more and more, on each other, and come
into contact and permeate each other in their different spheres of life.
The other is the development of man’s possibilities, of his power to
make and to destroy, possibilities that, exceeding everything to which
we have previously been accustomed, raise the question of the legal and
moral control of power. Thus, this question is quite pressing: How can
cultures, as they encounter each other, find the fundamental ethical
principles that can guide their cooperation along the right way and
build a common, legally responsible body to tame and organize power.
That the project of a ‘‘world ethos [Weltethos],’’ proposed by Hans
Ku ̈ng, has been so well received shows that the question is in the air.
This is true even if one accepts Robert Spaemann’s sharp-sighted criti-
cism of this project.^1 A third factor enters in, in addition to the two
already mentioned above: as cultures meet and penetrate each other,
ethical certainties that had previously been normative are more or less
shattered. The basic questions of what the Good actually is in any given
context and why one must do the Good, even if it is harmful to oneself,
remain largely without an answer. Now, it seems clear to me that sci-
ence as such cannot produce an ethic, and that scientific debates cannot,
therefore, generate a renewed ethical consciousness. Yet it cannot be
disputed that a fundamental change in the conception both of the world
and of man, a change that is the result of growing scientific knowledge,
contributes significantly to shattering old moral certainties. In this re-
spect, science now clearly has a responsibility for the human being as
human being, and philosophy, in particular, has a responsibility to fol-

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