Ethical Communication: Moral Stances in Human Dialogue

5. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Ethics of Personalism

40 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ethics of Personalism William Babcock Born in 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the foremost leader of the United States’ Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Making use of nonviolence to end segregation of blacks, especially in the American South, he started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference following the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955–1956. Speaking as an impassioned black minister, he organized sit-ins and protest marches against legal segregation, and during the 1963 March on Washington he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the same year in which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Dr. King’s march on Selma inspired the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was assassinated in 1968 by sniper James Earl Ray. This minister and social activist was primarily impacted, at least early on, by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian liberator, and the southern black evangelical tradition in the United States. As a result, he combined both nonviolent activism and Christian theology in an ethic of social change. An ethic of love combined with a strong reformist mission to form the basis of King’s philosophy. If King were advising media workers on proper ethics, he would emphasize their being dedicated to positively impacting their communities , to struggling for peace, to nonviolent agitation for social good, and to agape love. His overall ethical stance would be a very “personal” form of altruism. He defined love neither as eros (romantic love) nor philos (brotherly love), but rather as agape, a biblical term meaning redemptive, 5 .   41 Martin Luther King, Jr. unselfish love.1 King used the expression “Beloved Community” to indicate the ideal state of mankind as a whole—the apex of social evolution that he envisioned for humanity, the promised land of racial harmony and international solidarity. Agape, for Dr. King, was the key to this ideal state of humanity. As he understood it, creative and redemptive goodwill for all people was the source and true foundation of all the virtues which constitute moral excellence.2 King’s own odyssey toward the beloved community resulted in a Christo-centric conception of community that stressed the nature and role of society in the actualization of community. Accordingly , the goal of human community was not merely a utopian ideal for King, but rather the very destiny of the human family, and as a result, human community and international cooperation were no longer options, but vital necessities for continued existence on earth.3 The higher moral law was one of the four main components of King’s social ethics. The second was the principle of reconciliation . Third, he believed that resistance by public officials or private citizens to social justice manifested a deeper evil, and that reforms were incapable in themselves of destroying that evil. And fourth, the final victory over evil lay in the eschatological (or end-of-the-world) future. To King, no ethical principle was more basic to nonviolent ethics than was the concept of redemptive suffering, and he compared nonviolent struggle against racism to the redemptive suffering of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The nonviolent social ethics that constituted the very fabric of his life required both discipline and a willingness to suffer for a good that was higher than that of one’s personal safety or comfort.4 King’s dedication to God and his loyalty to others—especially those of his own subjugated race—largely defined his concept of ethics . This loyalty to others consisted largely of peace and nonviolence, and it is ironic that for King, and for other nonviolence advocates before him, he would lose his life in a violent manner. The impetus 1. Thomas R. Peake, Ethics, 3. 2. Marvin Sterling,“The Ethical Thought of Martin Luther King,” 92. 3. Walter Earl Fluker, “They Looked for a City: A Comparison of the Idea of Community in Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” 49–50. 4. Peake, Ethics, 3–4. 42 . William Babcock for King’s personal altruistic stance was his belief in God and the example of Jesus. And he saw his responsibility as taking action, not simply expressing faith. The idea of God (a theistic conception where God intrudes in the practical world) was central in King’s moral reasoning, and was originally shaped by his black religious heritage and developed in his...