2019, Vol., No.44

The Korean Journal of Chiristian Social Ethics 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.58

pISSN : 1229-8387 / eISSN : 2713-749X
https://journal.kci.go.kr/csethics

This research suggests four normative principles of Christian economic ethics, namely, ecological regulation, participation, justice and human dignity. With these four principles in hand I would emphasize five points for reshaping the market economy. 1. Christian economic ethics acknowledge that the price mechanism that mediates economic rationality must be fully complemented from a social and ecological point of view. 2. Christian economic ethics require that the stability and healthiness of the ecosystem should be guaranteed in order to propose some measures which are necessary to regulate and reshape the economic process of the historical market economy and its basic frameworks. 3. Christian economic ethics propose that capital and labor be jointly responsible for the survival and development of enterprises as social partners through joint decision-making. 4. Christian economic ethics require furthermore that industry, the national economy and the global economy should be regulated in democratic ways. 5. Christian economic ethics advocate guaranteeing the opportunity of life for all, and suggest that jobs should be distributed through reduction of labor hours and the unconditional basic income should be institutionalized.

The issue of basic income, which has been recently focused, is not only discussed within the current international political and economic aspects, but also needs to be discussed more macroscopically and more prospectively by predicting the future international political and economic aspects impacted by cutting- edge technologies. With this concern, this article regards modern society, which is put into the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as a neoliberal society conspiring with advanced science and technology, and suggests basic income as an alternative to solve social problems such as the polarization of the rich and the poor, and the loss of current jobs. For this, this article seeks to support the necessity and legitimacy of basic income by selecting the four positions of Christianity which are in line with the main position of basic income and linking them with basic income.

This article examines the Protestant missionaries’ view on capitalist values during the Japanese colonial period and analyzes their economic ethics that they taught and emphasized to Koreans. In the Japanese colonial era, the capitalist system in Korea slowly but incrementally expanded though the colonial economy of Korea was extremely subordinated to the Japanese Empire. Protestant missionaries believed that it was their “duty” and “responsibility” as Christian missionaries to help and train Koreans to adapt to the modern economic system. Self-help was central to the economic ethics of Protestant missionaries. Missionaries had played an important role in spreading modern economic norms and values and in creating capitalistic human beings by nurturing economic ethics, whose core element was self-help ethics. The self-help ethics of missionaries were closely related to the colonial self-help ethics expressed as “self-reliance,” a colonial policy carried out by the colonial government in the 1930s. Protestant missionaries played an important role in the formation of capitalist modernity in Korea by spreading self-help ethics. This is a feature of Christian modernity in colonial Korea.