This essay addresses the questions, “what good is religious ethics for?” and “what justification exists for the field?” in three steps. First, it canvases how religious ethicists have offered reasons for carrying out work in the field to identify anAnti‐Reductive Paradigmthat is guided by anEgalitarian Imperative. That imperative functions as a thin, minimal morality of inclusivity and equal respect that guides work in the field. Second, the essay considers the field's ends. Here the focus shifts from values that shape the (...) field'smethodsto values that can describe the field'spurposes. That shift requires us to think in terms of a thick rather than a thin morality, one with substantive rather than procedural virtues in mind. The essay offers a constructive, substantive proposal under the rubric ofCritical Humanism. Critical Humanism justifies the study of religious ethics as an enterprise that can expand the moral imagination through its encounter with difference. It is shaped by four values: post‐critical reasoning, social criticism, cross‐cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Third, the essay brings the two parts of the argument together by explaining how to connect such purposes to the thin morality of inclusivity and equal respect. One upshot of the essay is to have us think not only about values, but also about power as it pertains to scholarship in the guild; hence the attention to the ethics and politics of religious ethics. (shrink)

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation (...) of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison. (shrink)

This essay defends a Buddhist answer to the question of how a skeptical tradition might account for its moral position. Two domains in Buddhist thought and practice are often considered to be dissimilar, perhaps contradictory. On the one hand, there is an aspiration to nirvana and a philosophy that describes everything as “emptiness” and rejects, with apparent universality, “attachment to views.” On the other hand, Buddhist traditions of practice recommend actions based in compassion and loving kindness, and the cultivation of (...) contentment, introspective awareness, and peace of mind. It is argued that these arenas are not in conflict, but are linked through Buddhist psychology, wherein the proven limitations of concepts are quite explicitly leveraged to show that beings hampered by such limits ought to think and act with epistemic humility. The result is not nihilism, but a method for improving our perspectives on ourselves and our society—a method that may serve as a model for humanistic research. (shrink)

Issues of genre and persuasion are central to ethical thought and practice. Until recently, there has been an asymmetry between religious ethics and moral philosophy in regard to these issues. Renewed attention to these issues in moral philosophy creates a new context for their consideration in religious ethics--one in which the relation of religious ethics and moral philosophy is less determinate than it has been in previous discussions. The four essays that comprise this Focus Section reflect this new context while (...) also making new contributions to perennial concerns of genre in ethical thought and practice. (shrink)

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self-conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical (...) issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics. (shrink)

A survey of developments over the last forty years suggests that little progress has been made in the development of comparative religious ethics as a discipline. While authors working in this field have produced a number of interesting works, the field lacks structure, including an agreement on the basic purpose, terms, and approaches by which contributions may be evaluated as better or worse. I provide an account of this history, suggesting that a way forward will involve marrying ethicists' interest in (...) arguments with close attention to the more and less formal structures by which groups of people organize the giving and taking of reasons. (shrink)

This article reflects one scholar's attempt to locate herself within emerging ethical methodologies given a specific concern with cross-cultural women's moral praxis. The field of comparative ethics's debt to past debates over methodology is considered through a typology of three waves of methodological invention. The article goes on to describe a specific research focus on U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shii women that initiated a search for a distinct method. This method of comparative ethics, which focuses on the production of ethical (...) knowledge through the interaction of discursive logics of various moral agents, is described. The conclusion turns to how methodological invention can itself become a constructive project through the way it (1) locates the scholar in relation to her subject of study and (2) allows for isolation of tactics within specific moral discourses. (shrink)