This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by John Kelsay and Jung Lee. Contra Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo-Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, the authors argue that comparative religious ethics is and should be practiced as a field of study in active conversation with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods that have their roots in multiple disciplines. Cross-pollination from a variety of disciplines is a (...) strength of comparative ethics, which has enlivened recent and ongoing research on ethics, not a problem to be resolved by convergence on a single, distinctively comparative project. The authors also argue in response to Lee and Kelsay that while individual comparative studies of virtue and personal formation can be flawed in various ways, this line of research has been productive and at times very compelling. Moreover, attention to comparative virtue ethics shows how scholarship on some ethical topics necessitates drawing on a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, a conclusion relevant to all work in religious ethics today. (shrink)

Strategies for comparative ethics need to be chosen historically, for how they will play within the pre-existing field of comparisons already formative of public opinion. To counter popular misunderstanding of native ethics as a static repetition of taboos, I will examine the way mature character is formed through long experience in responding to the seasonal movement of species. Drawing on examples from the Arizona Papago, the Colombian Páez, and Ecuadorian Quichua peoples, I argue that the moral character is the well-weathered (...) character, the person experienced in appropriate response to unpredictable weather, plant, and animal cycles. Within this framework native analogies to such standard topics of Euro-American ethics as envy, ownership of place, privacy, shame, and modesty are reinterpreted in a new light. (shrink)

The violent encounter between Africans and the forces of globalization raises the question of whether Africans should capitulate to these forces or seek to morally transform them, notwithstanding the uncertainty of achieving success. This essay argues that an exclusively existentialist interpretation of the African predicaments is inadequate because it erects a false dichotomy between African religious and moral sensibilities. It proposes instead an ethic of responsibility that affirms the interdependence of not only these two realms of life, but also of (...) communal well-being and individual's subjectivity. (shrink)

Survey of some recent literature on normativity, including nonreductionist, neo-Aristotelian, neo-Humean, expressivist, and constructivist views.

Contemporary discourse on human rights in Africa constitutes an important and controversial aspect of the general discourse on African society and culture. I begin by examining the idea of human rights as a moral category and discuss its pertinence to African cultural and political life. I then analyze and discuss the two dominant positions in the current debate, namely, the communitarian and the individualist theses. I argue that both positions are inadequate because they dissociate dimensions of life that need to (...) be interpreted in their interplay. Drawing upon samples of traditional African religious and ethical traditions, I propose a personalist theory of human rights that affirms the intrinsic individuality and sociality of the human status. (shrink)

Over a century ago a Western observer recognized an effective morality among Navajo Indians in the American Southwest, yet could not locate its expression, except in mythology recounting contradictory behaviors. Through the 1900s scholars delineated contours of Navajo moral values, myths, and taxonomies upon which moral traditions were based, and situations in which Navajos have engaged in ethical decision-making. Recently individual Navajos have manifested their role as ethical agents, not merely as recipients of moral lore. A contemporary Navajo storyteller, Sunny (...) Dooley, enunciates narrative ethical judgments, grounded in traditional Navajo mythology and its religious milieu, as she addresses the present conditions of her people. Thus she probes the contradictions that are inherent to life. Her stories testify to the insoluble conflicts within the human condition, ultimate and immediate conundrums that must be faced, even though they surely will not be resolved. (shrink)

Two distinct, complementary ethical elements, an ethics of giving and an ethics of empathy, find expression in the world renewal ceremonial of the Winter Dance among the Kettle Falls people. Both elements derive from the cosmogony of these indigenous people who live along the Columbia River in Washington. The ethics of giving is investigated in terms of sacred power "(sumix)" and the giveaway; the ethics of empathy is studied in terms of guardian-spirit songs and spirit sickness. This paper shows that (...) the community norms established in the ethics of giving serve to prepare individuals for those spiritual encounters that engen- der the ethics of empathy; thus, the two elements together constitute a synthetic ethics: a unified developmental system of complementary elements in which worldview is related to subsistence practices and individual maturity is integrated with community moral identity. (shrink)

When African migrants disappear on the Mediterranean going to Europe they often leave no trace—except for the occasional bodies that wash ashore on the beaches of southern Europe. In this essay, the urgent social and existential ramifications of migrant fatalities on the sea are explored. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a small Ghanaian fishing village on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, it is discussed how the bereaved struggle to make sense of these deaths to high-risk migration—how they struggle (...) to deal with devastating loss while retaining a sense of moral order. (shrink)

This special focus issue brings to the Journal of Religious Ethics fresh considerations of moral anthropology as practiced by four emergent voices within the field. Each of these essays, in varying ways, seeks not only to advance an understanding of ethics in a particular time, place, and context, but to draw our attention to shared aspects of the human condition: its discontinuities and fractures, its practices of perception and attention, its interplays of emotion, intuition, and reason, and its thoroughly intersubjective (...) nature. To learn something of Thai Buddhist life-worlds, contemporary Russian modes of being, or the experience of immorality in today's China, each essay argues in turn, is to gain new insight into ourselves. (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)

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization (...) be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio-economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization. (shrink)

This collaborative companion piece, written as a postscript to the three preceding essays, highlights four themes in comparative religious ethics that emerge through our focus on sex and gender: language, embodiment, justice, and critique.

CHRISTIAN ETHICS IS VIRTUALLY DEVOID OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK. Many Christian ethicists practice "veranda ethics": They write from a vast social remove from the issues they address, like poverty and war, as observers. Fieldwork, as illustrated by casework in Northern Uganda, provides a way to overcome this remove.

The Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) project represented here through papers by Thomas Lewis, Aaron Stalnaker, Hans Lucht, and Lee Yearley (with responses) was motivated by the judgment that the trend toward a focus on virtue ethics, with attendant concern for techniques of forming selves, creates an opportunity for a dialogue with ethnographers. I argue that the CSWR essays neglect social and institutional considerations, as well as overdrawing the distinction between “formalist” and virtue approaches to the study (...) of comparative ethics. (shrink)

The descriptive and reflective aspects of ethical naturalism as a comparative approach are set in the context of an inquiry into the story tradi- tion of Interior Salishan peoples. In approaching cosmogonic stories of these traditions from a descriptive perspective, I observe these stories as practices, distinctive in their process as well as their content. The practice of these stories reveals ethical relationships structured in a manner that contrasts dramatically with ethics as an investigation into first principles, with formalist approaches (...) that seek a universal rationality, and with narrative ethics that take a meta-narrative approach to meaning. These stories "tell" an Interior Salishan cultural process of constructing a dynamic and historical measure of meaning and value-a multidimensional economy of meaning that can be characterized as traditional individualism. (shrink)