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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
An inclusive and innovative account of religious ethical thinking and acting in the world. Rather than merely applying existing forms of philosophical ethics, Religious Ethics defines the meaning of the field and presents a distinct and original method for ethical reflection through comparisons of world religious traditions. Written by leading scholars and educators in the field, this unique volume offers an innovative approach that reveals how religions concur and differ on moral matters, and provides practical guidance on thinking and living ethically. The book's innovative method--integrating descriptive, normative, practical, fundamental, and metaethical dimensions of reflection--enables a far more complex and nuanced exploration of religious ethics than any single philosophical language, method, or theory can equal. First introducing the task of religious ethics, the book moves through each of the five dimensions of reflection to compare concepts such as good and evil, perplexity and wisdom, truth and illusion, and freedom and bondage in various theological contexts. * Guides readers on understanding, assessing, and comparing the moral teachings and practices of world religions * Applies a disciplined, scholarly approach to the subject of religious ethics * Explores the distinctions between religious ethics and moral philosophy * Provides a methodology which can be applied to comparative ethics for various religions * Compares religious traditions to illuminate each of the five dimensions of ethical and moral reflection Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method will help anyone interested in the relation between religion and ethics in the modern world, including those involved in general and comparative religion studies, religious and comparative ethics, and moral theory.
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Seitenzahl: 818
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Table of Contents
Cover
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Sources, Dates, and Language Conventions
Introduction
1 The Task of Religious Ethics
Religion and Moral Convictions
The Aims of This Book
Some History
Conceptions of Religious Ethics
Morality, Ethics, and Religion
Method in Religious Ethics
Contents
Conclusion
2 Blindness and Insight
Describing a Moral World
Native American Religious Discourse
Christian Religious Discourse
Comparing Moral Descriptions
Conclusion
3 Good, Evil, and Beyond: Part 1
Beyond Good and Evil?
Dualism and the Types of Ethics
The Status of Good and Evil
Moral Knowledge
Moral Weakness
3 Good, Evil, and Beyond: Part 2
Good and Evil in the Religious Life
The Moral Good and the Transcendent Good
War, Ātman, and the City of God
Conclusion
4 Perplexity and Wisdom
Moral Problems and Religious Wisdom
Igbo Religious Wisdom
Early Christian Religion
Perplexity and Wisdom in Interpersonal Life
Conclusion
5 Freedom and Bondage
Religion and Moral Agency
The Nature and Features of Agency
Theistic and Nontheistic Religions
Freedom and the Sovereignty of God
Moral Purposes and the Divine Being
Moral Motivation and the Will of God
Religion and Human Rights
Conclusion
6 Truth and Illusion
Metaethics in Recent Moral Philosophy
The Metaethical Dimension in Buddhism
The Metaethical Dimension in Christianity
Buddhist and Christian Ecologies
Thinking About an Ecology of Practice
7 The Point of Religious Ethics
The Point of It All?
Moral Madness and Religious Self‐Criticism
Forms of Religion and Identity
Torah and the Repair of the World
The Way and Abundant Life
The Integrity of Life and the Point of Religious Ethics
Conclusion
Glossary and Additional Concepts in the Study of Religious Ethics
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 The Dimensions of Religious Ethics.
Chapter 3a
Figure 3.1 The dynamic between desires/aversions and goods.
Figure 3.2 The dynamic as a continuing spiral of the moral and religious lif...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Philosophical approaches to metaethics and religion.
Figure 6.2 The relationship of Khandhas to Dhammas.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Religious Ethics
Meaning and Method
William Schweiker and David A. Clairmont
This edition first published 2020© 2020 William Schweiker and David A. Clairmont
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Schweiker, William, author. Clairmont, David A.Title: Religious ethics : meaning and method / William Schweiker, David A. Clairmont.Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2019032067 (print) | LCCN 2019032068 (ebook) | ISBN 9781405198578 (paperback) | ISBN 9781118610244 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118610251 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Religious ethics. Classification: LCC BJ1188 .S38 2019 (print) | LCC BJ1188 (ebook) | DDC 205–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032067LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032068
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © jc_design/Getty Images
Preface
This book is the result of years of collaboration between the authors on work in religious ethics. The collaboration started when we published the first edition of The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics with William Schweiker as editor and David A. Clairmont as project assistant. Through the encouragement of our publisher, Rebecca Harkin of Wiley‐Blackwell, it was decided that a basic text was needed on the meaning and method of religious ethics, and, further, a book that could be used in connection with the Companion at several levels of academic instruction: undergraduate, graduate, and in the training of religious leaders.1Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method is that book. It elaborates and expounds the account of religious ethics developed by William Schweiker as a multidimensional theory of the religious and moral life for our global times.
This history of collaboration and also the specific task of Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method determined its scope and purpose. In the chapters that follow we do not survey the moral teachings of the world's religions, we cannot address every issue in moral theory, and we respond to practical moral problems only in an exemplary manner. Each chapter engages in a comparison of Christian thought in relation to one other religious tradition. The reason for this strategy is threefold: first, Christian ethical thinking is what we know best and it is wise to play to one's strengths; second, most of the courses that will, it is hoped, use this book and the scholars who engage our arguments will have at least passing knowledge of Christian faith; and, third, with the roughly 2.3 billion Christians worldwide, it is increasingly important for Christians to understand the analogies between their moral convictions and those of other religions and for others to see the analogues to their convictions in Christian ethics. However, our purpose in this book is not to compare Christian moral thought with every other religion.2
Some readers will say this book is so deeply Christian and Western that it cannot claim to speak so confidently about religious ethics as a discipline and practice. Granted, we are Christians (WS: Protestant; DC: Catholic) and we are Western as well as white, male, fathers, and university professors. What is more, we have decidedly different emphases in our work, Schweiker in moral theory and Clairmont in the history of religions. While acknowledging our sociocultural, academic, and religious locations, we plead that our readers examine the book's argument rather than its authors' lives. As noted previously, the reader will find that we engage the Christian tradition in every chapter of the book as a kind of reference point for developing the argument. Christian patterns of thought, argument, and practice are not assumed a priori to be necessarily true or good and right even though they provide a control measure in relation to which we can isolate similarities and difference among traditions. We would be delighted if someone were to test and develop our argument with reference to Buddhism, Judaism, African traditional religions, or any number of other longstanding religious and cultural traditions. Our hope, then, is that biographical facts about us and the acknowledgment of the areas and limits of our scholarly expertise do not deter the reader from wrestling with this book in order to see what contribution it brings to religious ethics.
William Schweiker,The University of ChicagoDavid A. Clairmont,University of Notre Dame
Note
1
We are happy to note that an expanded three‐volume edition of
The Companion to Religious Ethics
is under production with the title
The Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics
(edited by William Schweiker, Maria Antonaccio, Elizabeth Bucar, and David A. Clairmont) and will be a valuable additional resource for this book.
2
In seeking to provide an introduction to the study of religious ethics, we are mindful that readers are often introduced to the field either through a primarily philosophical lens (for example, in the widely used introductions such as William Frankena's
Ethics
or James Rachels' and Stuart Rachels'
The Elements of Moral Philosophy
) or through recent works in comparative religious ethics that focus on detailed comparisons of two thinkers from to different religious traditions (such as Lee Yearley's
Mencius and Aquinas
or Elizabeth Bucar's
Creative Conformity
, to give just two examples). Although we have benefited greatly from these approaches, in offering a more general introduction to religious ethics across a number of religious traditions, we argue that the combination of scope and depth of earlier studies (for example, David Little and Sumner Twiss'
Comparative Religious Ethics
) still have much to commend them and that a new effort in this mode is both appropriate and necessary for our global age.
Acknowledgments
Writing together is rewarding and challenging, and it takes a great deal of support from individuals and institutions for the authors to bring any project to a happy conclusion. This was certainly the case for the two of us. Rightly, then, we would like to thank three institutions for the unwavering support of this project: Wiley Publishers, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. Rebecca Harkin at Wiley encouraged us to begin this project and waited patiently through many delays. We are profoundly grateful to have enjoyed her support and good guidance throughout the writing of this book. At the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame we received support and encouragement from our respective colleagues, chairs, and deans as we worked on this project in addition to our other research, teaching, and administrative duties. Without these institutions nothing much of what we do as scholars and teachers would be possible.
At Chicago, we would like to thank Deans Margaret Mitchell, Richard Rosengarten, Laurie Zoloth, and David Nirenberg. At Notre Dame, we would like to thank John Cavadini, Matthew Ashley, and Timothy Matovina for their support in their roles as chair of the Theology Department. We would also like to thank the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame for a grant that made possible production of an index for this book. Our gratitude to all the editoral and production staff at Wiley who worked with us patiently throughout the project: Catriona King, Juliet Booker, Liz Wingett, Shyamala Venkateswaran, and Sandra Kerka.
The following colleagues and students at Chicago, Notre Dame, and other institutions offered us critiques, patient conversation, and their own research about the many themes and traditions explored in this book which advanced our work in many ways: Maria Antonaccio, Ebenezer Akesseh, Elizabeth Bucar, Michael Connors, Kristine Culp, Sarah Fredericks, Kevin Hector, Dwight Hopkins, Markus Hüfner, Jann Ingmire, Kevin Jung, Emmanuel Katongole, David Lantigua, Herbert Lin, Emery Longanga, Terence Martin, Jean‐Luc Marion, Gerald McKenny, Richard Miller, Elena Namli, Paulinus Odozor, Douglas Ottati, Willemien Otten, Jean Porter, Cheron Price, Bharat Ranganthan, Susan Schreiner, Heike Springhart, Jeffrey Stackert, Per Sundman, Günter Thomas, Elochukwu Uzukwu, Michael Welker, Todd Whitmore, and Charles Wilson. A special word of thanks to Maria Antonaccio and Elizabeth Bucar, our coeditors on the Wiley Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics, who were working with us on this much larger undertaking as we were also trying to bring this book to a successful resolution, and to Michelle Clairmont and Jann Ingmire for their patient support of this project. We owe a debt of gratitude to our research assistants, Willa Lengyel‐Swenson, David Barr, Sara‐Jo Swiatek, and Blaize Gervais.
Finally, we would like to thank our families whose examples prompted us to consider the ethical dimensions of religions. When two people write a book together, they discover not only interesting areas of agreement and disagreement about the research material but also a good deal about each other: where they came from, what they value, and who sustains them. We dedicate this book to the next generation of Schweikers and Clairmonts – particularly to Paul Schweiker and his wife Evelyn Buehler Schweiker and to Joseph and John Clairmont – in the hopes that they may pick up and advance in ways decidedly their own the work of respect and understanding in a wounded world.
Note on Sources, Dates, and Language Conventions
The reader will notice that this book draws from a wide variety of sources for its study of religious ethics, from primary texts of the religious traditions examined here to the work of philosophers, anthropologists, and historians of global religious cultures. We have attempted to standardize, as best we are able, the presentation of this material, which often follows a variety of conventions depending on generally accepted practices in different scholarly fields. Our goal is to follow standard scholarly conventions in the disciplines we consult wherever possible, but in some cases we have needed to make judgments for the sake of uniform presentation of the material. In these cases, we have attempted to follow the conventions employed by the contributors to The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2005), the revision and expansion of which this book is intended to accompany.
On the dating of historical figures, texts, and major events, we have followed standard reference works in the field such as the Encyclopedia of Religion (ER)1 or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).2 Where figures are not listed in those works, we have followed the dating given in the scholarly works from which our references were drawn. In biblical translations, we follow the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV),3 and in translations of the Qurʾān, we follow The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary.4 We have followed pinyin method for rendering romanized versions of Chinese characters, guided by suitable reference works.5 Although most of the material for the Igbo language is found in our sources, we have consulted the Encyclopedia of African Religion6 in certain cases, aided by Michael J.C. Echeruo's Igbo‐English Dictionary.7 Our references to Penobscot terms follow those used in our sources, although there is one standard resource available for the two main Abenaki dialects.8 In some cases, where complete scholarly translations are not available (for example, in the ongoing project on the Mahābhārata), we have noted in the text the translation used.
Notes
1
Jones, L. (ed.) (2005).
Encyclopedia of Religion
, vol. 15, 2e Detroit: Macmillan.
2
https://plato.stanford.edu
(accessed 22 June 2019).
3
Coogan, M.D. and Brettler, M.Z. , Newsom, C.A. , and Perkins, P. (eds.) (2001).
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha
, 3e, New Revised Standard Version. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
4
Nasr, S.H. , Dagli, C.K. , Dakake, M.M. et al. (eds.) (2015).
The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary
. New York: HarperCollins. On technical terms in Islamic law, philosophy, and theology, we have consulted Glassé, C. (ed.) (2008).
The New Encyclopedia of Islam
, 3e. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. For rendering diacritic marks for Arabic terms, we have used as a guideline the IJMES Word List published by the
International Journal of Middle East Studies
which may be found at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop‐file‐manager/file/57d9042c58fb76353506c8e7/IJMES‐WordList.pdf (accessed March 6, 2020).
5
Here especially, we have benefited from Leese, D. (ed.) (2009).
Brill's Encyclopedia of China
. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
6
Asante, M.K. and Mazama, A. (ed.) (2008).
Encyclopedia of African Religion
, vols. 2. Thousand Oaks and London: SAGE Publications.
7
Echeruo, M.J.C. (1998).
Igbo‐English Dictionary: A Comprehensive Dictionary of the Igbo Language, with an English‐Igbo Index
. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
8
Day, G.M. (1995–1996).
Western Abenaki Dictionary. Vol. 1: Abenaki‐English; Vol. 2: English‐Abenaki
. Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 128–129. Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Introduction
In the religions you are to discover religion.1
— Friedrich Schleiermacher
The world’s religions fuel the imagination and enflame human hearts. Whereas in places like Europe religion seems in retreat, there is massive growth within religions around the world. Likewise, religiously driven violence is ablaze in many nations but so too the attack on modern science. Not surprisingly, scholars, religious and political leaders, and many other people of good will, both those affiliated with or not affiliated with religious traditions, are interested in the ethical wisdom of specific religious traditions and how that wisdom interacts with and is comparable, or not, to the wisdom of other traditions. Are there ways to understand, compare, assess, and draw ethical wisdom from the religions to meet the challenges they put to this generation? This book is written for scholars, students, and, in fact, anyone interested in thinking ethically by drawing on the resources of the world's religions
More specifically, the following chapters present an account of religious ethics that defines the meaning of the field and also propose a method best suited for it. Although the book's argument is developed through comparisons between religious traditions, “religious ethics,” as a discipline and field, is not limited to comparative religious and ethical reflection even if, we believe, it must include comparison within the scope of its work. In this respect, the method and meaning of religious ethics as we present it are apt for, say, Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish ethics as much as for Buddhist–Christian comparative ethics.
We are mindful of the high demands and daunting challenges of writing a book like this one. The demands and challenges facing us are well known. The religions bear untold treasures of moral wisdom, that is, practical guidance about how to live justly and well that include beliefs and practices about the nature of human existence, social life, what is good and righteous, and reality itself. The deposit of those beliefs and practices that transmit moral wisdom is a religion's “morality.” In our understanding, “ethics,” religious or philosophical, is critical “metareflection” on the actual beliefs, values, practices, rituals, and social structures that inform and guide human conduct, that is, a religion's or a society's “morality.” Ethics, religious or philosophical, seeks to articulate the meaning and assess the truth of moral convictions. Sometimes an ethics will criticize and invalidate moral convictions; sometimes it will revise them; sometimes an ethics will endorse inherited morality as the proper way to conduct personal and social life.
However, the distinction between morality (morals, moral convictions, moral wisdom, etc.) and ethics, as a form of metareflection, is more contentious than might first appear and will be addressed in the book. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of suspicion in the Western academy about the idea of outlining an approach to any field of study, including “ethics.” Within ethics itself, many thinkers remain within the resources of one tradition and claim its uniqueness and incomparability with other religious traditions, say, Hindu ethics or Islamic ethics. Other thinkers apply the categories of Western moral philosophy to religious resources. For instance, one might argue (and some have) that “Buddhist ethics” can be seen as a kind of virtue ethics defined in the Western world by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE). We have worked against currents in scholarship in order to develop an approach to “ethics” from within the religions in order to explain the meaning and method of religious ethics in a way that can show the similarities and differences, the analogies, on moral matters among the religions. Our purpose is not to pit religious ethics against moral philosophy. It is to draw attention to the nuance and complexity of religious accounts of the moral life that tend to be neglected or insufficiently appreciated when discussion of morality is reduced to one specific philosophical language, method, or theory.
Global political events as well as ongoing debates about the place of religion in societies around the world have prompted people to reevaluate how best to study the moral teachings of the world's religions. Nowadays it seems obvious that societies in different ways and to different degrees are marked by a diversity of religious beliefs, institutions, practices, and adherents. In the present “postsecular” situation, as it is often called, the challenge is how best to live by the deepest moral insights of the religions and also how to understand, assess, and compare the moral teachings and practices of the religions in a world marked by a diversity of religious and moral traditions. Our approach to the meaning and method of religious ethics is, in this light, decidedly postsecular.
Sadly, too often the complexity of religious life is reduced by scholars, political figures, and the media to one or another dimension of human behavior (economic, social, political, psychological, aesthetic). Among thinkers interested in ethics, there has been a drive to interpret the religions from the perspective of Western philosophical ethics. We are told, for instance, that Christian ethics modifies elements of a Kantian ethics of duty. Other thinkers interpret the religions in terms of narratives, ideas about the Good, or virtue ethics. Admittedly, there are good reasons for interpreting Christian moral beliefs and practices in philosophical terms. The early Church Fathers during the so‐called Patristic period (100–400 CE) often insisted on the harmony between Christian convictions and Plato's (429–347 BCE) conception of the Good, Stoic ideas about natural law, and philosophical accounts of human well‐being (eudaimonia), especially widespread teachings about the virtues. In the mix, philosophical as well as biblical ideas were transformed in distinctive and decisive ways. Christians drew on and transformed Greek and Roman ideas in different ways than Muslim or Jewish thinkers did. So, the same blending of religious and “philosophical” reasoning about the moral life can be found in medieval Islam and Judaism even as Buddhism, to cite another example, drew on the philosophical resources of various Indian schools of thought, which themselves gave rise to what is now called Hinduism.
The fact that religious traditions are often marked by the incorporation of nonreligious forms of moral theory, concepts (e.g. virtue), accounts of justice, and ideas about goodness is the deep historical background to the emergence of “religious ethics” in the Western Academy. Over the last two centuries or so there emerged the study and comparison of religious moral teaching through the interpretative lens of philosophical forms of ethics. The grounds of comparison, that is, what ideas made comparison possible and fruitful, have often been the fact that the world's religions teach some version of the “Golden Rule” (“do unto others as you would have done unto you”). In Hinduism, the Laws of Manu (Mānava‐Dharmaśāstra) II.161 states: “Though deeply hurt, let him never use cutting words, show hostility to others in thought or deed, or use aberrant language that would alarm people.”2 To cite another example, The Analects (Lunyu), a basic Confucian text, reads at 12:2: “‘Go out into the world as if greeting a magnificent guest. Use the people as if offering a magnificent sacrifice. And never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. Then, there will be no resentment among the people or the great families’.”3 Further, the religions praise similar virtues and traits of character, like humility, courage, and compassion. Principles like the Golden Rule and various virtues provide the means to isolate commonalities and note the differences among the moral teachings of religions. The need to find analogies among religious traditions, that is, similarities within differences, is basic to this book. Yet we do so not only in terms of shared principles or virtues, but with respect to features of moral existence and dimensions of ethics that come to light once the resources of the religions help to shape a moral theory and ethics. We seek to develop the meaning and method of religious ethics from within religious resources mindful of the fact that those same resources bear through time the interrelation of multiple sources of moral wisdom.
In this light, religious ethics is (i) careful and critical reflection on the moral beliefs and practices of the religions in order (ii) to orient and guide the moral lives of people. However, too often work in “religious ethics,” as a scholarly discipline, takes the actual religious beliefs and practices as merely the “data” for analysis and interpretation through the categories of Western moral philosophy. To be sure, we have not ignored philosophical theories, quite the contrary. Although there is some warrant for a philosophical strategy of defining the task of religious ethics, it neglects to ask the two orienting questions of this book: what do the religions contribute to moral theory, and, further, can one develop an approach to religious ethics from within the resources of the religions themselves?
Given those two questions, this book involves a hermeneutical or interpretive circle. On the one hand, we use the resources of the religions in order to develop the method of religious ethics, that is, how one can and should think about and evaluate the moral beliefs and practices of a religion. On the other hand, the method is applied to those same religious resources in order to clarify the meaning of religious ethics. The argument is admittedly circular. It draws on the religions in order to develop an account of religious ethics that uses religious resources. Our hunch is that some will find this “circularity” bothersome even though it is actually part of every kind of ethics.4 The resources of ethics, even those that fasten on divine revelations and commands, are actual human beliefs about good and right actions and relations about which an ethics seeks to understand and to give orientation. Stated otherwise, we are involved in ethical thinking as living agents in the very task of developing an ethics to guide our lives. Yet, this “circularity,” one that is banished in the hard sciences and also systems of deductive logic, is not vicious. It is, we hope to show, productive of new insight about how people can and should live. In any case, we start with the received wisdom of the religions, admit that it is credible evidence for developing a theory of ethics, and then submit it to scrutiny in order to develop that theory.
So, there are two deep convictions that undergird the writing of this book and that the book seeks to explain and to sustain. First, we are convinced that the religions provide resources for thinking about the moral life that are as complex, subtle, and persuasive as standard options in Western moral philosophy. No doubt our philosophical colleagues will find that to be an audacious claim, but one thing that it has meant is the need to develop the structure and coherence of religious ethics on its own terms. And that is why, again, this book will seem odd to some readers. In more technical terms, the book is an exercise in hermeneutical reconstruction of “religious ethics.” We draw on the symbolic, textual, and ritual resources of religions in order to articulate the structure of religious ethics around basic tensions that characterize religious and human life. Culling insights and ideas from the religions we present the meaning and method of religious ethics in order to articulate the insights and problems in actual religions and also to provide some guidance for reflection on living a religious and moral life.
Our first conviction, then, is that the religions developed over millennia and in every culture on this planet have resources for deepening one's thinking about life and how one can and ought to live. This does not mean that this book is antiphilosophical. On the contrary, we explore philosophical problems, engage philosophical theories, and treat the works of philosophers. The point is that we explore, engage, and treat philosophical questions from within the resources of the religions in order to show the depth and subtlety of religious visions of the moral life. Our first conviction is meant to counter the trend to make the moral insight of the religions mere instances of some general theory of ethics and falsely to harmonize religious outlooks.
A second conviction cuts in the other direction, as it were. It aims to counter another trend in the academy and global social life. This trend is the belief that religious outlooks are so utterly unique that they cannot be compared. On that line of reasoning there are no similarities among religious outlooks and therefore religious ethics must always and only work within a specific tradition, say “Hindu ethics.” Widespread in numerous places around the world, the idea is that one cannot pass moral judgment on other moral outlooks, religious or not, because those outlooks can be understood and rightly evaluated only on their own terms. This is potentially a form of moral relativism: the claim that there are no valid general moral ideas or beliefs that can be used to judge moral outlooks because every moral belief about what is good, bad, justice, unjust, etc. is relative to some people's moral outlook. The human world is then a bewildering hodgepodge of incommensurable moral and cultural value systems.5 This also has the added effect of undermining the very religious impulse exhibited in the religions themselves that have prompted religions to engage with philosophers and with members of other religious communities. If scholars, religious leaders, and individuals cannot find possible ways to compare traditions and to learn from others about what makes a good, just, and right human life, then our supposed uniqueness is merely fodder for social conflict. Moral relativism may seem to be a comforting and consoling outlook but only until the point where some community has the power to dominate another under the idea that “might makes right.” Relativism has the added effect of undermining the religious impulse exhibited in the religions themselves that has prompted them to engage with members of other communities about moral matters.
Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method seeks to provide readers with an account of religious ethical thinking and acting in the world. The religions, on our account, seek to articulate the structure of moral existence attuned to tensions that define human life and to orient life within those tensions. “Religious ethics” denotes a way of doing ethics in terms of the profound insights of the religions. It explains, assesses, and deploys the wisdom of the religions in order to show that, ironically, the religions explain us. The position presented in the following chapters provides then a way to interpret and to understand how the religions provide distinctive responses to the tensions that constitute the meaning and structure of human life when seen through the resources of the religions. It is appropriate, then, that we turn next to explain in more detail the “task” of religious ethics and therefore to clarify basic concepts as well as the structure of this book.
Notes
1
Schleiermacher, F. (1988 [1799]).
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers
(trans. R. Crouter), 190. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
2
Olivelle, P. (2005).
Manu's Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava‐Dharmaśāstra
, 103. New York: Oxford University Press.
3
Confucius. (1998).
The Analects
(trans. D. Hinton), 127. New York: Counterpoint.
4
There are of course Western forms of philosophical ethics that attribute credible claims to the religions. This was Aristotle's point in using the so‐called “endoxic” (credible opinions) method, that is, to draw from prevalent moral ideas in a society and then seek to submit them to analysis in a systematic way. It was also Immanuel Kant's point when he noted, in
The Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals
, that he would begin the search for the supreme principle of morality by exploring commonly held moral ideas. Kant, I. (1997 [1785]).
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(ed. M. Gregor and intro. C.M. Korsgaard). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
5
For an incisive critique of relativism see Midgley, M. (1993).
Can't We Make Moral Judgments?
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
1The Task of Religious Ethics
The Master said: ‘The noble‐minded may not always be Humane. But the small‐minded–they never are.’
— Confucius, The Analects 14.6.
By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self‐control. There is no law against such things.
— St. Paul, Gal 5:22–23
Religion and Moral Convictions
The world's religions have diverse beliefs, practices, stories, and teachings as well as sages, saints, and saviors to help guide adherents in how they should live. Although one of the so‐called Ten Commandments dictates “You shall not murder,” other religions express the prohibition of murder through stories or prescriptions about helping others, even loving one's enemies. And although some religions ground their moral beliefs in the command of God, still other religions – and sometimes the same religions – speak about the ability of human reason or sensibilities to apprehend the demands of justice, or they look to the lives of saints and sages as the embodiment of moral perfection. The various ways to instruct and empower proper conduct constitute the “moral convictions” of a religion because in different ways each religion's morality is about right and just actions and the kinds of persons and communities one should strive to become in relation to other persons, other communities, and the divine or the sacred.
Often moral convictions among the religions are surprisingly similar. Religious people praise unselfish behavior, have codes of sexual conduct and fidelity, treasure the bonds of friendship, share beliefs about what is just and right in social life, and they even hold remarkably similar ideas about human flourishing and its relation to right conduct and to virtuous character. But the outlooks of the religions on the proper conduct of human life can be surprisingly different as well. Consider the examples cited at the head of this chapter. Confucius (Kong Qiu or Kong Fuzi [“Master Kong”], 551–479 BCE) related Goodness to the life of the noble‐minded one. In order to be a noble‐minded one, one must abide by rituals performed rightly and in the right circumstances and also follow the laws under heaven, as Confucius called them. St. Paul, the great early Christian thinker (c. 5–67 CE) from Tarsus in Cilicia, composed letters, like the one cited previously, that make up a good portion of the New Testament in the Christian Bible. (The other portion of the Christian Bible is called the “Old Testament.”) According to Paul, the life of faith is lived in the power of the “Spirit” and it has no law but is manifest in love, peace, joy, and other fruits, as he calls them. Separated by time and space, these religious sages are divided not only by how they think about God or heaven but also by how they believe human life should be properly lived. The conduct of life is connected to law or to the divine spirit, abides by ritual requirements or it manifests the spirit's fruits, and it is lived under heaven or in the power of Jesus Christ's spirit.
The examples of religious similarity and difference, that is, the analogies among the religions, could be endlessly multiplied. If one casts a glance at the teachings of Buddhism in its many forms, Islam and Judaism in their many forms, and also what we call Hinduism or Christianity (again, in their many forms), ideas about how one ought to live and the practices that characterize that life would be strikingly – and shockingly – different. The devout Buddhist seeks Enlightenment and the dissolution of the “self” from its desires in order to escape saṃsāra, the round of suffering and rebirth. A pious Muslim, conversely, expects to stand alone before Allah on the Day of Judgment in order to account for his or her actions. And yet, again, there are similarities in moral convictions as well. The Buddhist and the Muslim agree that compassion and mercy are at the core of the moral life. A Jew and a Hindu are committed to the right ordering of social life and thus some idea about moral order and justice even while they differ of what that “order” is and what counts as a just social order. What is more, the striking similarities and profound differences in religious outlooks become more difficult to summarize when one includes so‐called indigenous or native religions. Some indigenous religions involve practices of divination or the interpretation of dreams by a shaman for the discernment of how to live. For instance, among the Candomblé, a Brazilian African religion, the gods descend on priests and priestess during ritual dances in order to teach and protect worshippers in the conduct of their daily lives.
How are we to understand let alone assess religious outlooks on life? What resources might the religions contribute to ethical reflection? What are we to make of the amazing similarities but also befuddling differences among the religions in their teachings and practices about how one ought to live? How might the study of the religions and their moral convictions about human personal and social conduct actually enrich ethical thinking in a global age when the religions are interacting and shaping human existence around the world? How is it even possible to study, compare, and assess moral convictions? Are there constitutive features of human existence that can be analyzed and understood through the interpretations of a religion's patterns of thought and practice?1 The study of religious ethics seeks to answer those questions for scholars, students, religious adherents, and anyone concerned about the moral life.
The similarities and differences among the moral convictions of the religions are vexing, to say the least. This is especially true in our global times when people from different religions interact, sometimes violently but mostly peacefully, and people must find common solutions to shared human problems, like, say, the environmental crisis, economic injustice, or ethnic violence (to name just a few). The root question, then, is how to develop an approach to religious ethics.
The Aims of This Book
This book presents an approach to “religious ethics,” and it aims to do three things. The first aim of the chapters that follow is to define the field of “religious ethics” as a discipline of inquiry of interest to anyone who asks about the relation between “religion” and “morality.” Although “religious ethics” is a relatively old idea, as we briefly explore in this chapter, it is still in need of clarity and definition. The book will present a definition of and approach to religious ethics – its meaning (definition) and method (approach) – that makes sense of the similarities and differences among the religions in their teaching and practices about the conduct of human life.
Second, the book is not a survey of the world's religions about their moral teachings. There are fine volumes that provide that information.2 As noted in the Introduction, too often the world's religions are subjected to forms of thought – say, psychological, philosophical, or sociological ones (to name a few) – developed by scholars so that the religion studied does not contribute to thinking about, say, psychology, philosophy, or sociology.3 The religions are “data” for theories and methods of explanation, including ethics. The religions thereby do not provide the means and resources to develop these theories, including ethics.
This book significantly alters that standard approach and with surprising results. The various tensions and perplexities found in religious texts – say, the aporia between law and Spirit in St. Paul's writings or between the Good and the noble‐minded ones in Confucius' – help us to develop an approach to religious ethics from within religious thought and life. A robust religious ethics, we argue, entails five interacting dimensions of thought that arise out of distinct but related tensions, aporias or perplexities, that religious texts and practices deploy in order to illuminate the structure of human existence. More details on those dimensions will be noted later because they structure this book as a whole. The novelty of this approach, we believe, is that it demonstrates how the religions provide resources for the development of normative ethics for how one can and ought to orient the conduct of life.
By engaging the religions and developing an account of religious ethics, the third purpose of this book is to enable people in our global times to think intelligently and clearly about religious outlooks on life and how they can and may be lived in ways that respect and enhance, rather the demean and destroy, the integrity of life.4 We admit that the book poses a challenge to many religious adherents who believe that their religious traditions possess every moral truth and that there is, accordingly, little to learn from others. The real moral challenge for those people is how to be, say, an authentic Christian, a devoted Hindu, or an enlightened Buddhist. Learning from others is beside the point; the real task is to live by the truth of one's own religious and moral convictions. Further, the aim of this book to provide a way to address moral problems will be rejected by adherents and scholars who insist that comparison among the religions is impossible and can add nothing to ethics. Their claim is that religious worldviews and convictions are so utterly different that there is no possibility of comparing them. It is not just that one's own tradition has all truth; it is also the case, they claim, that there is no vantage point and form of thought adequately to compare religious and moral convictions in order to develop something called “religious ethics.” For both of these outlooks, then, the third aim of this book is impossible. Comparison is either morally unnecessary or it is ethically impossible.5
We are convinced that those two prevalent and widespread ways of rejecting the idea of “religious ethics” are neither true of the religions themselves nor a proper account of moral thinking, religious or nonreligious. One thing discovered in the following chapters is that quite often a religious community or thinker shows how their community can and must learn moral truths from the outsider, and, what is more, that human beings can and do have some basic moral knowledge, whether innate or learned. The first objection to the aims of this book is then incorrect with respect to the religions themselves, at least about moral matters.6 The religions are not only extraordinarily different in their moral convictions, they are also and often surprisingly similar in their teachings. If that is so, then it must be possible to isolate similarities and differences and thereby to show the analogies among the religious moral convictions. The method we develop in this book unfolds the analogical structure of religious ethics through five dimensions of reflection that arise from within religious ways of life in response to the perplexities of human existence. In this way, we take seriously the point about religious difference without succumbing to the idea that among the religions there is only difference.
There is one other reason to pursue the third aim of this book. All ethical thinking arises in response to problems and challenges about how human beings can and should live. Certainly, in the present age one problem and one challenge is to develop ways of being religious that escape the cycles of misunderstanding and violence too often seen among religious people. At this level, the book seeks, perhaps with some audacity, to intervene into religious life in the name of responsible moral convictions. The book aims to enable the reader to see the various ways to live within and among religions and thus to make judgments about which ways are most responsible, most humane, and most devout. In this way, we hope the book itself serves the purpose of moral education, the sharpening of moral perception, and also character development.
Providing an account of religious ethics with these three purposes in mind is a daunting task. Yet it is a task demanded by a global age when religious people interact in many ways around our shared planet. This chapter introduces the book by expanding on its three aims. We start – rightly – with some history.
Some History
The idea of “religion” and the discipline of “ethics” are products of Western thought. What sense, then, does it make to speak of “religious ethics” and how does that field of inquiry relate to the actual religions? As a discipline of thought, religious ethics must develop a form of reflection subtle enough to explore the religions themselves. In this light, the idea of religious ethics has a specific history.
In one respect, the idea of “religious ethics” is rather ancient. During the period of what has been called the “axial age” (800–200 BCE), thinkers around the world, in China, India, Persia, and the West, developed patterns of thought, including “monotheism” or belief in one God, as well as paths to enlightenment that included moral convictions.7 In each case there were criticisms of accepted ways of thinking and acting and proposals for new modes of thought and action. The Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), for example, advanced ethical thinking by isolating basic moral standards and concepts but was condemned for supposedly corrupting the youth and creating new gods. Analogously, the great Hebrew prophets, like Isaiah (eighth century BCE), challenged traditional religious cult and ritual with the demands for justice, especially for the poor and the outcast. Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha or “Enlightened One” [c. 563–483 BCE]) taught, as explored in a later chapter of this book, the Four Noble Truths for attaining Enlightenment and that the path to nirvāṇa (the quality of having desire “extinguished” which would lead to liberation [mokṣa] from suffering [duḥkha]) included specifically moral traits and actions. In each of these cases, and others could be noted, the validity and meaning of moral convictions were tested and even revised from within a religion and its way of life. The axial breakthrough in these religions was both conceptual and ethical, a fact we will also see in some of the indigenous religious we will explore.
Thinking about, assessing, and applying religious and moral convictions to the conduct of human life continues throughout history. The rise of Islam and Islamic law (sharī‘a), the development of early Christianity within the context of Judaism and the Roman Empire, and the advances of Jewish Rabbinic patterns of thought into the so‐called Western Middle Ages each shows the vibrancy of religious and moral thinking and thus, in early form, “religious ethics.” This continued and was intensified in the early modern period in the West by thinkers as diverse as Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677 CE), David Hume (1711–1776 CE), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804 CE), Joseph Butler (1692–1752 CE), and many others. The attempt by these “Enlightenment” thinkers was to show either the independence of morality from religion (Hume), the unity of religion and morality (Spinoza), or a complex relation of religion's dependence on morality (Kant) or the inverse (Butler). Further, with these developments in modern thought the question of how, if at all, to compare the moral convictions of the religions came into focus. This interest in religion was due to the realities of the wars of religion in Europe, expanding trade, colonial domination of peoples by Western powers, and growing fascination with the history of cultures.
The current situation of religious ethics in the Western academy draws on and expands this complex and at times troubling history. Here too there are important and exemplary events. In 1993 a Parliament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago, Illinois to commemorate the original parliament convened at the Colombian Exposition in Chicago 100 years earlier. Representatives of the many and different religions met at the 1993 Parliament: Buddhists, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Druids, Christians, Jews, indigenous peoples, and many more. The purpose of the Parliament, which continues to meet every four years at locations around the world, was to enhance understanding and cooperation among religious people and leaders. Yet something distinctly important happened at the 1993 meeting. The delegates gathered in Chicago issued a “Declaration on Global Ethics” that was meant to show the common moral wisdom of the world's religions and the ways in which that wisdom could help address the many moral and political challenges facing people around the world. Although the “Declaration” rightly has its critics – including the authors of this book – and has been superseded by other concords and patterns of thought around the world, it was a sign of a pressing need in our global times. In a world of cultural and religious diversity, there is the need for ways to think about the moral challenges and possibilities that affect the whole planet and are shared by human communities. To undertake that task requires not only finding points of commonality among the religions but also developing patterns of thought to interpret and to analyze the moral teachings and practices of the religions. Again, that is the task of this book and so too religious ethics as a discipline.
It was hardly surprising that delegates from the world's religions eventually had to think about a common ethics. Religious and moral challenges are found everywhere and people have to encounter the beliefs and practices of others, violently or nonviolently. There are many shared, global problems that reach beyond the power of any one nation or culture to address: global climate change, worldwide poverty, diseases, war, genocide, human trafficking, and the like. It also seems that human beings have some shared aspirations and sentiments: the desire for dignity and happiness, beliefs about justice, feelings of sympathy for others, love of one's children and family, and also outrage at senseless violence and death. Yet although global moral thinking is needed, it is exceedingly difficult to do. The customs and practices of some religions seem almost incomprehensible to others. And, in fact, in every known human society the connection between religion and morality is deeply entangled and yet at times also strongly contested.
One can easily see why that is the case. For some people, in order to be a moral individual, that is, a responsible person, one must be religious because any moral standard of what is right or wrong has its source in, say, “God's will.” The divine will is revealed in texts like the Ten Commandments of the Jewish and Christian Bibles or for Muslims in the Qurʾān. In order to have a just and peaceful society one must follow God's will and form a morally unified society. Other people believe the opposite. They note that many nonbelieving people are good and just, often in ways that are far more obviously virtuous than religious people. They note that imposing religious and moral beliefs on people leads to tyranny, inequality, and conflict rather than peace and justice. Morality, they contend, finds its source in human reason, the social life of people, or in beliefs about what is needed in social cooperation to achieve human flourishing. Let people be religious if they like, but morality, so this argument goes, has its own source and purpose.
The debate rages across the centuries and also across cultures and religions. Each side in this well‐known debate casts a skeptical eye at the book in your hands. For the religious believer, the idea of “religious ethics,” rather than, say, Hindu, Christian, or African ethics, would make no sense. There is only one true religion – one's own religion – and so ethics, if it is to be valid, must be based on this true religion. The nonreligious person could hardly imagine why one would need a book on “religious” ethics. The very idea of religious ethics is confused; one ought to drop religion from thinking about how we ought to live, that is, from ethics.
Mindful of these perspectives on “religious ethics,” this book seeks another way. What is this different approach to “religious ethics?” To give it a perhaps too high‐sounding name, it is a hermeneutical (or interpretive) and multidimensional method of religious ethics. The method interprets and draws on the resources of religious traditions in order to articulate and explore moral understanding and the responsible orientation of human life. The book is a constructive presentation of the meaning and method of religious ethics. In order to develop the approach requires clarity about terms and also how religious ethics as a discipline has previously been conceived.
Conceptions of Religious Ethics
There are longstanding disputes about the meaning of “religion,” “morality,” and “ethics.” For some thinkers, ethics is the philosophical analysis of the codes of conduct and beliefs about what is good, just, and right in a society, that is, a “morality.” “Ethics” is a form of metareflection that seeks to interpret the meaning of some “morality” in order to assess its validity for orienting human existence. Thinkers and scholars of this type have spoken about “religious ethics” by applying some moral theory to religious sources. One might draw on the ethics of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and his ideas about “virtue” and then apply his theory to the texts and practices of a “religion,” for example, Buddhism, to show that “Buddhist Ethics” is a kind of Aristotelean virtue ethics. One might use the moral theory of Immanuel Kant, the great eighteenth century European Enlightenment thinker, about practical reason and universal duty in order to show that, say, Jewish ethics is really a “deontological” ethics or a morality of duty. On this strategy “religious ethics” is an instance or kind of moral philosophy. Its distinctiveness is that religious people have peculiar beliefs about gods, the afterlife, salvation, or enlightenment. But in that case, the religions with their rich and complex heritages of texts, symbols, rituals, and practices do not provide novel and deep ways to sense, feel, and think about ethics and ethical problems.
There is a genuine problem with these formal approaches to religious ethics, as we can call them.8 A formal approach begins with a definition of “ethics” and “morality” and then explores how a “religion” fits that formal definition. Typically, philosophical definitions of “morality” seek to show how it is to be understood with respect to one, singular attribute, say, that morality is about “duty” (Kant) or it is about virtuous behavior (Aristotle) or it is about consequences and utility (Jeremy Bentham [1748–1832 CE]). Ethics becomes one dimensional because its task, again, is to interpret, elaborate, assess, define, and apply “morality.” Yet what if morality, or at least the moral convictions of the religions, is not one‐dimensional? How might that change the very conception of ethics? Does either Confucius or St. Paul, cited in the chapter opening, neatly fit into an ethics of duty, virtue, or consequences? They seem to speak about duties, consequences, and virtues as well as other traits of a life properly lived.
Another method and approach to religious ethics is historical or descriptive
