Premium
On Comparative Religious Ethics as a Field of Study
Author(s) -
Bucar Elizabeth M.,
Stalnaker Aaron
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of religious ethics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.306
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 1467-9795
pISSN - 0384-9694
DOI - 10.1111/jore.12060
Subject(s) - meta ethics , scholarship , variety (cybernetics) , sociology , applied ethics , flourishing , information ethics , normative ethics , discipline , conversation , epistemology , virtue ethics , norm (philosophy) , field (mathematics) , social science , virtue , political science , philosophy , law , psychology , social psychology , computer science , communication , artificial intelligence , mathematics , pure mathematics
This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by J ohn K elsay and J ung L ee. Contra K elsay'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 L ee and K elsay 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.