Tradition, Authority, and Immanent Critique in Comparative Ethics

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 an Anti‐Reductive Paradigm that is guided by an Egalitarian 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's methods to values that can describe the field's purposes. 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 of Critical 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.

Section: The Anti‐reductive Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ethics and Politics of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023

Miller¹

2023

“…The first is that religious ethicists mark a distinction between being traditional and being traditionalist, and have good reason to prioritize the former over the latter. One of the clearest recent articulations of this difference has been made by Rosemary Kellison (2014). There are those who believe that what it means to situate oneself in a religious tradition (or any tradition of inquiry) is to bind oneself to a uniform set of authorities who declaim what the essence of that religious tradition is, and that all members of that tradition must agree on that essence in order to be members in good standing.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Benderman's reaction is also an immediate kind of knowing, one rooted in affect and not discursive reasoning. And as Kellison, Shannon Dunn, and Kate Temoney have pointed out in a recent JRE focus issue on moral injury, there is no good reason to limit these stories to those of combatants (Dunn 2021;Kellison 2021;and Temoney 2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

Fearful and Faint‐Hearted: On Affect and the Just‐War Tradition

Kavka¹

2023

In the spirit of this group of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Journal of Religious Ethics, dealing with tradition-based reasoning, this article takes up a passage from Deuteronomy 20 that allows the "fearful and faint-hearted" person not to participate in battle, as well as the rabbinic and medieval appropriations of this passage in the Jewish tradition. It argues that this verse gives primacy to affect in a way that complicates standard interpretations of the Jewish tradition on just war and allows us to see the pliability of tradition. Finally, the article argues that scholars assessing the justice of conflicts need to attend to the circulation of affects in a reasoning community, as is currently happening on scholarship on moral injury.

“… For an excellent treatment, in the context of just‐war thinking, of how tradition‐based ethical thinking can avoid traditionalism, see Kellison .…”

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confidence: 99%

What Does a Prophet Know?

Kavka¹

2018

This essay on Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt (2016) challenges her argument from two opposing sides. First, it critiques all jeremiads. It asks how a person uttering prophetic indictments, whether in the form of a classical jeremiad or the more moderate form that Kaveny argues for, can possibly know of what she speaks, given the otherness of God. Second, it calls for more jeremiads. It asks whether a person, whether religious or not, might indeed know enough to offer withering jeremiads, in those cases where she sees the target of her jeremiad making flagrantly incompatible commitments.