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The 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 sa?sara, 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...