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Comparative Religious Ethics

Aaron Stalnaker

While comparative assessment of the ethics of different religious groups is an ancient

and widespread pursuit, the modern field of comparative religious ethics arguably
dates from the founding of the Journal of Religious Ethics in 1973. While there have
been a variety of motivations for the attempt to study religious ethics rather than
or in addition to Christian ethics, one animating idea has been the growing recog-
nition that people from numerous religious groups propound sophisticated and
powerful moral visions, which possess intriguing similarities and differences, and
which are not easily reducible to a common denominator. Moreover, the variety
andparticular characteristics of such visions are historically and politically signifi-
cant in the modern era of increasingly pervasive globalization. Indeed, comparative
religious ethics may be desperately needed in our contemporary context of global
interdependence, misunderstanding, and mutual mistrust. There are thus ample
grounds, both social and purely intellectual, to suggest that this ethical variety needs
to be engaged directly via rigorous comparison (see religion and global ethics).
Comparative religious ethics makes such ethical diversity central to its analysis.
This analysis typically includes three main aspects, which receive more or less
emphasis depending on the study. First, comparative ethics describes and inter-
prets particular ethics (in the sense of more or less determinate positions on the
best mode of life) on the basis of historical, textual, anthropological, or other
data. Second, it compares different instances of such ethics, which often requires
searching reflection on the methods and tools of inquiry. And third, on the basis
of these more hermeneutical activities, it pursues various critical, constructive,
and theoretical goals (Twiss 2005), sometimes including explicit normative
argument. Through all of these modes of analysis, comparative ethicists work to
address contemporary concerns about overlapping identities, cultural complexity
and plurality, universalism and relativism, and political problems regarding the
coexistence of divergent social groups, as well as particular moral controversies
and topics in ethical theory. Ideally, each of these aspects enriches the others, so
that, for example, comparison across traditions helps generate more insightful
interpretations of particular figures and themes.
Why is it worthwhile to compare multiple ethical outlooks? The import and pay-
off for comparative studies of ethics begins with deeper understanding, both of
broad categories and types of worldview, as well as more specific objects and issues.
Many have argued that thinking is intrinsically comparative, as particular objects
are classified under broader categories and analyzed in terms of larger questions that
relate them to other objects which are similar in some ways, but different in others.
Thus to even arrive at generalizations about Christian ethics, Islamic ethics, or

The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Edited by Hugh LaFollette, print pages 944953.
2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/ 9781444367072.wbiee243
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Buddhist ethics, for example, an interpreter must compare a range of instances to

distill a general type (see buddhist ethics; islamic ethics). By reflecting onshared
traits across a set of examples, comparison can help develop and refine general ideas
like modernity, fundamentalism, virtue, law, and religion. Even the proper
scope and character of morality and ethics appear quite different when studied
inductively on the basis of a variety of empirical examples, rather than deduced from
supposedly necessary first principles about rationality, agency, or utility.
Comparisons deeper value is perhaps most apparent when it is used to draw
perspicuous contrasts between things that otherwise appear similar (Taylor 1985).
Even specialists in a single religious tradition make comparisons between earlier
and later figures in order to draw fine-grained distinctions between them, and
narrate ethical debates over time. And various figures or texts that have no direct
historical connection can be compared as well. By juxtaposing quite different objects,
comparativists must creatively articulate and specify similarities and differences
with respect to particular issues. For instance, the medieval Christian theologian
Thomas Aquinas (see aquinas, saint thomas) is an extraordinarily rich and com-
plex religious thinker, and so has been widely studied and analyzed for centuries. He
might be analyzed on his own, in a primarily exegetical way, but his texts are also
quite amenable to comparative study. Quite different issues come to the forefront
when he is compared with other medieval Christians on questions of virtue and
natural law, for instance, than when he is compared with medieval Jewish and Muslim
figures on the questions of freedom and divine creation (Burrell 1993), or with the
early Confucian thinker Mencius on conceptions of virtue, especially courage
(Yearley 1990; see mencius; virtue). In each case the analyst identifies themes
around which to organize the comparison, and which specify the areas of primary
attention, where comparison can reveal unusual or previously unseen subtleties,
strengths, and weaknesses to the positions of both Aquinas and his interlocutors.
Simply detailing the analogies and disanalogies between various aspects of the
compared objects provides an excellent spur to deeper interpretation and
understanding of both sides. While all of these modes of comparison deserve the
name, scholarly work labeled specifically as comparative religious ethics has often
centered on non-Christian materials, or has at least included comparisons with
such figures, traditions, groups, or texts. And over the past 20 years, perhaps the
most salient general example of comparative ethics focusing primarily on better
understanding of an alien tradition has been a spate of excellent books on Islamic
militancy and fundamentalism, from various angles (e.g., Euben 1999;
Mahmood 2005; Kelsay 2007).
Beyond deeper understanding of both generalizations and specific figures and
themes, the second main fruit of comparative religious ethics is its ability to retrieve
relatively unknown and novel sources for use in contemporary theorizing and
criticism. In so doing, comparative ethicists contribute to substantive current
debates in ethics. For example, a number of works have examined ancient Confucian
(see confucian ethics) thought as a resource and conversation partner for the
contemporary revival of virtue ethics (see virtue ethics), drawing out ideas and
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practices to query familiar presumptions as well as add fundamentally new themes

to that burgeoning subfield. (Particularly noteworthy examples include Yearley
1990; Stalnaker 2006; Van Norden 2007; Angle 2009.) Another common theme
has been analysis of contemporary human rights theorizing in relation to other
traditions of reflection, such as modern Chinese thought (Angle 2002) or Islamic
thought (Oh 2007; see human rights and religion). As with other efforts at
retrieval from the Western past, delicate issues of adapting past ideas and practices
to purge them of dubious or objectionable elements are unavoidable in such efforts,
but cultural distance seems no more unbridgeable in principle than the temporal
distance separating contemporary analysts from the ancient Greeks, various
Christian thinkers, or even more modern philosophical touchstones like Immanuel
Kant or J. S. Mill.
Viewed broadly, comparative religious ethics has a fairly lengthy history (Twiss
2005). David Hume and Adam Smith inaugurated an empirical, descriptive approach
to human morality that presaged the later development of the sociology of religion,
and of morals (see hume, david; smith, adam). Smith and other figures in the
Scottish Enlightenment developed stadial theories of human history moving from
primitive savagery to modern enlightenment; these theories were elaborated into a
number of evolutionary views of society and culture during the nineteenth century
(e.g., by G. W. F. Hegel and Herbert Spencer). These ideas were extremely influential
in the development of the social sciences, including efforts to produce comparative,
scientific accounts of culture, religion, and morality, usually organized after the
manner of biological taxonomies arranged between primitive and civilized poles.
Comparative study was often pursued with the aim of making scientific judgments
of the relative value of different religions, races, and civilizations as organismic
wholes, leading to gross and indefensible generalizations. While some of these early
efforts at a science of religion have aged badly, the classical sociologists of religion
and morality, especially Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Ernst Troeltsch, produced
much more subtle forms of comparative analysis, and have continued to be quite
influential on later developments in comparative ethics (see weber, max; durkheim,
emile; troeltsch, ernst).
The next major stimulus was the development in the twentieth century of
anthropology, which contributed ethnographic reports about a vast range of ethics
and religions, as well as sophisticated reflection about human culture and the
strengths and weaknesses of various sorts of comparison. Some anthropologically
inclined philosophers, such as John Ladd (1957) in his study of the Navajo, made
extensive, empirically based studies of the justification of the moral codes of their
informants, thus beginning serious cross-cultural study of moral justification. In the
1950s and 1960s the history of religions emerged as a field constituted by com-
parative study of various themes, such as the sacred and the profane, in religions
around the world and throughout time, and this strongly influenced the burgeoning
study of religion beyond the reflection of theologians and Christian ethicists.
A watershed of sorts occurred in 1978, with the publication of several works in
comparative religious ethics. The most discussed were Little and Twiss (1978) and
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Green (1978). Little and Twiss sought to update the sociological tradition of empiri-
cal, cross-cultural study by giving clear definitions of religious, legal, and moral
action-guides, and provided three case studies of the application of their new
method, which was designed in particular to illuminate the structure of rational
moral justification in each case. Green sought to discern a generally Kantian deep
structure of religious reason operative in numerous traditions, which illuminates
common human dilemmas that religious ethics aims to resolve or at least cope with.
Historians and anthropologists of religion immediately criticized both, arguing that
Little and Twiss were excessively positivist and obsessed with rational justification to
the exclusion of topics more relevant to their objects of study, and charging that
Greens use of an a priori structure of universal religious reason introduced funda-
mental ethnocentric distortions into his analysis. These exchanges inaugurated a
period of wide-ranging debate about the proper methods, goals, and procedures of
inquiry in comparative religious ethics.
On one side of the debate stood area studies specialists who insisted that expert
knowledge of local languages, cultures, and histories was essential to properly inter-
pret and understand whatever one might call ethics in some alien time or place
(e.g., Lovin and Reynolds 1985). Members of this camp favored thick description
of cultural particulars, were interested in a large variety of themes which pressed on
the boundaries of ethics as understood by philosophers, and were suspicious of
ethnocentrism and excessive comparative generalization, sometimes to the point
offailing to actually compare the different ethics narrated in group collections of
specialist studies. On the other side were more philosophically and theologically
trained ethicists who wanted to draw on the conceptual sophistication of Western
moral theory in its many forms as they interpreted different religious thinkers
andtraditions, and were keen to engage broader questions about universalism and
relativism, the justification of moral norms, and the possibility of systematic,
methodical comparison across cultures. The burst of more recent work in compara-
tive religious ethics (since 2000 or so) has tried to merge the virtues of both of
theseapproaches, exhibiting historical and cultural sensitivity to diverse particulars
analyzed in context, a broad sensibility about possible topics of research in the field
of ethics, and the conceptual and logical precision of philosophers and moral
theologians drawing on the Western heritage.
When considering the field as a whole, some are tempted to think of single- or
dual-authored studies that focus on carefully comparing two classic thinkers as the
norm that defines fully explicit comparative religious ethics (e.g., Yearley 1990;
Stalnaker 2006; Carr and Ivanhoe 2010). But this is an overly truncated view of a
rich and diverse range of approaches, all of which have real value as comparative
ethical analysis. Let us take each of these modifiers in turn comparative and
religious as a way to explore the full spectrum of work in the field.
While explicit comparisons between two or more objects are obviously compara-
tive, and are frequently conjoined with explicit reflections on methods and tools of
analysis, they are not the only true form of comparative ethics. Any study of ethics,
no matter how focused on a specific body of textual or other religious materials, can
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be implicitly comparative insofar as it is framed and pursued with full acknowledg-

ment of the relevance of other similarly themed studies of other traditions or
cultures. When an analyst attends carefully to the range of work on similar topics
but in different settings, then she or he will see similarities and differences to the
material she or he is most familiar with, and can often be led to pursue novel
questions of thatmaterial on the basis of comparative observations prompted by the
secondary scholarship on other traditions. There is obviously a spectrum of
engagement and comparativity possible, but some works that are ostensibly on one
subject, such asrabbinic ethics, are actually thoroughly comparative by means of
this sort of cross-pollination from other studies, in this case on theories and
practices of self-formation (Schofer 2004; see rabbinic ethics).
The question of what should count as religious ethics is more vexed. Given the
necessary brevity of this format, suffice it to say that religion is not a natural kind,
but a human-made artifact, generated by scholars pursuing various comparative
projects. The most unity one might reasonably hope for is that of a family resem-
blance among tokens of the type, with no single factor, including belief in a divine
being or beings, as determinative. Having authoritative scriptures and traditions of
exegesis, a festival cycle, rituals and similar practices, an overarching worldview that
orients humans to the greater environment and cosmos, a sense of some things
assacred while others are profane, a moral code that guides the life of observant
members, a narrative of sacred history, and some concern over group membership
all seem relevant to what counts as a religion, to name just a few factors. In general,
especially when it comes to cross-cultural studies of ethics, it seems best to cast a
wide net and allow in possible borderline cases (such as Marxism, various new
religions and cults, and other ideologies that have a strong social orientation) in
order to subject ones presuppositions to the greatest critical scrutiny.
Scholars from a number of different disciplinary backgrounds have studied
religious ethics comparatively, with corresponding differences in style, focus, and
method. Philosophers commonly attend most carefully to the quality of argument,
rational justification of theses, and questions of overall theoretical coherence in
source materials, and tend to focus on texts, especially but not always of the obviously
great thinkers (e.g., Angle 2002, 2009; Van Norden 2007). Scholars trained in
religious studies are generally alert to hermeneutical issues surrounding the proper
interpretation of texts, including careful attention to historical and cultural context,
as well as linguistic issues, and focus on a relatively wide range of possible topics,
given the diversity inherent in the category religion (e.g., Kelsay 2007; Lovin
and Reynolds 1985; Schofer 2004). Political scientists tend to privilege themes in
political philosophy such as legitimacy, authority, and citizenship, and are prone
to study more modern movements and figures (e.g., Euben 1999; March 2009).
Anthropologists practicing comparative religious ethics reflect the current
tendencies in their field as well, tending to ground their studies in ethnographic
fieldwork, making recourse to the rhetorical techniques of fiction as they provide
detailed, thick descriptions of everyday life among their informants, and drawing on
various traditions of theorizing about culture and society (e.g., Prasad 2007;
6

Mahmood 2005). In other words, what counts as religious ethics and how exactly
comparisons should be structured and focused, varies significantly with the
interpreter and his or her specific project.
One fundamental question that continues to bedevil practitioners of comparative
religious ethics is the question of scope. Should analysts aim for grand, encompassing
studies that illuminate whole traditions or regions, or is it better to focus more
carefully on precisely delimited targets, such as a single great thinker or some small
set of individuals within a particular country or even village? Both approaches have
real strengths and weaknesses.
Having a large scope makes grander conclusions possible, whether about moder-
nity, rationality, the quest for a common morality, or the proper role of religious
convictions in political life. It also allows treatment of a greater array of examples
and objects for comparison. But many of the worst problems of past comparisons
were generated by excessive comparative scope, for example by the quixotic desire to
encompass all religions in one study. Trying to summarize the moral thinking
ofwhole traditions is a recipe for gross generalizations; comparing such generaliza-
tions often testifies more to the hunches or prejudices of the interpreter than to any
deep insight into the phenomena being analyzed. Beyond the obvious danger of over
generalization, large scope also risks anachronistic and ethnocentric misinterpreta-
tions of data. It seems impossible that any one person would have sufficient expertise
to interpret every religion with much insight. Thus large comparative ethical projects
have more recently been group projects, drawing on teams of scholars who provide
accounts of what they know well, and then trying to address comparative issues
either through editorial work or group conversation and revisions. (The best recent
example of this sort of approach is Schweiker 2005.)
The other possibility is to narrow the scope of ones comparative work enough
so that one or two people can responsibly handle the interpretive and analytical
challenges through sufficient specialized training and practice. Tightness of focus,
on the basis of real scholarly expertise in the relevant languages, cultures, and
traditions, allows a level of precision, insight, and depth of treatment that is not pos-
sible with larger projects, and most of the books cited in this essay exemplify this
sort of approach, although still with variations. Explicit comparisons of two influen-
tial thinkers around a set of themes, or studies of a theme in a key period in a single
tradition (informed comparatively by similar studies of analogous phenomena),
for example, are both common paradigms. These sorts of studies, however, risk
anexcessive narrowness of focus and a concomitant attenuating of general interest
in their research questions. A happy medium of sorts can be found when an appro-
priately delimited but not excessively focused topic is chosen, such as the intellectual
history of how modern Chinese people came to borrow and adapt the idea of rights,
and specifically human rights, with judicious comparative analysis of how various
typical modern Chinese approaches relate to the most widely discussed English-
language treatments of human rights (Angle 2002).
Given the conflicted heritage of comparative religious ethics, drawing on
ostensibly descriptive disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, as well as
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more normative disciplines such as philosophy and moral theology, the relation
between descriptive and normative purposes in the field can sometimes lead to
controversy and confusion. It does seem clear that all practitioners of comparative
religious ethics seek to understand culturally or historically distant others, and
thereby illuminate contemporary debates or answer current questions. Some of
those questions are more straightforwardly scholarly, driven above all by the desire
to comprehend some mysterious or baffling human phenomenon for example,
why do Muslim suicide bombers do what they do? How and why do they view
theiractions as good and right? In some such cases normative argument is deeply
submerged as a goal of inquiry, whether because normative evaluation seems utterly
obvious, or simply not pressing as a live issue. But in other cases, normative ques-
tions of various sorts are raised explicitly, even if standards for judgment are
sometimes elusive. Examples of explicitly normatively inclined studies are frequently
of the retrieval sort mentioned above, where contemporary writers discern
valuable possibilities in some unusual moral source, and take it as their job to
explore, elucidate, and to some degree advocate for the importance of that moral
source, atleast in relation to certain issues.
One might say that comparative religious ethics is normative in three main ways.
First, it is implicitly normative, even in its most resolutely descriptive modes, because
it either stipulates or argues for the value of certain topics and questions as worthy
of attention and study. The same considerations pertain to the choice of objects of
study whatever the analyst focuses on is separated and held up as important and
worthy of attention, often with some sort of at least implied judgment of excellence
and insight, or conversely error or vice.
Second, it is normative in relation to scholarship on ethics, arguing for certain
sorts of approaches as valuable and thus advocating their use by others. Even
resolutely descriptive historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of ethics argue
inthis way, and seek to convince other scholars of the wisdom of their modes of
analysis and interpretation (when criticizing Green for ethnocentric misreadings,
for example). This advocacy of certain kinds of theorizing is analogous to more
familiar debates about strengths and weaknesses of various sorts of ethical theory,
such as utilitarianism, contractarianism, or virtue ethics, although the grounds for
these critiques of other ways of proceeding often recapitulate a deeper clash between
more descriptive and more normative approaches to ethics.
And third, comparative ethics can be explicitly normative when it argues for the
goodness or badness, rightness or wrongness, of particular positions, ideas, or prac-
tices advocated by its objects of study. Another way to put this is that comparative
ethicists may pursue interpretive insight in order to critique certain practices (such
as female genital mutilation, or targeting of civilians in war), or alternatively to
retrieve and advocate other practices (for example, using music or ritual as modes of
moral development and community formation; see moral development).
The best comparative religious ethics provides rich, evocative descriptions of the
moral life as lived in particular cultures and religious traditions, sometimes even by
particular people struggling with sometimes excruciating difficulties and dilemmas.
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It informs and extends this descriptive effort to understand and explain the strange
and unfamiliar, the local and particular, often by relating it to the goals, concepts,
and procedures of modern Western philosophical and religious ethics. It thereby
provides an expansive angle of vision on familiar but often excessively abstract
moral debates, dramatically illuminating the strengths and weaknesses, the successes
and failures, of modern attempts to construct or discover a common morality
adequate to the whole human family. One striking example that shows this subtle
interplay between descriptive and normative interests is the burgeoning subfield of
comparative religious bioethics (see bioethics), which includes a classic study of
Buddhist understandings of and rituals surrounding abortion in Japan (LaFleur
1994) and a more recent searching investigation of kidney transplantation among
living relatives in Muslim Pakistan (Moazam 2006). But whatever the topic and
approach, comparative religious ethics provides a unique and invaluable supple-
ment to more abstract and formal kinds of ethical reflection.

See also: aquinas, saint thomas; bioethics; buddhist ethics; confucian

ethics; durkheim, emile; human rights and religion; hume, david; islamic
ethics; mencius; moral development; rabbinic ethics; relativism, moral;
religion and global ethics; smith, adam; troeltsch, ernst; virtue; virtue
ethics; weber, max

REFERENCES
Angle, Stephen C. 2002. Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Angle, Stephen C. 2009. Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian
Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Burrell, David B. 1993. Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions. Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press.
Carr, Karen L., and Philip J. Ivanhoe 2010 [2000]. The Sense of Antirationalism: The Religious
Thought of Zhuangzi and Kierkegaard, 2nd ed. Charleston, SC: Create Space.
Euben, Roxanne 1999. Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern
Rationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Green, Ronald 1978. Religious Reason: The Rational and Moral Basis of Religious Belief.
NewYork: Oxford University Press.
Kelsay, John 2007. Arguing the Just War in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ladd, John 1957. The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Analysis of Ethical Discourse
Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
LaFleur, William 1994. Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Little, David, and Sumner B. Twiss 1978. Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method.
NewYork: Harper & Row.
Lovin, Robin W., and Frank E. Reynolds (eds.) 1985. Cosmogony and Ethical Order:
NewStudies in Comparative Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Mahmood, Saba 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
March, Andrew 2009. Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Moazam, Farhat 2006. Bioethics and Organ Transplantation in a Muslim Society: A Study in
Culture, Ethnography, and Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Oh, Irene 2007. The Rights of God: Islam, Human Rights, and Comparative Ethics. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press.
Prasad, Leela 2007. Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian
Town. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schofer, Jonathan 2004. The Making of a Sage: A Study in Rabbinic Ethics. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press.
Schweiker, William (ed.) 2005. The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Stalnaker, Aaron 2006. Overcoming Our Evil: Human Nature and Spiritual Exercises in Xunzi
and Augustine. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Taylor, Charles 1985. Understanding and Ethnocentricity, in Philosophy and the Human
Sciences: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11633.
Twiss, Sumner B. 2005. Comparison in Religious Ethics, in William Schweiker (ed.), The
Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 14755.
Van Norden, Bryan W. 2007. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yearley, Lee 1990. Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage.
Albany: State University of New York Press.

FURTHER READINGS
Fleishacker, Samuel 1994. The Ethics of Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Heim, Maria 2004. Theories of the Gift in South Asia: Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Reflections on
Dana. New York: Routledge.
Keown, Damien 1992. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. New York: Macmillan.
Lukes, Steven 2008. Moral Relativism. New York: Picador.
Outka, Gene, and John P. Reeder, Jr. (eds.) 1993. Prospects for a Common Morality. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Patton, Kimberley, and Benjamin Ray (eds.) 2000. A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion
in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Reynolds, Frank, and David Tracy (eds.) 1990. Myth and Philosophy. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Reynolds, Frank, and David Tracy (eds.) 1992. Discourse and Practice. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Reynolds, Frank, and David Tracy (eds.) 1994. Religion and Practical Reason: New Essays in
the Comparative Philosophy of Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press.