Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-2020

Publication Title

Soundings: An Interdiscipliary Journal

Volume

103

Issue

4

First Page

473

Last Page

496

Abstract

This article reflects on the ethnographic turn in recent comparative religious ethics (CRE). Comparative religious ethicists should be lauded because they privilege engagement with non-Western intellectual sources. Such engagement is important since it undermines the erroneous view that non-Western sources are either soft or are part of someone else's commitments and therefore irrelevant. Yet some recent comparative work stops at merely describing these non-Western sources, moving ethics away from its normative tasks. If CRE is to remain relevant to broader conversations in moral and political theory, comparative religious ethicists should perform two tasks: they should evaluate the object under consideration and illustrate how thinking about it may contribute to broader thinking about common moral and political problems.

Comments

This is an accepted version of an article published in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal in October 2020 and is available on Project Muse's site at https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/768731 or at https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.103.4.0473

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