Explorations In Global Ethics

Comparative Religious Ethics And Interreligious Dialogue

Sumner B Twiss, Sumner Twiss, Bruce Grelle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813328812
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980251
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Inspired by the 1993 Parliament of the Worlds Religions, this volume for the first time brings the scholarly discipline of comparative religious ethics into constructive collaboration with the community of interreligious dialogue. The contributors draw from both communities of discourse in addressing questions of method and theory and global moral issuessuch as human rights, distributive justice, politics of war, international business, the environment, and genocidein a cross-cultural context. }Inspired by the 1993 Parliament of the Worlds Religions, this volume for the first time brings the scholarly discipline of comparative religious ethics into constructive collaboration with the community of interreligious dialogue. Its design is premised on two important insights. First, interreligious dialogue offers to comparative religious ethics a new, more persuasive rationale, agenda of issues, and practical orientation. Second, comparative religious ethics offers to interreligious dialogue an arsenal of critical tools and methods which will enhance the sophistication of its practical work. In this way, both theory (a dominant concern and strength of comparative religious ethics) and praxis (a dominant concern and strength of interreligious moral dialogue) are joined together in mutual effort, each contributing to the benefit of the other.The volumes contributors share this vision of collaboration, drawing explicitly from both communities of discourse in a manner that crosses disciplinary and professional boundaries to deal creatively and constructively with important methodological and global moral issue. Although theory and practice cannot easily be separated in such a collaborative project, for the purpose of clarity, the volume is divided into two main parts. The first specifically engages questions of method, theory, and the social role of the public intellectual; the second, on substantive moral themes and issues, many of which were raised at the 1993 Parliament. Taken together, the volumes essays articulate and illustrate new ways of approaching contemporary moral concerns cross-culturally yet with a rigor appropriate to our complex and pluralistic world.

Part One
Comparative Religious Ethics and Interreligious Dialogue

Chapter One
Four Paradigms in Teaching Comparative Religious Ethics

SUMNER B. TWISS
Brown University

It is well known that comparative religious ethics is a field with a number of alternative paradigms for scholarly inquiry. Indeed, a modest literature has appeared in recent years attempting not only to typologize and characterize these paradigms—in terms of aims, methods, and presuppositions— but also to assess their hermeneutical and epistemological strengths and weaknesses (see especially Lovin and Reynolds 1985; Green and Reynolds 1986; Sizemore 1990; Yearley 1990a; and Schweiker 1992). What is considerably less well known are the curricular paradigms and experimentation for instruction in the field.

This situation needs to be redressed for a number of reasons. First, we need to gain a better sense of how the field's scholarship stands up to scrutiny in the classroom where strengths and inadequacies of goal and method are often revealed when exposed to the probative questions of students. Second, ongoing curricular experiments may themselves yield new guidance for doing work in the field—for example, in identifying objectives, critiquing cultural presuppositions, designing useful hermeneutical strategies, forging insightful cross-traditional comparisons, and identifying needs for texts, anthologies, and other course materials. Third, we need to construct a way for teachers in the field to become more aware of what their colleagues are doing in the classroom—in order to share the successes and failures of curricular experiments and help one another to avoid blind alleys, meet challenges, and capitalize on successful pedagogical strategies and course designs. Fourth, we need to become more aware of curricular strategies in the field in order to assess them in light of published discussions of curricula in religious studies concerned with cross-traditional inquiry. Not only would our teaching be likely to benefit from such a broader assessment but also our curricular designs and experiments might themselves advantage that broader context of discussion.

This chapter aims to describe, interpret, and assess the range of curricular paradigms in comparative religious ethics, with an eye to the above four considerations. It uses three types of materials: (1) solicited course syllabi as well as answers to questions designed to make these syllabi and their instructors' thinking as perspicuous as possible; (2) published discussions of aims and methods of inquiry in comparative religious ethics; and (3) published discussions of curricula in comparative religious ethics and, to a lesser extent, comparative religious inquiry and teaching more generally (see, e.g., Yearley 1990b, 1991; Lovin and Reynolds 1991; and Juergensmeyer 1991).¹ While the latter two bodies of material serve as the initial basis for reviewing, interpreting, and evaluating the first, I believe that the data of the first generates an insightful angle of vision on the published discussions of the other two.

Four Curricular Paradigms

From the data available to me, I discern four basic curricular paradigms, which, adapting some of the field's methodological language, I label as follows: (1) formalist-conceptual comparison, (2) historical comparison, (3) hermeneutical-dialogical comparison, and (4) comparative methods and theory. I will specify each paradigm in terms of its typical goals, focal questions, method of inquiry, presuppositions, range of comparison, course materials, pedagogical strategies, levels of instruction, and institutional contexts.

The first curricular paradigm I call formalist-conceptual because its courses use Western moral theory and conceptual analysis to sort out and critique modes of moral reasoning and argument, moral principles and doctrines, and sources of authority and appeal in Western theistic traditions. Courses within this paradigm apply the standard types of moral theory (e.g., deontological, consequentialist) and moral doctrine (e.g., double effect, moral rights, just war) to religious ethical reflection about such matters as war and pacifism, sexual ethics, and social justice in Western moral traditions (e.g., secular, Christian, Jewish, Islamic). By and large these are courses in moral problems (or applied ethics) similar to analogous courses in philosophy departments but distinguished from the latter by serious attention to traditions other than secular moral philosophy.

The goals of these courses, similar to their philosophy department counterparts, include developing students' cognitive skills in moral analysis and argument—clarifying the conceptual underpinnings of positions, assessing the cogency of moral arguments, and enabling students to construct their own moral positions on important moral issues, concepts, and themes. The dominant focal questions are either (1) how does this or that tradition reason about selected practical moral issues, how does this reasoning compare with contemporary secular moral thought, and what position do you (the student) take on these issues? or (2) how are we to best understand philosophical and theological accounts of, for example, justice and/or love, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and what do they have to teach us about how to conceive of the relationship between love and justice and the nature of moral agency?

The presuppositions of these courses include the following (see Lovin and Reynolds 1985, 12-18; Sizemore 1990, 88-94; and Schweiker 1992, 266-267).² Moral traditions are conceived as expressions of patterns of moral rationality identified in the light of Western philosophical reflection. Moral reasoning is the most accessible and important phenomenon in moral life, and that life is conceived as being concerned with principles, rules, and justifications of decisions and actions. Moral thought is defined initially by paradigms of Western moral rationality, though these may be refined in dialectical interaction with the ethical reflection of religious traditions. Facts and values are distinguishable, though they can be related through processes of practical moral reasoning. Moral rationality is often regarded as epistemically autonomous from religious beliefs, though these can be related in practical moral reasoning. Moral theory is important for reflecting on practical problems. There is nothing wrong with ethnocentricity, especially if patterns of moral reasoning are shared across cultural traditions and if one focuses on Western traditions or those traditions (e.g., Hinduism, Gandhi's thought) informed by contact with the West.

The method of inquiry in these courses corresponds quite well to Russell Sizemore's observation that work within the formalist approach to comparative religious ethics conceives of both method and field as concerned with distinguishing and relating "faith and reason" (Sizemore 1990, 91). Put succinctly, the method of these courses involves using Western moral theory to clarify, analyze, and assess the reasoning of religious ethical traditions about practical moral issues or philosophical and theological accounts of significant principles or virtues. This procedure involves identifying the role and effects of religious premises in moral arguments and is more open than secular moral philosophy courses to seeing significant conceptual nuance introduced by religious beliefs. Proper use of the method includes some historical contextualization of materials studied, though this is not the dominant concern of these courses.

The range of comparison for these courses is focused on Western moral traditions, including, for example, classical Greek philosophy; biblical traditions; Christian, Judaic, and Islamic traditions; secular moral philosophy in the modern period; and occasional outreach beyond the West to traditions informed by dialogue with the West. Because the range of comparison is Western yet also open to different moral traditions in the West, I characterize it as both intracultural and cross-traditional. As might be expected, course materials include both classical and modern texts and/or works by thinkers from Western traditions embodying philosophical and theological reflection on practical moral issues or accounts of principles and virtues. I do not perceive any significant commitment to employing comparative religious ethics literature, though the instructors are surely aware of this literature (this is not a criticism but rather an observation). As mentioned earlier, these courses do assign some materials that historically contextualize issues and arguments.

These courses are typically taught by a single ethicist-instructor, sometimes enriched with guest lecturers from other relevant disciplines, in a standard lecture-discussion section format. The courses employ the pedagogical strategy of having students write short interpretive, analytical, or constructive papers focusing on moral arguments about topical issues or concepts. These papers may be supplemented by midterm and final exams as well as longer term papers on such topics as consequentialist moral theory, natural law, criteria for just war, the morality of abortion, justice as fairness, and the varieties of love and their interrelation. The courses are taught at the introductory or intermediate level, requiring no prerequisites other than some degree of conceptual sophistication for the intermediate level. In my small sample of syllabi, all of these courses are taught within university (private and public) religious studies departments, though there is no need for such restriction; so this observation is probably an artifact of the sample size.

The second curricular paradigm is what I call historical-comparative, though some within the field might epistemologize it as "ethical naturalism" (e.g., Lovin and Reynolds 1985, 29-30; and Lovin and Reynolds 1991, 251); I think, however, that this latter label may be too limiting. These courses aim to effect a historically and culturally contextualized empathetic understanding and appreciation of the diversity of religious ethical traditions, and to that end they are informed by work in comparative religious ethics and the history of religions. By and large, these courses attempt to characterize the nature of whole traditions while at the same time using sociomoral problems as points of contact between, and modes of access to, the traditions' fundamental beliefs and modes of thought.

Although these courses are concerned with modes of moral reasoning, their principal aim is to develop students' empathetic comprehension of similarities and differences in moral and religious thought among traditions. Their emphasis is not so much on developing cognitive and conceptual skills in moral argument as to develop a way for students to deeply understand "the other," so that they might subsequently in their lives be in a stronger position to deal with moral and religious pluralism. A subsidiary goal involves assessing approaches to comparative religious ethics with an eye to advocating the superiority of a historical framework.

The focal question for those courses is encapsulated in the question: How do beliefs about human nature, salvation, evil, the good life, and the order of the world affect the way that traditions conceive of the spheres of personal and social life and how they reason about or otherwise deal with sociomoral issues (e.g., war, poverty, economic injustice, sexual relations)? Clearly, there is some similarity here with courses in the previous paradigm but with this difference: The historical courses put a premium on describing with empathy the whole worldview of the traditions being studied rather than tending, as the formalist courses do, to isolate out in analytical fashion moral concepts, principles, and doctrines. This observation introduces the presuppositions of the historical courses.

For these courses, persons and groups are conceived as so intimately shaped by cultural and historical forces that modes of reasoning can only be understood and assessed within the holistic system of moral, religious, empirical, economic, political, and other beliefs constituting a tradition (see Lovin and Reynolds 1985, 18-20; Sizemore 1990, 88-94; and Schweiker 1992, 268). Thus, for this paradigm, comparative moral inquiry requires helping students gain a participant-observer view of traditions so that their integrity is respected rather than distorted while being studied. This perspective, then, devalues ethnocentrism and even fights against it by being somewhat antithe-oretical because of the perceived biasing effects of Western-derived categories of moral analysis. Moreover, these courses presuppose that, in addition to contextually shaped reasoning, moral thought is crucially informed by the moral imagination—for example, imaginative empathetic insight into "the other." And further, moral judgments and positions are conceived as complex equilibrations of fact, principle, and emotion.

As a result of such presuppositions, these courses employ a method of inquiry that is (broadly) phenomenological—attempting to bracket students' cultural beliefs so that they might enter into the worldviews of other traditions and describe what they find with a second naivete, in the hope of enabling them to understand and appreciate the diversity of moral beliefs and reasoning practiced in those traditions (see, e.g., Twiss and Conser 1992, 1-74). The technique of systematic empathy is so important to these courses' method of inquiry that it comes as no surprise that their method is informed by historical and social anthropological methods and data.

In order to teach their lesson of sensitive understanding and appreciation of "the other," these courses tend to compare only two or three traditions in depth. Often these traditions are drawn from radically different cultures—for example, one Western tradition and one Eastern—but other variations are also taught (the intracultural study of two traditions such as Christianity and Judaism, or even the intratraditional study of, for example, Protestant and Roman Catholic moral thought). The latter variations do not undercut the courses' attempt to reach beyond the categories of Western moral philosophy because each tradition is still treated as an integral unity with its distinctive modes of rationality studied in epistemic context. The materials studied in these courses are quite extensive in terms of genre and historical spread—for example, classical and modern primary texts and thinkers, treatises and myths, ritual activity and ethnographically recorded ways of life, interpretive overviews of entire traditions, case studies from comparative religious ethics, and history of religions materials. Clearly, this range of material differs considerably from the more limited philosophical and theological texts studied by formalist courses. This difference is surely explained by this paradigm's distinctive aims, methods, and presuppositions.

Also different from the formalist courses are the historical paradigm's preferred pedagogical strategies. Though the standard lecture-discussion section format is occasionally used, more typical is the seminar requiring students' prior study in the field of religion. Team teaching—usually combining one ethicist with one historian of religion or religious thought— emerges as a significant pedagogical strategy, presumably to ensure depth of understanding of, and control over, the diverse course materials. When there is only one instructor, he or she is often a historically oriented ethicist or a historian of religion or religious thought with considerable competence in ethics. Course requirements range from short interpretive papers to quizzes and exams to final research papers, though significantly they emphasize informed student discussion and seminar presentations. Paper topics focus on interpreting an aspect or theme in two traditions, with comparison and contrast of similarities and differences between the traditions' handling of a moral issue or concept. The level of these courses, as might be expected, ranges from the undergraduate intermediate course to the graduate seminar. A few introductory-level versions are also taught, and these typically have more inventive requirements beyond the usual papers and exams—for example, preparation of assigned study questions, or one- or two-page weekly responses to interpretive questions—in order to ensure students' ongoing absorption of the course materials. Most of these courses are taught at universities, private and public. A few are taught in private colleges, but in these cases team teaching may require special resources, such as an external grant to hire a visiting specialist in comparative religious ethics or a tradition of special interest.

The third curricular paradigm—what I call the hermeneutical-dialogical—appears to be a recent development, at least as a distinctive type of course in comparative religious ethics. These courses seem to synthesize some elements from the two preceding par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A New Venue for Comparative Religious Ethics
• PART 1 COMPARATIVE RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE
• PART 2 RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN DIALOGUE ON GLOBAL MORAL ISSUES
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index