This book is the result of years of collaboration between the authors on work in religious ethics. The collaboration started when we published the first edition of The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics with William Schweiker as editor and David A. Clairmont as project assistant. Through the encouragement of our publisher, Rebecca Harkin of Wiley‐Blackwell, it was decided that a basic text was needed on the meaning and method of religious ethics, and, further, a book that could be used in connection with the Companion at several levels of academic instruction: undergraduate, graduate, and in the training of religious leaders.¹ Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method is that book. It elaborates and expounds the account of religious ethics developed by William Schweiker as a multidimensional theory of the religious and moral life for our global times.

This history of collaboration and also the specific task of Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method determined its scope and purpose. In the chapters that follow we do not survey the moral teachings of the world's religions, we cannot address every issue in moral theory, and we respond to practical moral problems only in an exemplary manner. Each chapter engages in a comparison of Christian thought in relation to one other religious tradition. The reason for this strategy is threefold: first, Christian ethical thinking is what we know best and it is wise to play to one's strengths; second, most of the courses that will, it is hoped, use this book and the scholars who engage our arguments will have at least passing knowledge of Christian faith; and, third, with the roughly 2.3 billion Christians worldwide, it is increasingly important for Christians to understand the analogies between their moral convictions and those of other religions and for others to see the analogues to their convictions in Christian ethics. However, our purpose in this book is not to compare Christian moral thought with every other religion.²

Some readers will say this book is so deeply Christian and Western that it cannot claim to speak so confidently about religious ethics as a discipline and practice. Granted, we are Christians (WS: Protestant; DC: Catholic) and we are Western as well as white, male, fathers, and university professors. What is more, we have decidedly different emphases in our work, Schweiker in moral theory and Clairmont in the history of religions. While acknowledging our sociocultural, academic, and religious locations, we plead that our readers examine the book's argument rather than its authors' lives. As noted previously, the reader will find that we engage the Christian tradition in every chapter of the book as a kind of reference point for developing the argument. Christian patterns of thought, argument, and practice are not assumed a priori to be necessarily true or good and right even though they provide a control measure in relation to which we can isolate similarities and difference among traditions. We would be delighted if someone were to test and develop our argument with reference to Buddhism, Judaism, African traditional religions, or any number of other longstanding religious and cultural traditions. Our hope, then, is that biographical facts about us and the acknowledgment of the areas and limits of our scholarly expertise do not deter the reader from wrestling with this book in order to see what contribution it brings to religious ethics.

Writing together is rewarding and challenging, and it takes a great deal of support from individuals and institutions for the authors to bring any project to a happy conclusion. This was certainly the case for the two of us. Rightly, then, we would like to thank three institutions for the unwavering support of this project: Wiley Publishers, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. Rebecca Harkin at Wiley encouraged us to begin this project and waited patiently through many delays. We are profoundly grateful to have enjoyed her support and good guidance throughout the writing of this book. At the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame we received support and encouragement from our respective colleagues, chairs, and deans as we worked on this project in addition to our other research, teaching, and administrative duties. Without these institutions nothing much of what we do as scholars and teachers would be possible.

At Chicago, we would like to thank Deans Margaret Mitchell, Richard Rosengarten, Laurie Zoloth, and David Nirenberg. At Notre Dame, we would like to thank John Cavadini, Matthew Ashley, and Timothy Matovina for their support in their roles as chair of the Theology Department. We would also like to thank the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame for a grant that made possible production of an index for this book. Our gratitude to all the editoral and production staff at Wiley who worked with us patiently throughout the project: Catriona King, Juliet Booker, Liz Wingett, Shyamala Venkateswaran, and Sandra Kerka.

The following colleagues and students at Chicago, Notre Dame, and other institutions offered us critiques, patient conversation, and their own research about the many themes and traditions explored in this book which advanced our work in many ways: Maria Antonaccio, Ebenezer Akesseh, Elizabeth Bucar, Michael Connors, Kristine Culp, Sarah Fredericks, Kevin Hector, Dwight Hopkins, Markus Hüfner, Jann Ingmire, Kevin Jung, Emmanuel Katongole, David Lantigua, Herbert Lin, Emery Longanga, Terence Martin, Jean‐Luc Marion, Gerald McKenny, Richard Miller, Elena Namli, Paulinus Odozor, Douglas Ottati, Willemien Otten, Jean Porter, Cheron Price, Bharat Ranganthan, Susan Schreiner, Heike Springhart, Jeffrey Stackert, Per Sundman, Günter Thomas, Elochukwu Uzukwu, Michael Welker, Todd Whitmore, and Charles Wilson. A special word of thanks to Maria Antonaccio and Elizabeth Bucar, our coeditors on the Wiley Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics, who were working with us on this much larger undertaking as we were also trying to bring this book to a successful resolution, and to Michelle Clairmont and Jann Ingmire for their patient support of this project. We owe a debt of gratitude to our research assistants, Willa Lengyel‐Swenson, David Barr, Sara‐Jo Swiatek, and Blaize Gervais.

Finally, we would like to thank our families whose examples prompted us to consider the ethical dimensions of religions. When two people write a book together, they discover not only interesting areas of agreement and disagreement about the research material but also a good deal about each other: where they came from, what they value, and who sustains them. We dedicate this book to the next generation of Schweikers and Clairmonts – particularly to Paul Schweiker and his wife Evelyn Buehler Schweiker and to Joseph and John Clairmont – in the hopes that they may pick up and advance in ways decidedly their own the work of respect and understanding in a wounded world.

The reader will notice that this book draws from a wide variety of sources for its study of religious ethics, from primary texts of the religious traditions examined here to the work of philosophers, anthropologists, and historians of global religious cultures. We have attempted to standardize, as best we are able, the presentation of this material, which often follows a variety of conventions depending on generally accepted practices in different scholarly fields. Our goal is to follow standard scholarly conventions in the disciplines we consult wherever possible, but in some cases we have needed to make judgments for the sake of uniform presentation of the material. In these cases, we have attempted to follow the conventions employed by the contributors to The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2005), the revision and expansion of which this book is intended to accompany.

On the dating of historical figures, texts, and major events, we have followed standard reference works in the field such as the Encyclopedia of Religion (ER)¹ or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).² Where figures are not listed in those works, we have followed the dating given in the scholarly works from which our references were drawn. In biblical translations, we follow the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV),³ and in translations of the Qurʾān, we follow The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary.⁴ We have followed pinyin method for rendering romanized versions of Chinese characters, guided by suitable reference works.⁵ Although most of the material for the Igbo language is found in our sources, we have consulted the Encyclopedia of African Religion ⁶ in certain cases, aided by Michael J.C. Echeruo's Igbo‐English Dictionary.⁷ Our references to Penobscot terms follow those used in our sources, although there is one standard resource available for the two main Abenaki dialects.⁸ In some cases, where complete scholarly translations are not available (for example, in the ongoing project on the Mahābhārata), we have noted in the text the translation used.

In the religions you are to discover religion.¹

— Friedrich Schleiermacher

The world’s religions fuel the imagination and enflame human hearts. Whereas in places like Europe religion seems in retreat, there is massive growth within religions around the world. Likewise, religiously driven violence is ablaze in many nations but so too the attack on modern science. Not surprisingly, scholars, religious and political leaders, and many other people of good will, both those affiliated with or not affiliated with religious traditions, are interested in the ethical wisdom of specific religious traditions and how that wisdom interacts with and is comparable, or not, to the wisdom of other traditions. Are there ways to understand, compare, assess, and draw ethical wisdom from the religions to meet the challenges they put to this generation? This book is written for scholars, students, and, in fact, anyone interested in thinking ethically by drawing on the resources of the world's religions

More specifically, the following chapters present an account of religious ethics that defines the meaning of the field and also propose a method best suited for it. Although the book's argument is developed through comparisons between religious traditions, “religious ethics,” as a discipline and field, is not limited to comparative religious and ethical reflection even if, we believe, it must include comparison within the scope of its work. In this respect, the method and meaning of religious ethics as we present it are apt for, say, Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish ethics as much as for Buddhist–Christian comparative ethics.

We are mindful of the high demands and daunting challenges of writing a book like this one. The demands and challenges facing us are well known. The religions bear untold treasures of moral wisdom, that is, practical guidance about how to live justly and well that include beliefs and practices about the nature of human existence, social life, what is good and righteous, and reality itself. The deposit of those beliefs and practices that transmit moral wisdom is a religion's “morality.” In our understanding, “ethics,” religious or philosophical, is critical “metareflection” on the actual beliefs, values, practices, rituals, and social structures that inform and guide human conduct, that is, a religion's or a society's “morality.” Ethics, religious or philosophical, seeks to articulate the meaning and assess the truth of moral convictions. Sometimes an ethics will criticize and invalidate moral convictions; sometimes it will revise them; sometimes an ethics will endorse inherited morality as the proper way to conduct personal and social life.

However, the distinction between morality (morals, moral convictions, moral wisdom, etc.) and ethics, as a form of metareflection, is more contentious than might first appear and will be addressed in the book. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of suspicion in the Western academy about the idea of outlining an approach to any field of study, including “ethics.” Within ethics itself, many thinkers remain within the resources of one tradition and claim its uniqueness and incomparability with other religious traditions, say, Hindu ethics or Islamic ethics. Other thinkers apply the categories of Western moral philosophy to religious resources. For instance, one might argue (and some have) that “Buddhist ethics” can be seen as a kind of virtue ethics defined in the Western world by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE). We have worked against currents in scholarship in order to develop an approach to “ethics” from within the religions in order to explain the meaning and method of religious ethics in a way that can show the similarities and differences, the analogies, on moral matters among the religions. Our purpose is not to pit religious ethics against moral philosophy. It is to draw attention to the nuance and complexity of religious accounts of the moral life that tend to be neglected or insufficiently appreciated when discussion of morality is reduced to one specific philosophical language, method, or theory.

Global political events as well as ongoing debates about the place of religion in societies around the world have prompted people to reevaluate how best to study the moral teachings of the world's religions. Nowadays it seems obvious that societies in different ways and to different degrees are marked by a diversity of religious beliefs, institutions, practices, and adherents. In the present “postsecular” situation, as it is often called, the challenge is how best to live by the deepest moral insights of the religions and also how to understand, assess, and compare the moral teachings and practices of the religions in a world marked by a diversity of religious and moral traditions. Our approach to the meaning and method of religious ethics is, in this light, decidedly postsecular.

Sadly, too often the complexity of religious life is reduced by scholars, political figures, and the media to one or another dimension of human behavior (economic, social, political, psychological, aesthetic). Among thinkers interested in ethics, there has been a drive to interpret the religions from the perspective of Western philosophical ethics. We are told, for instance, that Christian ethics modifies elements of a Kantian ethics of duty. Other thinkers interpret the religions in terms of narratives, ideas about the Good, or virtue ethics. Admittedly, there are good reasons for interpreting Christian moral beliefs and practices in philosophical terms. The early Church Fathers during the so‐called Patristic period (100–400 CE) often insisted on the harmony between Christian convictions and Plato's (429–347 BCE) conception of the Good, Stoic ideas about natural law, and philosophical accounts of human well‐being (eudaimonia), especially widespread teachings about the virtues. In the mix, philosophical as well as biblical ideas were transformed in distinctive and decisive ways. Christians drew on and transformed Greek and Roman ideas in different ways than Muslim or Jewish thinkers did. So, the same blending of religious and “philosophical” reasoning about the moral life can be found in medieval Islam and Judaism even as Buddhism, to cite another example, drew on the philosophical resources of various Indian schools of thought, which themselves gave rise to what is now called Hinduism.

The fact that religious traditions are often marked by the incorporation of nonreligious forms of moral theory, concepts (e.g. virtue), accounts of justice, and ideas about goodness is the deep historical background to the emergence of “religious ethics” in the Western Academy. Over the last two centuries or so there emerged the study and comparison of religious moral teaching through the interpretative lens of philosophical forms of ethics. The grounds of comparison, that is, what ideas made comparison possible and fruitful, have often been the fact that the world's religions teach some version of the “Golden Rule” (“do unto others as you would have done unto you”). In Hinduism, the Laws of Manu (Mānava‐Dharmaśāstra) II.161 states: “Though deeply hurt, let him never use cutting words, show hostility to others in thought or deed, or use aberrant language that would alarm people.”² To cite another example, The Analects (Lunyu), a basic Confucian text, reads at 12:2: “‘Go out into the world as if greeting a magnificent guest. Use the people as if offering a magnificent sacrifice. And never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. Then, there will be no resentment among the people or the great families’.”³ Further, the religions praise similar virtues and traits of character, like humility, courage, and compassion. Principles like the Golden Rule and various virtues provide the means to isolate commonalities and note the differences among the moral teachings of religions. The need to find analogies among religious traditions, that is, similarities within differences, is basic to this book. Yet we do so not only in terms of shared principles or virtues, but with respect to features of moral existence and dimensions of ethics that come to light once the resources of the religions help to shape a moral theory and ethics. We seek to develop the meaning and method of religious ethics from within religious resources mindful of the fact that those same resources bear through time the interrelation of multiple sources of moral wisdom.

In this light, religious ethics is (i) careful and critical reflection on the moral beliefs and practices of the religions in order (ii) to orient and guide the moral lives of people. However, too often work in “religious ethics,” as a scholarly discipline, takes the actual religious beliefs and practices as merely the “data” for analysis and interpretation through the categories of Western moral philosophy. To be sure, we have not ignored philosophical theories, quite the contrary. Although there is some warrant for a philosophical strategy of defining the task of religious ethics, it neglects to ask the two orienting questions of this book: what do the religions contribute to moral theory, and, further, can one develop an approach to religious ethics from within the resources of the religions themselves?

Given those two questions, this book involves a hermeneutical or interpretive circle. On the one hand, we use the resources of the religions in order to develop the method of religious ethics, that is, how one can and should think about and evaluate the moral beliefs and practices of a religion. On the other hand, the method is applied to those same religious resources in order to clarify the meaning of religious ethics. The argument is admittedly circular. It draws on the religions in order to develop an account of religious ethics that uses religious resources. Our hunch is that some will find this “circularity” bothersome even though it is actually part of every kind of ethics.⁴ The resources of ethics, even those that fasten on divine revelations and commands, are actual human beliefs about good and right actions and relations about which an ethics seeks to understand and to give orientation. Stated otherwise, we are involved in ethical thinking as living agents in the very task of developing an ethics to guide our lives. Yet, this “circularity,” one that is banished in the hard sciences and also systems of deductive logic, is not vicious. It is, we hope to show, productive of new insight about how people can and should live. In any case, we start with the received wisdom of the religions, admit that it is credible evidence for developing a theory of ethics, and then submit it to scrutiny in order to develop that theory.

So, there are two deep convictions that undergird the writing of this book and that the book seeks to explain and to sustain. First, we are convinced that the religions provide resources for thinking about the moral life that are as complex, subtle, and persuasive as standard options in Western moral philosophy. No doubt our philosophical colleagues will find that to be an audacious claim, but one thing that it has meant is the need to develop the structure and coherence of religious ethics on its own terms. And that is why, again, this book will seem odd to some readers. In more technical terms, the book is an exercise in hermeneutical reconstruction of “religious ethics.” We draw on the symbolic, textual, and ritual resources of religions in order to articulate the structure of religious ethics around basic tensions that characterize religious and human life. Culling insights and ideas from the religions we present the meaning and method of religious ethics in order to articulate the insights and problems in actual religions and also to provide some guidance for reflection on living a religious and moral life.

Our first conviction, then, is that the religions developed over millennia and in every culture on this planet have resources for deepening one's thinking about life and how one can and ought to live. This does not mean that this book is antiphilosophical. On the contrary, we explore philosophical problems, engage philosophical theories, and treat the works of philosophers. The point is that we explore, engage, and treat philosophical questions from within the resources of the religions in order to show the depth and subtlety of religious visions of the moral life. Our first conviction is meant to counter the trend to make the moral insight of the religions mere instances of some general theory of ethics and falsely to harmonize religious outlooks.

A second conviction cuts in the other direction, as it were. It aims to counter another trend in the academy and global social life. This trend is the belief that religious outlooks are so utterly unique that they cannot be compared. On that line of reasoning there are no similarities among religious outlooks and therefore religious ethics must always and only work within a specific tradition, say “Hindu ethics.” Widespread in numerous places around the world, the idea is that one cannot pass moral judgment on other moral outlooks, religious or not, because those outlooks can be understood and rightly evaluated only on their own terms. This is potentially a form of moral relativism: the claim that there are no valid general moral ideas or beliefs that can be used to judge moral outlooks because every moral belief about what is good, bad, justice, unjust, etc. is relative to some people's moral outlook. The human world is then a bewildering hodgepodge of incommensurable moral and cultural value systems.⁵ This also has the added effect of undermining the very religious impulse exhibited in the religions themselves that have prompted religions to engage with philosophers and with members of other religious communities. If scholars, religious leaders, and individuals cannot find possible ways to compare traditions and to learn from others about what makes a good, just, and right human life, then our supposed uniqueness is merely fodder for social conflict. Moral relativism may seem to be a comforting and consoling outlook but only until the point where some community has the power to dominate another under the idea that “might makes right.” Relativism has the added effect of undermining the religious impulse exhibited in the religions themselves that has prompted them to engage with members of other communities about moral matters.

Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method seeks to provide readers with an account of religious ethical thinking and acting in the world. The religions, on our account, seek to articulate the structure of moral existence attuned to tensions that define human life and to orient life within those tensions. “Religious ethics” denotes a way of doing ethics in terms of the profound insights of the religions. It explains, assesses, and deploys the wisdom of the religions in order to show that, ironically, the religions explain us. The position presented in the following chapters provides then a way to interpret and to understand how the religions provide distinctive responses to the tensions that constitute the meaning and structure of human life when seen through the resources of the religions. It is appropriate, then, that we turn next to explain in more detail the “task” of religious ethics and therefore to clarify basic concepts as well as the structure of this book.