{"title":"The Varied Trajectories of Engaged Buddhism: New Works on Buddhist Environmental Ethics, Interdependence, and Racial Karma","authors":"Jessica Locke","doi":"10.1111/jore.12379","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12379","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This book discussion reads three works in contemporary Buddhist social ethics alongside one another: Ogyen Trinley Dorje’s <i>Interconnected</i>, David Loy’s <i>Ecodharma,</i> and Larry Ward’s <i>America’s Racial Karma</i>. Each of these works contributes to the subfield of engaged Buddhism, which aims to bring Buddhist value theory to contemporary social and political issues in order to effect social change. The rapid development of engaged Buddhism constitutes a particularly rich moment in the history of Buddhist thought, as Buddhist ethics is showing itself to be actively in process—a tradition in the midst of rapid transformation, revision, and cross-cultural application. This book discussion interrogates these three works with that metaphilosophical and historiographical issue in mind, analyzing the particular ways in which they contribute to challenging and reshaping the traditional contours of Buddhist ethics into a contemporary social and political register. In exemplifying the approaches of translation, extending, and applying, these works demonstrate the creative and experimental moment in which Buddhist social ethics finds itself today. Such adaptations of the Buddhist tradition are historiographically significant as innovations, while also of a piece with Buddhism’s history of intercultural transmission.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45932569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reclaiming “Natural Partnership and Communication”","authors":"Brett O’Neill S.J.","doi":"10.1111/jore.12378","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12378","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The massive scale of forced displacement across the globe discloses the fractured state of the modern international order. Francisco de Vitoria’s theological approach to the law of nations, in the context of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, had a significant influence on this order’s development. This paper argues that recovering his innovative insights today can help refurbish a collective sense of international responsibility for refugees. Vitoria’s bold assertion of indigenous Americans’ dominion affirmed all human beings as members of a world commonwealth with equal claims to basic rights. The “right to travel” he articulated, by its orientation to “natural partnership and communication,” can promote refugee rights and global fraternity.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46654291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Examining Hindu Ethics: The Three Yogas in Bhāgavata Purāṇa Commentaries","authors":"Jonathan Edelmann","doi":"10.1111/jore.12377","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12377","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The object of this article is pre-colonial Hindu ways of distinguishing “the path of devotion” (<i>bhakti-yoga</i>) from “the path of knowledge” (<i>jñāna-yoga</i>) and “the path of work” (<i>karma-yoga</i>). It highlights how a developing religious group in early modern India explained and justified its path—its ethics, its ritual, its theology—while in conversation with the larger Brahminical tradition out of which it was emerging. I argue that early authors in the Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition such as Sanātana (c.1475–1554), Rūpa (c.1480–1554), Jīva (c.1510–1606), and Viśvanātha (fl. c.1650–1712) used the authority of the <i>Bhāgavata-Purāṇa</i> to elevate devotion to an ethical imperative by including and excluding the behaviors and the motives of the older and well-established paths like knowledge, works, and Patañjali’s yoga. Their ethics is connected to an ontology of god’s being in which the path of devotion is uniquely effective in revealing god’s being and uniquely salvific the among paths. I argue this discourse on the three paths is a type of Hindu ethics, but it is unclear how it might be reconstructed in rational terms to deal with contemporary issues and that its primary innovation for the time was the uncoupling of ethics from the caste system.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41619246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Taciturn Exemplar","authors":"Nai-Yi Hsu","doi":"10.1111/jore.12380","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12380","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Early Confucian thinkers have an intense interest in the external aspects of moral exemplars. This article explores this interest by unpacking a complicated relation between silence, speech, and moral cultivation in the <i>Analects</i>. Situating Confucius’s desire to be silent in a pedagogical context, this article points out a tension between speaking of moral knowledge and personalizing it. It argues that silence is considered a desirable pedagogical practice because it fosters a more intimate relation between people and the moral knowledge they receive. This article then offers a detailed analysis of several difficult pedagogical moments between Confucius and two of his most eloquent students, Zigong and Zai Wo. Their problematic ways of speaking provide cases in point that flesh out the arguments sketched above. This article concludes by reflecting on how silence can also be alienating in moral cultivation, and on how people’s styles of speech may shape who they are.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44048236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ARE MORAL VALUES OVERRIDING? HOW BEAUTY CHALLENGES ROBERT ADAMS’S THEORY OF VALUE","authors":"Martin Jakobsen","doi":"10.1111/jore.12374","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12374","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article addresses the following meta-ethical question: do moral values have a special position among other values? According to Robert Adams, moral values do have a special position and are of overriding importance. I argue that the \"overridingness\" thesis is inconsistent with Adams’s value theory that only God has value in himself and all other things are valuable to the extent that they resemble God. I consider some possible ways of integrating the overridingness thesis that are latent in Adams’s work and argue that none succeeds. My main contribution is to propose a solution to the inconsistency in Adams’s theory. I argue that a theological account of beauty gives us reason to reject the overridingness thesis. Morality overrides some other concerns, but not all other concerns.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46435972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Values to Critical Praxis: The Future of Jewish Ethics","authors":"Yonatan Y. Brafman","doi":"10.1111/jore.12375","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12375","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The major issue for religious ethics in the 21st century is a methodological one: To move beyond the paradigm that attempts to unite religious communities around indeterminate values and to establish a framework in which determinate norms and practices can be generated out of religious traditions. This essay aims to reclaim reflection on Jewish norms and practices as a site for resisting forms of domination. It proceeds by analyzing the work of two twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, Joseph Soloveitchik and Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Both thinkers recruit specific Jewish norms and practices, which they interpret as disciplines for the cultivation of dispositions that can aid in counteracting economic and political domination.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44655498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"VIRTUE AND HIERARCHY IN EARLY CONFUCIAN ETHICS","authors":"Peng Yin","doi":"10.1111/jore.12369","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12369","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Aaron Stalnaker’s <i>Mastery, Dependency, and the Ethics of Authority</i> proposes a moral vision that reclaims authority and dependency as indispensable conditions for fostering autonomy. Contemporary Western ethics, argues Stalnaker, is mired in faulty thinking about a set of linked concepts that inhibits an appreciation for the ubiquitous fact of human interdependence. The nature of authority is viewed as exclusively coercive, freedom as primarily negative, autonomy as automatically possessed, and equality as incompatible with differentiated appraisal of moral achievement and expertise. Stalnaker retrieves early Confucianism as a corrective because it does not present authority and autonomy in competitive terms. Instead, early Confucianism advocates that properly submitting oneself to the right sort of authority and dependent social relationships is the indispensable path for cultivating autonomy. The article lifts up three attractive claims of the proposal and probes the tension between virtue, hierarchy, and cosmology in early Confucianism.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49305658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"ETHICAL DISSONANCE, ETHICAL DISJUNCTURE, AND THE AUTONOMOUS SPHERES","authors":"Bradley Shingleton","doi":"10.1111/jore.12368","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12368","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The contemporary ethical landscape appears to many to be marked by a plurality of normative regions. The values and standards of one region may contrast and conflict with those of other regions, creating a sense of dissonance and discontinuity for the individual agent. This article explores how the phenomenon of such dissonance might be conceptualized. It considers the attempts of two thinkers who, following on Weber's notion of autonomous spheres, give a theoretical account of a pluralized ethical environment in terms of distinct, autonomous zones that reflect distinctive assumptions about rationality and action. While such Weber-inspired theories are compelling in some respects, they have the potential of overemphasizing the autonomy of the various regions. An alternative idea of ethical sectors, rather than orders, seeks to avoid this problem by positing a more porous, less delimited ethical landscape, one that allows for a sense of ethical identity that an agent can maintain across different sectors.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43600065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the Structure and Significance of Augustine’s Moral Grammar","authors":"Martin Westerholm","doi":"10.1111/jore.12372","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12372","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay traces Augustine’s understanding of the structuring elements that give shape to human becoming. It presents this understanding as a distinctive form of maximalism in thinking about happiness, justice, and power, and as standing apart from classical and modern alternatives in its approach to desire, power, and mediation. By tracing the way that Augustine develops a moral grammar across three distinctive constellations of concepts, it shows where influential interpretations of his work leave important elements behind, and wider contemporary conceptions may benefit from dialogue with his work.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jore.12372","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43756278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dirty Hands, Supreme Emergencies, and Catholic Moral Theology","authors":"Evan Sandsmark","doi":"10.1111/jore.12371","DOIUrl":"10.1111/jore.12371","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Is it ever permissible to commit an intrinsically evil act in order to avert catastrophe? Consequentialists say yes, denying the very concept of intrinsic evil, since the action that leads to the best consequences is by definition right. Moral absolutism, in contrast, insists that it is never permissible to commit an action that is inherently evil, regardless of the consequences. However, there is a middle position, occupied by “dirty hands” theorists, who claim that actions can be both necessary and immoral. I argue that Catholic moral theology, although generally associated with moral absolutism, can and should make conceptual space for the idea of dirty hands, both because it saves the Church from committing itself to what seem to be moral absurdities and because the phenomenon of dirty hands captures a genuine dimension of our moral experience in a fallen world.</p>","PeriodicalId":45722,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43801637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}