Two Neglected Classics of Comparative Ethics

Journal of Religious Ethics 36 (3):375-403 (2008)
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Abstract

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison

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Citations of this work

The Ethics and Politics of Religious Ethics, 1973–2023.Richard B. Miller - 2023 - Journal of Religious Ethics 51 (1):66-107.
(The Image of) God in All of Us.Laura E. Alexander - 2019 - Journal of Religious Ethics 47 (4):653-678.

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References found in this work

After Virtue.A. MacIntyre - 1981 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 46 (1):169-171.
Philosophy and social hope.Richard Rorty - 1999 - New York: Penguin Books.
Human agency and language.Charles Taylor - 1985 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The world of thought in ancient China.Benjamin Isadore Schwartz - 1985 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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