This essay is a critical engagement with recent assessments of comparative religious ethics by John Kelsay and Jung Lee. Contra Kelsay's proposal to return to a neo‐Weberian sociology of religious norm elaboration and justification, the authors argue that comparative religious ethics is and should be practiced as a field of study in active conversation with other fields that consider human flourishing, employing a variety of methods that have their roots in multiple disciplines. Cross‐pollination from a variety of disciplines is a strength of comparative ethics, which has enlivened recent and ongoing research on ethics, not a problem to be resolved by convergence on a single, distinctively comparative project. The authors also argue in response to Lee and Kelsay that while individual comparative studies of virtue and personal formation can be flawed in various ways, this line of research has been productive and at times very compelling. Moreover, attention to comparative virtue ethics shows how scholarship on some ethical topics necessitates drawing on a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, a conclusion relevant to all work in religious ethics today.

The most interesting and perilous issue at present in comparative religious ethics is comparative ethical judgment-when and how to judge others, if at all. There are understandable historical and conceptual reasons for the current tendency to prefer descriptive over normative work in comparative religious ethics. However, judging those we study is inescapable-it can be suppressed or marginalized but not eliminated. Therefore, the real question is how to judge others (and ourselves) well, not whether to judge. Instead of bringing supposedly universal moral scoring systems to bear on reified "traditions" and "cultures," it would be better to focus on the precise details of particular practices, motifs, and theories in various settings, and compare them with an eye to substantive issues of current ethical concern.THERE IS AN AMBIGUITY OF PURPOSE embedded in the activity of comparison, which carries over into comparative studies of ethics. In most cases, one compares things of the same sort in order to judge which of them is superior, which inferior. This seems relatively obvious when it comes to restaurant or movie reviews, to scoring systems for fine wines or colleges. It might seem less so as the objects compared become more complex, like books instead of possible airline tickets. Usually complexity makes the judgments harder, more contestable, and more interesting, without changing the purposes of the comparison-discerning excellence, mediocrity, and failure, and pointing out the differences. However, this is not ordinarily how comparative religious ethics is practiced in the contemporary English-speaking academy. At present, serious comparative studies tend to aim not at discerning the finest ethic among several possibilities, but instead at various other goals-such as insightful description of unfamiliar ways of life, or the construction of suggestive typologies of religious practice and self-regulation. JRE 36.3:425-444.

Comparative religious ethics is a complicated scholarly endeavor, striving to harmonize intellectual goals that are frequently conceived as quite different, or even intrinsically opposed. Against commonly voiced suspicions of comparative work, this essay argues that descriptive, comparative, and normative interests may support rather than conflict with each other, depending on the comparison in question, and how it is pursued. On the basis of a brief comparison of the early Christian Augustine of Hippo and the early Confucians Mencius and Xunzi on the topic of "human nature," this paper advocates a particular account of comparative religious ethics, and argues for the complexity of the idea of "human nature." Different elements of this family of concerns are central to religious ethics generally, and to theories and practices of moral development and personal formation specifically.THIS ESSAY ATTEMPTS TO UNTANGLE A COMPLEX PROBLEM arising from the disputed relations of historical and comparative studies in ethics. Area studies specialists, including many in religious studies, frequently insist on the paramount importance of interpreting texts and social practices strictly in terms of their local cultural and intellectual contexts. The implication, sometimes stated explicitly, is that comparison with the cultural products of people in different contexts is at best a distraction from this paramount task, and is more likely illicit in principle, because of its tendency to abstract human artifacts from the contexts in which they were (and are) produced and used. 1

This essay explores the interrelation of skills and virtues. I first trace one line of analysis from Aristotle to Alasdair MacIntyre, which argues that there is a categorical difference between skills and virtues, in their ends and intrinsic character. This familiar distinction is fine in certain respects but still importantly misleading. Virtue in general, and also some particular virtues such as ritual propriety and practical wisdom, are not just exercised in practical contexts, but are in fact partially constituted by the mastery of certain skills. This has implications for moral psychology, specifically how we might understand the acquisition of virtue, as well as its very nature. To try to make this claim plausible I analyze two case studies from early Confucianism: Xunzı'š treatment of ritual propriety as a cardinal virtue, and Mencius's less carefully integrated treatment of excellence at moral discernment. I conclude by revisiting the question of the relations between skill and virtue, and exploring a few of the difficulties implied by my account of early Confucian ethics.

Building on influential work in virtue ethics, this collection of essays examines the categories of self, person, and anthropology as foci for comparative analysis. The papers unite reflections on theory and method with descriptive work that addresses thinkers from the modern West, Christian and Jewish Late Antiquity, early China, and other settings. The introduction sets out central methodological issues that are subsequently taken up in each essay, including the origin of the categories through which comparison proceeds, the status of these categories in the process of comparison, and the goals of comparison. In considering the question of goals, the introduction draws connections between comparative study and historical study within one tradition. Both types of analysis can bridge the gap between historical and normative work by attending to the ways in which the questions a scholar asks-not just the answers found-vary from one context to another.