Religious Ethics and Empirical Ethics

Abstract

In recent decades, cognitive and behavioral scientists have learned a great deal about how people think and behave. On the most general level, there is a basic consensus that many judgments, including ethical judgments, are made by intuitive, even unconscious, impulses. This basic insight has opened the door to a wide variety of more particular studies that investigate how judgments are influenced by group identity, self-conception, emotions, perceptions of risk, and many other factors. When these forms of research engage ethical issues, they are sometimes called empirical ethics. This essay argues that the field of religious ethics would benefit from a more robust engagement with empirical ethics than it has thus far undertaken. In doing so, it offers a brief account of how issues of moral psychology and moral anthropology have been treated in religious ethics, and it highlights ways that the scientific findings challenge some prevailing norms in religious ethics. It ends by suggesting avenues by which religious ethics research could productively engage empirical ethics.

King, Lévinas, and the Moral Anatomy of Nonviolent Transformation

“…Despite King's constant admonishment to understand nonviolence as agape —a powerful and transformative kind of love distinct from sentimental feelings of attachment—there is often a temptation to dismiss nonviolent methods as wishful and utopian. This frequent misunderstanding of nonviolence may have been Gene Sharp's impetus when in 1973 he redefined the field with his magisterial three‐volume work. The Politics of Nonviolent Action abandoned the field's prior focus on the religious and ethical bases of nonviolence, which were central to Mahatma Gandhi and King's advocacy of the method, to focus instead on nonviolent tactics as a viable strategy of political reform.…”

“…The combination of moral theory, textual analysis, and case studies provides a template for moral-pragmatic studies of nonviolent resistance that couple evidence-based theory and empirics. In conclusion, my own study calls for more "empirical ethics" (Moret 2021) of this kind: finegrained analyses of public experiments in nonviolence that can be further tested in the realm of practical action.…”

Freedom Of Belief And Ecological Consciousness In India

“…This research is implemented in theoretical and empirical-practical ways. The first phase was implemented theoretically through studying the approaches, methods, methodologies used by such scholars of the field as Apresyan (2010), Nelson (2010), Jensen (2017), Horujy (2020), Hall (2018), Bermejo (2000), Barbato (2020), Bhat (2019), Velassery and Patra (2019), Wong (2021), Young (2019), and many others. As for the topic of religious consciousness, our special attention was not payed to this conception in general, but to the aspect of correlation with ecology.…”