Response to Schweiker
Abstract
RESPONSES AND REJOINDERS Response to William Schweiker I READ WILLIAM SCHWEIKERâS paper with great interest and a mounting sense of excitement. Here are the reflections of someone who has thought deeply about matters of religious ethics in traditions and is raising and responding to questions that confront all scholars in the inquiry into religions. Schweiker addresses three broad areas, the problem of comparison in religious ethics and whether any comparison is the imposition of a particular set of ideas, the problem of the nature of moral dispute and different accounts of it (particularists versus universalists, constructivists versus realists, and virtue ethics versus deontology), and the organization of graduate education in religious ethics. In the context of the organization of the field into a dichotomy between a tradition-constituted rationality of one particular tradition and a nontradition-specific theory of knowledge, he advocates moving beyond this dichotomy toward a multidimensional hermeneutics that points toward the goal of religious humanism. Such a multidimensional hermeneutics, if I have understood him correctly, would help in the expression and reconstruction of religious outlooks themselves âin order that they might serve their own most humane expression.â This articulates a position that I am in broad sympathy