JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS最新文献

Does religious ethics have anything meaningful to say about the many difficult metaphysical, ethical, and theological questions surrounding artificial intelligence (AI)? The four articles featured in this Focus Issue suggest that it does. Mariele Courtois's essay focuses on the cultivation of prudence as a necessary virtue for the moral life and raises concerns about how increasing reliance on AI may distort the nature of practical moral reasoning. Paul Scherz and Luis Vera's coauthored essay draws attention to an emerging crisis of the knowing self in the post-truth age of AI, arguing that the self is becoming alienated from the production of knowledge. Kevin Jung's essay explores how language can serve as a window into both the artificial and human mind, drawing insights from Augustine and Wittgenstein. John Pittard's essay examines the moral standing of AGIs and weighs the reasons for and against their development from a Christian perspective.

Sometimes humans face perplexing situations in which we must make a choice. We are bound by multiple obligations, and each of them requires a different and incompatible course of action. One or more obligations must go unfulfilled. We might also anticipate that, by neglecting an obligation, serious, detrimental consequences will follow for us or for others. The choice may be further complicated by the fact that we care deeply for people who could be negatively affected by our choice. Weighty situations such as these are known in ancient Indian literature as dharma saṃkaṭas. This essay reflects on two instances of dharma saṃkaṭas from the Mahābhārata, namely, the respective conflicts in the narrative of “The Hawk and the Dove” and in the dialogue of Prince Arjuna with Lord Kṛṣṇa on the battlefield, followed by post-war ruminations. These stories can help contemporary readers to think critically and creatively about dharma saṃkaṭas that may not be fully resolvable.

The idea for this issue began with an inquiry from Edmund N. Santurri to the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) coeditors. Santurri expressed interest in reaffirming the anti-dilemma position that he articulated in Perplexity in the Moral Life: Philosophical and Theological Considerations (1987) but with consideration of more recent scholarship on the topic. By contrast, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Kate Jackson-Meyer reaffirm and defend the plausibility of the moral dilemmas thesis articulated in their scholarship (see Cahill 2019 and Jackson-Meyer 2022). While these first two essays draw on resources from Christian ethics, Schillinger and coauthors Howard and Cates enrich the conversation by offering Islamic and Hindu insights that complicate Christian assumptions about moral dilemmas.

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of philosophical interest in the concept of supererogation. Although Martin Luther figures prominently in the historiography as a critic of supererogation, the particular nature of his critique and its place within his broader moral theology has been underexplored. This article offers a reconstruction of Luther's theological opposition to supererogation, demonstrating its tight connection to central elements of his spiritual and ethical vision. Three elements are identified and discussed: the relationship between faith and the Word of God, the distinction between divine and human law, and the equality of Christian vocations within the community of believers. The article concludes by suggesting the ongoing relevance of Luther's antisupererogationism for contemporary religious ethics.

This essay offers both a review of recent texts in disability studies and religious ethics as well as appreciation in the guild's growing interest in disability ethics. When the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) solicited this essay, I felt a sense that recognition of the important work that disability ethics offers to our guild had arrived. Reviewing works by Julia Watts Belser, William C. Gaventa, Lisa D. Powell, Devan Stahl, and Erin Raffety, this essay begins with a disability primer and then moves to the texts under review. These texts present the ongoing challenges surrounding disability justice and the hopes and joys that characterize the human spirit in making a way out of no way.

We take moral dilemmas to be situations where no fully “moral” resolution is possible. Even an action that is, on the whole, justified may involve an injustice against someone affected. Some philosophers and theologians rule out such dilemmas on the basis of logical incoherence, or incompatibility with the nature of a good and all-powerful God. This essay defends the plausibility of moral dilemmas in Christian ethics, in light of Augustine's and Aquinas's reflections on ambivalent decisions; challenges to modern rationalist epistemologies; and contemporary theological hermeneutics of God, God's attributes, and the problem of evil. We propose a Christian ethical response entailing communal support for agents caught in moral dilemmas, as well as social-political remediation of contributing structural injustices. Our focus is individual agents, yet we indicate how analogous dilemmas can arise for agents of institutions.

This article examines the study of Indigenous religions and ethics in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Over the past few decades, scholars have grappled with the colonial origins of religious studies. This essay focuses on the history of anthropological scholarship on Indigenous religions and the significance of this work for the growth of the academic study of religious and ethical systems. I first consider scholarship on Indigenous ethical systems produced by theologians and comparative religionists. I next consider how anthropological concepts of cultural relativity offered scholars of religion important tools to broaden and deepen understandings of Indigenous cultures. Finally, I address the limits of these anthropological tools. During this era, scholars increasingly argued that Indigenous cultural traditions were worthy of study; however, the prevailing racialized assumptions contributed to assessments of these ethical systems as inferior to Euro-American religio-ethical systems.