Ethics and Advocacy

Comparative Religious Ethics seeks to promote multiple “encounters with difference,” but what capacities should we be developing, in ourselves and our audiences, to engage genuinely with multiple views? A careful attention to analysis, leading to appreciation though not assent, has marked many of the most interesting efforts in CRE over the past few decades. But some critics think that such efforts fail, and that the protocols of contemporary culture and scholarship turn encounter into consumerist amusement and genuine toleration into indifference, diluting subjects’ own convictions and producing “Don Juans of the myths, courting each one in turn.” This paper directly addresses these challenges, trying to appreciate their power while still proposing that constructive encounters with difference are possible, though they may require more serious self-reflection than scholars have often theorized.

Ethics is not only anemic, but vacant without a modicum of advocacy, as ethics defines the good without remaining starkly neutral. Comparative religious ethics charts real-time communities, facing salient and timely issues. Yet, informed ethics complicates the good by viewing it comparatively. Comparative ethics requires attention not only to textual, traditional, or theoretical factors, but dynamic, historically-rooted social circumstances.  The first case concerns Soto Zen norms during Japanese annexation of Korea in the early 20th century, in which many celibate Korean monastics were required to marry.  By Korean independence in 1945, a small minority of celibate Korean monastics remained.  The second case charts San Francisco Zen Center’s leadership transitions from a beloved root teacher of Soto Zen lineage, Shunryu Suzuki, whose American successor’s misdeeds pushed restructuring of the community to prevent ethical violations. Comparing Buddhist community adjustments after ethical challenges, this study affirms aspects of advocacy in comparative, informed ethics.

This paper will attempt to translate East Asian thinking into a new cultural setting where feminist and pluralist discourses prevail by pointing out certain limitations of Western feminist discourse and comparatively reinventing femininity as an alternative concept. Firstly, Western mainstream epistemology and ontology will be critically reviewed from the gender perspective. The paper will argue Western mainstream thought operates through masculine discourse and that some feminism is actually a byproduct of and reinforces it. Next, it will examine East Asian gendered cosmology, systematically completed in Neo-Confucianism and discuss how the gender binary framework of yinyang can remove the charge of essentialism and modify Western masculine discourse and feminism. It will be argued that the Dao can offer a new feminist paradigm. Here, femininity is not an antithesis of masculinity in the confrontational male-female dichotomy, but an alternative discourse at a larger level that transcends and encompasses that dichotomy.

Convinced of the value of Comparative Religious Ethics as a framework both for conveying foundational concepts and for nurturing multireligious fluency, an ethicist with deep experience in chaplaincy education presents an approach to ethics instruction for professional spiritual caregivers that is informed by interreligious studies, comparative theology, and post-colonial methods and concerns. It is a model through which chaplains-to-be learn best practices of comparison-making as they broaden and deepen their understanding of worldviews and ethical theories beyond their own. At least as importantly, it is a model that facilitates the understanding of the interconnectedness of individual and systemic issues that impede equity; hence it develops competencies that enable spiritual care to be provided justly. Among its goals is to ensure that, when confronted with calls to serve as advocates, chaplains be well equipped to know whether, when, and how to respond.