Whom am I to Judge? Relativism and Religious Difference

Undergraduate / Graduate

How do we evaluate people who are different from us? What grounds our evaluation of human behaviors or beliefs? At the end of the 20th century, comparative analyses of religious beliefs and ethics were heavily criticized for their ethnocentric tendencies; researchers were blamed for importing their own values on the "other". More recently, however, the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction. Comparative religious ethicists often adopt a brand of liberal moral relativism. "To each their own" is their preferred mantra. This dramatic swing within the field of comparative religious ethics opens up questions for future study: Under what conditions can we praise or blame those who are different than us? What virtues of scholarship are necessary for quality comparative work? In this course we will learn about the field of comparative religious ethics and the perils and possibilities that accompany its intellectual projects. In addition to several theoretical texts, we will read two ethnographies (Fernando 2014 and Pandian 2009) that weave in and out of comparative religious ethics. These texts focus on themes of nationalism, post-colonialism, immigration, the production and regulation of religious subjects, and the limits of our judgments on the other.