Abstract

This paper continues a dialogue begun in the Focus on Cosmogony and Religious Ethics published in JRE 14/1 (Spring, 1986). There Charles Reynolds and Ronald Green argued for a model of comparative religious ethics that seeks to locate certain "descriptive universals" across cultural boundaries in diverse forms of religious ethics. The present paper argues that this approach is dangerously imbalanced in its emphasis on similarities, ignoring the importance of diversity for interpreting cross-cultural phenomena and tending to impose a heterogeneous conceptual framework on all religious ethical systems examined. Using the case of the Aztec ethic, the paper argues instead for an approach that studies each particular system in depth in its own context. Such an approach, besides being more faithful to each system being examined, also carries the potential of enriching the search for universals by nuancing the description of the patterns being sought.