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Studying and Advocating

Upon reading Scott Davis’s compelling work Believing and Acting, I am struck that the pragmatic turn in religion and ethics has taken three primary forms. That is, pragmatism has been understood as (1) a scholarly approach to the study of religious ethics; (2) a description of the social practices of reasoning by which communities work through disagreements and come to shared norms; and (3) an ethical program suggesting a way that human communities ought to come to such agreement and disagreement; or some combination of these three. Davis’s book falls primarily into the first category, as he outlines a pragmatic approach to the study of religion and comparative ethics. In my brief remarks here, I want to recount the key features of this approach, which I do indeed regard as the most productive avenue of studying religious ethics. However, I would also like to suggest that it may be difficult to separate the pragmatic scholarly approach from options (2) and (3) for understanding pragmatism as listed above. In other words, it may be that a more robust, normative form of pragmatism follows logically from the way in which Davis has outlined his approach to inquiry.