first section, it is not important for this purpose that everyone agree on the foundation of
ethics or the substantive goal at which the moral life aims; nor is it important that
everyone have the same motive to be moral. It is not even important that everyone think
of wrongdoing the same way—as a sin, avidya, a violation of someone's rights, or
something else—as long as they agree on what is wrong, and they only have to agree on
that within a certain core area of human behavior.
What are the prospects for a common morality? One based on natural law? Divine
commands? Universal reason? It is widely believed that there is virtually no hope for a
common morality based on divine commands, and I think that must be true. Natural law
and Kantian universal reason may both provide some help, but so far with only limited
results.^14 It seems to me that one of the lessons of cross-cultural experience is that even
though most people find the metaphysics
end p.361
and theology of another culture hard to swallow, they can usually relate to the narratives
that have an important place in other cultures, even those that are radically different from
their own. That includes other cultures' paradigms of good persons, those they seek to
imitate. Of course, most of us would have no trouble distinguishing a Christian saint from
a Stoic sage or a Buddhist arahant. My point is not that the exemplars are identical, but
that for the most part, we have no trouble understanding why most of them are worthy of
being imitated. Even the alleged exceptions, such as terrorist leaders, prove the rule
because they get a very different reaction from those outside their own extremist groups
than do the more standard moral exemplars in the major religions.^15 I believe it is likely
that a wide range of virtues is represented by all or almost all of the moral paradigms in
the major cultures, both religious and nonreligious, in different parts of the world, even
though there are some differences in the particular acts that are thought to express the
virtues. A common morality would in principle be that morality that derives from the
overlapping character traits of moral exemplars in a wide range of cultures. Particular
moralities distinctive of individual cultures would include the nonoverlapping traits of
their exemplars. Religiously based moralities have an important function to serve in the
development of a common morality because they have richly described moral exemplars.
In contrast, secular ethics in the Western world differs from religious ethics, not so much
in having different exemplars, but in not having exemplars at all. This is particularly true
of consequentialist and deontological ethics, both of which aim for universality by
constructing entire moral systems out of the thinnest of moral concepts.
My view is that if the aim is universal agreement, that is the wrong way to go about it.
Full universal agreement is no doubt impossible in any case, but a workable common
morality is more likely to arise from dialogue between richly developed religious
moralities than between those who develop the most abstract systems and everyone else.
If that is right, religious ethics has an important function in society quite apart from its
importance in religious communities themselves.