1 - Religious Ethics and Obligations to Others

Summary

In Chapter 1, I frame the book. First, I identify the questions that motivate my book. For example, to whom do we have obligations? On what terms? And why? Second, I rehearse scriptural sources that may guide religious ethicists when thinking about our obligations to severely poor people. Third, given the various intradisciplinary debates in religious ethics about definitions and distinctions, I lead the reader through important definitions in contemporary normative and practical ethics, for example, doing and allowing, agent-neutrality and agent-relativity, and institutionalism and interpersonalism. And fourth, I comment on my methodology, highlighting my commitments to contractualist deontology and the use of thought experiments in ethics.