Cue the Chorus

The three essays by Dunn, Rapp, and Decosimo show us how comparative religious ethics is developing as a field of study. Those who do comparison today are less concerned with methods and theories than with finding an angle of vision that enables readers to locate themselves in moral reality. Precisely because resemblance is ubiquitous, as Decosimo says, comparisons do not form themselves and wait to be discovered. Comparisons are the product of the comparativist's own moral purpose. Like the chorus in Euripides' dramas, the comparative ethicist shows possibilities for recovering the moral equilibrium that is lost when we see how different things can be from how they safely seem to us in daily life.