Modern Jewish Ethics since 1970 : Writings on Methods, Sources, and Issues

The field of Jewish ethics is never far from foundational questions about how to do Jewish ethics – and these questions are inseparable from other kinds of scholarly conclusions or prescriptions. In part because Jewish ethics is inherently deliberative, the volume is organized not by standalone essays but by small sets of curated conversations between scholars from different time periods, academic subfields, and religious commitments (or lack thereof). These deliberate juxtapositions are to encourage scholars and students to develop similar meta-ethical analyses on Jewish ethics, broadly construed. Jewish ethics is not just a set of propositions or principles; nor can it be reduced to a single trajectory of thought or abstracted as an elaborate system of ideas. Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, human relations and responsibilities. This volume presents some of those conversations to spark many more.

A compelling and generative way to study and teach Jewish ethics.
 
The field of Jewish ethics is characterized by foundational questions about how to do Jewish ethics—questions that are inseparable from other scholarly work within the subject area. The essays in this collection show that analyzing methods of reasoning is a productive approach for both students and teachers of Jewish ethics. The volume is organized not by standalone essays but by sets of curated conversations between scholars from different time periods, academic subfields, and religious commitments (or lack thereof). These deliberate juxtapositions encourage scholars and students to undertake similar meta-ethical analyses on Jewish ethics as related to theories and methods, communities, constructions of the human, and bioethics. For the editors, Jewish ethics is not just a set of propositions or principles; it cannot be reduced to a single trajectory of thought or abstracted as an elaborate system of ideas. Instead, Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, and human relations and responsibilities. This volume, which presents such discussions, is certain to spark many more.