Endorsements

Ethical systems characterised by detailed rules - such as Islamic sharia and Christian casuistry - have often been dismissed as empty formalism or instruments of social control. This book demonstrates that, on the contrary, rules often enable, rather than hinder, personal ethical life. Rules and ethics assembles anthropologists and historians to explore cases of rule-oriented ethics and their dynamics across a wide range of historical and contemporary moral traditions. Examples of pre-modern Hindu ethics and codes of civility from early modern England demonstrate how rules can form an essential element of what Michel Foucault called 'the care of the self'. Studies of Roman exemplary ethics, early modern Christian theology and the calculation of sin and merit in contemporary Muslim Palestine highlight the challenges posed by the coexistence of moral rules with other moral forms, not least those of virtue ethics. Finally, explorations of medieval and modern Islamic sharia, Christian casuistry and Jewish halakha all highlight how such traditions develop complex meta-rules - rules about rules - for managing the tensions and dilemmas that the use of rules can entail. Together, these case studies and the theoretical framework proposed in the book's introduction offer a more nuanced, cross-cultural appreciation of the role of rules in moral life than those currently prevalent in both the anthropology of ethics and the global history of morality.