Religions and universal ethics

Abstract

Have religious contributed or have they rather been an obstacle to the advance of ethics of universal scope? To answer this question, the author constructs her response starting fundamentally from the Christian religion. Beyond the ethics of maximums of a community of believers, and of the transcendent foundations that it requires, she tries to describe a continuity between the universalizable aspects of the religion and an ethics today left to the arbitrage of an always fallible reason. The heteronomy that a God would impose on the believers' community accepts the challenge of traveling towards a tolerance detached from rules with religious content. Even recognizing the implicit universality in confessional doctrines, ethics today must remain attached to an intramundane hope where a certain type of charity is revealed exempt from any last foundations.