Happy Easter! :e4e:
Of course I picture H&G wearing attachable bunny ears while they are running wildly around the neighborhood looking for easter eggs
lain:
Universal versus particular ethics can be understood in a few different ways. Ethics can be particular in the sense of being described to a single particular community, like for example Jewish ritualistic and dietary laws. It can also be particular in the sense of being revealed in a specific culture and not be deducible from reason.
Universal ethics can both mean ethics that are universal in the sense of specific rules being obvious to all reasonable people or it can be more phenomological as in saying that being merciful is a universal human phenomenon that must be supressed in order to act against it, and it need not have any particular expression, love and mercy can expressed particularly within different cultures while the phenomenological inclination remains universal.
Sufism for example is a typical example of universal religious ethics. It claims that the mystical search inwards in human nature reveals a transcendent unity of all religions which reveals an ethics of love and compassion as the highest ethics, it is a sort of mystical phenomenology if you want.
Very conservative and literal understandings of the Islamic sources on the other hand leans more towards a particular ethics, the ethics of the Islamic society. Those are the extremes, the Islamic sources have elements of both.