Current Issue: Volume 15, Number 1 (2024) The Talmud as an Ethical Prompt

Introduction

This essays in this special issue of the Journal of Textual Reasoning propose an approach to moral reasoning that models it as a conversation between an individual or community and a specific ethical prompt. An ethical prompt is not simply a nudge or push to do the right thing, but a source or text—though it could be a work of art, a concrete experience—that sparks a process of thinking, reflection, and discernment. This encounter expands our mental toolbox by providing new data and methods of reasoning, thereby deepening our capacity for ethical decision-making. In some cases, these texts may offer us values or models that can be imported into our daily lives. The primary aim of this type of reasoning, borne out in the present collection of studies, is to enter into a conversation that stretches and transforms our moral frameworks rather than to identify or adopt wholesale responses from ancient sources.

I. Text as Ethical Prompt

II. Idea as Ethical Prompt

III. World as Ethical Prompt