TWO NEGLECTED CLASSICS OF COMPARATIVE ETHICS

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison.     

A COMPARISON OF TWO COHORTS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN RESPONSES TO THE MALE-FEMALE RELATIONS QUESTIONNAIRE

Two cohorts of male and female introductory psychology students from the same university, tested in 1978 and 1992, were given the male or the female form of the Male-Female Relations Questionnaire (MFRQ; Spence, Helmreich, & Sawin, 1980), which assesses respondents' personal gender-role preferences and behaviors in interpersonal situations. In both genders, the means of the majority of MFRQ items decreased significantly from 1978 to 1992, but item means were still fairly close to the midpoint of the response scale. Women tended to be less willing than men to assign leadership roles to men but in social interactions with the other gender, they admitted to deliberately acting "feminine" as much or more than men admitted to acting "masculine." Correlations between the MFRQ and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1978) were also determined and found to be substantial. Psychometric differences between the instruments suggested, however, that the MFRQ provides unique information and may often be more useful than the AWS in detecting relationships with other variables.