Abstract
We examine a hitherto unstudied debate, turning on the epistemology of value judgements, between Ashʿarīs and Baṣran Muʿtazilīs of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Al-Ghazālī and al-Rāzī countered Muʿtazilī ethical realism, here defended by al-Malāḥimī, by developing an emotive subjectivism underpinned by increasingly sophisticated psychological accounts of ethical motivation. Value judgements, they maintained, arise not from knowledge of some ethical attributes of acts themselves, but from subjective inclinations, which are often elusive because they can be unconscious or indirect. We also argue against the widespread notion that Ashʿarīs espoused an anti-rationalist ethics, and we show that they were not only ethical rationalists, but also the more innovative side in this debate.
Highlights
Two main metaethical theories were advanced in medieval Islamic theology and jurisprudence
Al-Malāḥimī’s defence of the Mutazilī ethical theory against al-Ghazālī’s attack occurs in the discussion on “the judgements that apply to acts”, that is, the value judgements of ethically evaluable acts
Al-Malāḥimī fails to rule out this possibility when he claims that the repulsion we experience towards bad acts derives from reason rather than disposition, which is to say that it is grounded in our knowledge of the external world, rather than in emotive repulsion
Summary
Two main metaethical theories were advanced in medieval Islamic theology and jurisprudence. The ethical attributes of certain types of act are self-evident, and known immediately (ḍarūrī) to all sound-minded human beings, while the ethical attributes of other types of act are not self-evident but can be acquired through inference (naẓarī) Against this theory, classical Asharīs, as I showed elsewhere, counter with an anti-realist position, arguing that when value expressions are encountered in ordinary language—that is, not in the specialised, religious-conventional sense of being commanded or prohibited by God—they are grounded not in the extra-mental reality of acts themselves, but in the subjective experience of attraction and repulsion, which arise from the disposition (ṭab) of an individual in reaction to things.. Al-Bāqillānī identifies the knowledge that constitutes the intellect firstly by eliminating two subdivisions of immediate knowledge that
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