Document Type : .
Author
Official researcher of Masoomiya Research Center
Abstract
If someone intends to describe their behavior and dispositions as good or evil or make a moral assessment of the others’ behavior, they need to know the good and evil. Schools of moral philosophy have responded to the need based on their different foundations and approaches, and as a result there are three main theories of morality: teleological ethics, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics. Islam’s school of morality has its own viewpoint, but it has not taken the form of a theory. One of the ways to infer the moral theory of Islam is through explaining commonalities and differences between schools of morality and morality-themed statements in the Koranic verses and hadiths. Several researches have been conducted using this method. However, in spite of Nahj al-Balagha’s substantial credence as a comprehensive hadith and morality-themed book, no research was found which would examine the Islamic moral viewpoint as narrated by Nahj al-Balagha. Thus, this study has chosen consequentialism to ask the question of what is the relationship between the theory of morality and the viewpoint inferred from Nahj al-Balagha. The comparison was drawn using the analytic-descriptive method. The research result was that while there are many morality-themed phrases in Nahj al-Balagha which establish a relationship between actions and their consequences, Nahj al-Blagha’s viewpoint is not a consequentialist one, because morality-themed statements in the book are characterized by features that are out of line with consequentialism, such as a lack of connection between goodness of some actions and their consequences; desirability of an action regardless of one’s personal interest; different moral responsibilities towards different people; and the gradation of the concepts of good and evil. Therefore, it seems that the high frequency of making mentions of the consequences of moral actions in the book has a motivational function.
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