Research Quarterly in Islamic Ethics
Year:2015 | Volume:7 | Issue:26|Papers Count:8

The two theories of “ideal observer” and “divine command” are theories on constructionism and voluntarism. According to the ideal theory, ethical realities are defined based on the attitudes of the assumed ideal observers and the foundation of these theories is formed on negation of the independent ethical realities. Therefore, existence of independent and evident ethical realities based on which human reason could be revealed is repudiated and ethical reality is considered as acceptable / unacceptable things proposed by some ideal observers. For this reason, these observers do not have independent ethical virtues and they are not obliged to observe any ethical principles or values in their own ethical judgments. The theory of divine command includes various versions and the theory of ideal observer along with its meta-ethical principles is totally similar to some varieties of this theory. Meanwhile, equality of the nature of the ideal observer theories and divine command of Asharites is significant. It appears that the theory of ideal observer is the same as Asharites’ being unconditionally represented in relation to existence and lack of ideal observers in non-religious form. Describing and comparing these two theories, the paper intends to reveal the identical nature of the both theories.

The Book “the Secret of Prophet Mohammad’s Midnight Journey to the Seven Heavens in Explanation of Al-Mi’raj Hadith” is written by Ayatollah Sa’adatparvar. Analyzing the discourse of a part of its introduction, his recognition method about this hadith has been investigated in this paper. The paper aims at investigating the particular discourse pattern of the author in analyzing the document of Mi’raj narration to reveal the hidden dimension of this discourse and adopting a meta-method, the methodological dimensions of this book are evaluated. Finally, by applying this particular case, the special requirements of document-mining in the mystical and ethical narrations are explained as a “general pattern” in a systemic manner. The theoretical framework of this study is based on theories of three sciences of “deduction principles”, “Rijal” “and “Derayat al-Hadith”, its methodology is a combination of discourse analysis and documentary method and the type of the study is analyico-descriptive based on case study. The results of the discourse analysis of this text include: discovery of the book’s scientific and technical infrastructures and usage of a more widespread range of conventional methods of document-mining i.e. fundamental, expertise and rijali analyzes of the Hadith document by the author; usage of three other methods based on methodology reason, the book and tradition including presentation of Hadith to the Holy Quran, presentation of Hadith to other narrations and obtaining credibility of Hadith by the help of experts (Hadith experts researching on mysticism and ethics).

The rationalist approach has been dominated on the education environment of values for many years. Unilateral and excessive focus on this approach has revealed ignorance of a vast part of human implicit learning and his intuitive ethical judgments which have been the source of many ethical behaviors. The study intends to answer the question that why only direct and deductive educations about values cannot guarantee ethical realization in the educators’ behavior. It seems that direct and theological education of values is not the only source of human ethical learning, but a great deal of human learnings are happened implicitly and in the form of real experiences. To analyze this hypothesis, new viewpoints about implicit, practical and intuitive understanding learning types have been investigated and proved in that human ethical learnings are occurred in two direct and implicit ways while despite of cooperation of these two methods, the majority of our judgments and ethical actions are happened intuitively. At the end, some suggestions on ethical education programs have been proposed to have more efficiency.

Following the problem led by this question that what is the role of “the position of education of ethics in classifying educational purposes” on its efficiency and also following inefficiency concerns on the common educations of ethics and lack of guaranteeing realization of ethics in people’s behavior, the study is began with two presumptions: 1. Failure of the common programs about education of ethics is a multifactorial phenomenon and the condition of ultimate success lies on removing all of the obstacles by adopting a holistic perspective; 2. Based upon the methodology of attaining success in every activity on having a correct idea of that activity, one of the factors in failure of common educations of ethics is due to promotion of reductionist ideas from education of ethics. Then, this hypothesis is driven that ignoring the position of education of ethics in classifying the educational purposes has brought about reductionist ideas about it. Therefore, the common reductionist ideas and perceptions from education of ethics are investigated based upon lived experience (experiment), observation and interview. After that, it has been attempted to propose a more comprehensive pattern according to its dimensions in classifying the educational purposes. Based on the study and achieving an appropriate pattern, some of the requirements of effective and efficient education of ethics, such as Priority of emotional literacy to ethical literacy and consideration of two principles of diversity of purposes (partial) in education of ethics and the principle of methodological pluralism in education have been explained.

One of the important virtues in the field of ethics is “courtesy” and ethics philosophers have widely discussed the nature of courtesy and its components. The contemporary western philosophers’ viewpoints have been analyzed and explained in this paper. Their viewpoints could be classified into four groups: 1. the belief-oriented theory; 2. Ignorance-based theory; 3. Will-oriented theory; 4. Asymmetry-based theory. Analysis of these theories reveals that some of them are not comprehensive and some others fail to justify the fact that courtesy is a virtue. Finally, the belief-oriented theory has been selected as the autonomous theory which seems to be free from the raised problems in the four mentioned viewpoints.

The subject of "harm" and its binary distinction is one of the most recent topics in moral philosophy which has been dealt with by some moral philosophers in the last three decades. In recent years, there have also been some Iranian publications under this topic. The do/allow distinction is one of the distinctions. Moderate and minimalist philosophers who are advocates of this distinction offered some reasoning to support this distinction as well as the prohibition of doing harm, but they have been criticized by extremist philosophers. The accounts that have been suggested by some advocates like, Donagan, Foot, Quinn and Bennet, are "interference with the well-being", "action/inaction and positive/negative rights", etc. The opponents believe that, by the reasoning of advocates of constraint against doing harm, doing harm is prohibited and allowing harm is permitted, whereas on their basic reasons, sometimes, allowing harm is forbidden as much as doing harm. So the advocates of this distinction must reconsider their reasons or abandon them. This paper provides a description, analysis and critique of the distinction and its critiques.

Although the acquisition knowledge has preparing and introductory relation with regard to practice and is considered as its required condition, it lacks enough capability for definite guarantee of practice. Explicating the function of the acquisition knowledge achieved from different faculties of the soul and analyzing its position in principles and process of practice can to some extent explain why there is a gap between theory and practice. On the contrary, intuitive knowledge has a deeper effect than the acquisition one in respect to guaranteeing the practice, and the higher the degree of intuitive knowledge, the less the opposition of practice against this knowledge will be. After defining knowledge and practice and mentioning its types from Ibn Arabi and Imam Khomeini’s viewpoints, the paper deals with comparing the effect of acquisition and intuitive knowledge on practice.

Criminal affairs have public dimensions and government is at least one side of this story and even when there is a private complainant, it is the government’s right and duty to come to trial of the accused people and to punish the criminals by its intervention and applying power. Therefore there will be a kind of relationship between the accused person and government. In Imam Ali’s judicial tradition we can observe some affairs related to the accused people which could be taken into account among the accused people’s rights and accordingly discuss the ethics and manner of encountering the accused people within the framework of principles (absolute, relative, and privative). Certainly, we have also observed violation of some principles such as lack of investigation with the aim of obtaining a greater prudence such as Imam’s investigation from his agents with the intention of controlling them and discovering their probable infidelity and fault.