فصلنامه نقد و نظر
سال بیست و یکم شماره 1 (پیاپی 81، بهار 1395)

In his discussion of the old problem of induction, Nelson Goodman refers to something that was later called the method of reflective equilibrium by John Rawls and was employed by him in order to infer a theory of justice in the domain of political philosophy. He claimed that in a liberal society, the selection of a particular principle regarding justice requires an arbitrary preference. To solve the problem, Rawls considers an initial situation through the developments of which people come to an agreement over the normative principles of justice. For him, these principles should be reconciled with our moral judgments concerning particular cases via the method of reflective equilibrium. The employment of this method came to be criticized by some philosophers and defended by others. It seems that ethical problems, and in particular, problems of applied ethics, cannot be solved only by an appeal to moral theories and abstract moral principles. Thus despite many controversies about this method, it is so useful in the field of ethics, and in particular, applied ethics, that some people have claimed that it is the only useful method in ethics.

With the emergence of virtue ethics in recent years, many people tackled with its weaknesses and strengths. One of the most important fundamental objections to virtue ethics is to doubt or deny internal moral attributes (virtues and vices). Some moral philosophers based such an objection on social psychology, and thus considered the attribution of internal attributes to human moral conducts as a fundamental error in attribution. Gilbert Harman and John Doris appealed to some experiments in social psychology, such as the Milgram experiment, benevolent Samurai, and Zimbardo prison, to deny internal moral attributes. They hold that it is a mistake to base a moral theory on such attributes, and thus virtue ethics is not a plausible normative theory. Proponents of virtue ethics provided several negative and positive replies to this objection. We believe that the best reply is the one based on rareness. In this paper, we delineate the problem and then examine it in detail.

Since the age of science emerged and empirical views of the world were developed, religious beliefs have been under attack by empiricists. With the emergence of logical positivism in the philosophy of science, this radical worldview led to the claim that religious beliefs are meaningless. In such a context where it seemed unexpected for there to be a dialogue between empiricists and religious believers, Anthony Flew introduced the criterion of falsifiability as the condition for the meaningfulness of religious beliefs, and this led to a heated debate between empiricists and religious believers. Flew’s Challenge was frequently reprinted and gave rise to many positive and negative reactions rooted in the brevity and ambiguity of Flew’s writing. In this paper, we examine such reactions to Flew’s view and then provide a detailed analysis of his challenge, unveiling the significant insight lurking in it; an insight that not only does not degrade religious values, but provides a foundation to elucidate religious beliefs and issues concerning the language of the religion.

The main question in this paper is the meaning and the nature of moral actions for Ibn Sina. What are the requirements of a moral action that is, for Ibn Sina, the result of observing the middle path between two opposing temperaments? And under what conditions can an action count as a moral middle term? What are the epistemic prerequisites of a moral action? And what are its ontological features? In order to answer these questions, we should first discuss the significance of cultural and ethnical requirements in providing a meaning for an action as a middle term in Ibn Sina’s moral system, and we will then analyze how the action can turn into a habit or a temperament. We then go on to show that the epistemic nature of a moral action is formed for individuals in the society as a matter of reliance on what mystics and the rulings of sharia say. The ontological nature of a moral action will be elucidated in terms of the addition of a certain form to the forms already existing in the world.

Philosophers, including Mullā Ṣadrā, have always been concerned to provide an explanation and an analysis of death. Sadra tried to give a philosophical account of death. A philosopher’s intellectual principles will indubitably affect their philosophical analysis of the problem of death and will have certain consequences and implications. In this paper, I seek to delineate what, why and how death happens from Mulla Sadra’s point of view, and I shall then elucidate the consequences of his analysis of death in terms of his philosophical principles, such as substantial motion and the soul-body relation. There are some religious doctrines, such as the naturalness, necessity, truth and existentiality of death and human survival after death, that can be better accounted for in terms of Sadraean principles. however, there are religious doctrines that seem incompatible with the Sadraean account. This paper ends with an examination of two such doctrines: that of raj’a (return of certain people after Imam Mahdi’s reappearance) and perfection in barzakh (the world after death and before the resurrection).

In his teleological ethics, Aristotle investigates moral virtues in order to present practical moral rules. What he describes in Nicomachean Ethics as virtues are characteristics which in his age Athenians considered as virtues. In this paper, we have shown that this aspect of Aristotle's ethics roots in Protagoras. On the other hand, inspired by Plato, Aristotle considers such virtues as products of intellect in discovering and inventing moral rules. Therefore, contrary to Protagoras, for Aristotle, moral rules are not relativistic and conventional. Thus, we can take Aristotelian Ethics as a synthesis of Platonic ethics, which seeks moral rules in the heavens and considers it as an unconventional product, and Protagorean ethics, which considers morality as a product of convention.