Investigation of the Relationship between Theory and Practice in Moral Education Based on Allamah Tabataba’i’s Theory of Virtual Perceptions

The present article examines one of the important challenges in the field of moral education, namely the gap between theory and practice in moral education. The main question of the article is as follows: ‘why do, sometimes, individuals not follow the moral rules in spite of knowing them?’
The research method used in this article is an analytical-inferential one. In other words, the inference method has been used to explain the theory of Allamah Tabataba’i’s credentials from the analytical method, and in concluding and discovering the educational implications of this theory in moral education.
The results of this study show that Allamah’s theory of credentials is a different solution to the relation of opinion and practice in ethics and moral education. This fundamental difference can be seen in the separation between intrinsic goodness and virtual goodness and in proving the priority of validity of incumbency over validity of goodness, as there is no dichotomy between the theory and practice in moral education in this view. This is because human desires play their role alongside real knowledge in creating virtual knowledge, and ultimately this virtual knowledge is generated by the incitement of will and as the main cause of the incitement of will, they form a moral act.
This theory, in the educational dimension, also creates a different conception of the process of education, according to which one must prepare the peripheral and mental ground necessary for creating virtual perception along with presenting and explaining true recognition instead of focusing on reinforcement of will