javad danesh

The nature, scope, and conditions of moral responsibility are among the highly controversial issues in ethical studies. A significant portion of these controversies appears to arise from the ambiguity surrounding concepts like moral responsibility and free will. This research utilizes the descriptive-analytic method to analyze the concept of moral responsibility. The diverse semantic scope of the concept of moral responsibility prompts the following question: What notion of moral responsibility has led to so many disputes between compatibilists and incompatibilists? Have we not encountered the challenge where one party argues for the compatibility of causal necessity with responsibility based on the agent’s role and duty, while the other attempts to demonstrate the inconsistency and conflict between any causal predetermination and responsibility as accountability? While the initial focus of moral philosophers on issues of moral responsibility sometimes centers on three types of responsibility related to causation, duty, and moral requirement, recent works highlight two notions of responsibility concerning blameworthiness and accountability. It appears that the most precise concept of human moral responsibility towards moral requirements is "accountability."

Freedom of action and free will of the moral agent are the most challenging requirements of moral responsibility. Incompatibilist philosophers implicitly argue, in an indirect way and with the help of elements such as the constancy of the past or non-changeability of laws of nature, that previous causal determinations make any alternative actions unavailable to the moral agent, and sometimes drawing on the modal principle of the transition of lack of responsibility, they directly assert that causal necessity results in the negation of human moral responsibility. In addition to these standard arguments, however, there are other semi-direct arguments that do not rely on this principle. A major semi-direct argument considered by incompatibilists is the manipulation argument, which draws upon our intuitive conceptions of the reverse relation between the responsibility of moral agents and their non-ordinary manipulations. A well-known version of the semi-direct manipulation argument is the four-case argument by Pereboom, which begins with a particularly unordinary case and then adds conditions to it, finally reaching an ordinary agent in the determinate world. In this way, he shows that such an agent lacks moral responsibility. Against this argument, McKenna adds other cases to those introduced by Pereboom, concluding that even in a determinate world as envisioned by Pereboom, we cannot decisively say that agents are not free and morally responsible. In another argument, Pereboom rejects McKenna’s agnostic approach, asserting that this approach leaves it unclear whether an ordinarily determined agent is morally responsible or not responsible. In this article, I appraise these two views, showing that for the manipulation argument by incompatibilists, including Pereboom’s four-case argument, to work, it needs to establish its first two premises, but it fails to do.

According to the principle of alternative possibilities, an agent is only morally responsible if he could have acted differently as a decision-maker or as an actor. Frankfurt emphasizes, by contrast, that there are cases in which, although a person is not forced to make a decision or take action, it is impossible for him/her to avoid doing so, and yet the agent is morally responsible. The flicker of freedom and the dilemmatic argument are two of the philosophers' most important responses to the Frankfurt model in which he rejects the principle of alternative possibilities. According to the flicker of freedom strategy, the Frankfurt-Style examples do not eliminate all alternative possibilities, and there are still flickers of freedom. In other words, in a Frankfurt-Style example, even though the agent lacks the ordinary choices due to the presence of an intervener, he/she actually has a limited number of alternative choices, which seems to justify his moral responsibility. Fisher and Stump's robustness objection is the most important obstacle to advancing this strategy, which does not seem effective enough in defending the Frankfurt-style examples.

According to the principle of alternative possibilities, the agent has a moral responsibility for what he did only if he could have acted or decided otherwise. Contrary to this view, Frankfurt emphasizes that sometimes we encounter situations in which, although the person is not compelled to take action, it is impossible for him to avoid doing so, and yet we hold the agent morally responsible. The dilemma defense has been the philosophers' most important response to the Frankfurt model and the rejection of the principle of alternative possibilities in it and according to it, whether causal determinism is ruling among the phenomena or not, the Frankfurt’s claim does not come true and we cannot face an agent that is morally responsible for an action, while having no alternative at hand, because in the case of the lack of causal determinism, there is no necessary and predictable relationship between the previous evidence and movements of the agent and his subsequent choice and behavior. In fact, he still has before him the alternative possibility of avoiding a certain action, and in the case of necessity and causal determinism, the person's moral responsibility is not ruled out and does not become meaningless. Interfering brain process and contained obstruction are among Frankfurt's responses to this approach, which, of course, do not have the necessary efficiency in defending Frankfurt.

This paper seeks to explain and study a new approach by Fischer in solving the possible conflict between God’s fore and infallible knowledge with the moral responsibility of the agent. Even though, on one hand, Fischer considers attributes such as knowledge to be essential and infallible Divine characteristics and also attributes temporal non-Thomistic eternity to God within the temporal framework of material existents and ultimately accepts the Fixity of the Past Principle and man’s lack of control over temporally expired events and at first glance is faced with the conflict between such foreknowledge with man’s free will in his actions; however, his type of view regarding the essence of man’s free will frees him from this challenge. In Fischer’s Frankfurter explanation, free will is not a factor preceded by man’s ability to attempt an alternative act in the opposite course and therefore, even if Divine knowledge is synonymous with the one-sidedness of action, such a consequence would not be equal to man’s loss of volition and free will. In this article, after presenting a short explanation for Fischer’s view regarding Divine foreknowledge and addressing the Fixity of the Past Principle and the possibilities of alternatives and Fischer’s Frankfurter approach in encountering that, we will assess Fischer’s solution and observe that, anyway, envisioning the existence of an alternative for actions to actualize the free will of the agent is unavoidable.

According to a common view among Muslim philosophers, a moral agent has free will if and only if she is able to do an action when she wants to and is able to avoid it when she wants otherwise. Implicit in this view is the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). On the other hand, according to this view, free will is dependent on requirements such as conception, judgement, tendency, decision, and personal volition. In this paper, I discuss the bilateral defects of this view and present a reformed view on free will and moral responsibility in relation to causal predetermination in an Islamic context.

Relying on the two conditions of the “necessity of open alternatives to moral agents” and “genuine choice of the person from among the alternatives” as well as the agent being a true origin of his or her actions, incompatibilists believe that causal determination is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility. One such philosopher is van Inwagen who brings a direct argument—without drawing on notions such as “the ability to do otherwise” or “inevitability”—to show that any causal determinism is incompatible with the responsibility of moral agents, because, in his view, such an inevitable necessity amounts to the absence of the agent’s free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, we show that the first premise of this argument, and the picture van Inwagen provides for the relationship between causal necessity and free will in human actions, are unacceptable and objectionable.

Apart from the conditions for moral responsibility and the normative question regarding the relationship between this type of responsibility and the determination and necessity of the pre-eternal cause or the a priori and infallible divine knowledge, which has been one of the most interesting and challenging topics of moral philosophy in recent centuries, the scope of such responsibility and its foundation are among the key issues in this field. This paper attempts to investigate the scope of the responsibility of moral agent in Islamic perspective by relying on the analysis of religious doctrines. The moral responsibility of man is organized based on the servitude of man, and its broad realm extends so much in the universe that, on the one hand, it includes the obligations and duties of the moral agent before God and his obligations and prohibitions imposed by him, and on the other hand, it indicates the responsibility of man to himself and to the smallest and most hidden intents, thoughts, suppositions and beliefs, feelings and emotions, actions derived from one’s emotions or beliefs and, ultimately, to the other creatures around him.

The consequence indirect argument on the strength of the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) seeks to establish that causal determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility. So on the one hand, it claims that causal determinism will cause human actions arising from past events and the laws of nature and thus we have no alternative possibilities of any sort. On the other hand it insists that human moral responsibility depends on such freedom of choice and action for activity in counterfactual sequence. Thus, from the perspective of Van Inwagen, drawing of a determined world that in which a moral agent can meaningfully be held morally responsible for what he does or does not would be impossible. In this paper, we will explain and evaluate two components of Van Inwagen's claim within the framework of Islamic philosophy and Frankfurtian rule.

The different versions of van Inwagen’s indirect argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility asserts that (1) the causal necessity and determination indicates that human actions are the results of past events and the laws of nature and thus does not have any alternative possibilities, while (2) every type of human free will and moral responsibility is based on such an alternative possibility to be capable of being chosen. Agreeing with the incompatibility of causal determination and the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), Frankfurt tries to call the dependence of moral responsibility on the PAP into question. It seems, however, that the Frankfurt-style approach against the indirect argument suffers from being ambiguous in the status of the intervener. It is also incapable of explaining the significance and function of alternative possibility.

The problem of evil is challenging the belief in the omniscient، omnipotent، and wholly good God. In its logical sense and deductive form، it claims that there are some pointless evils and myriads of life disorderliness with the existence of which God’s existence and his positive attributions are inconsistent. Needless to say، the reliability of this argument is based on the trueness or at least probable trueness of the concrete statement. Nevertheless، some philosophers like Swinburne have tried to deny the statement by the answers such as Greater goods theodicy. This article tries to look closely at atheists'' logical argument and their alleged concrete statements، and then examine the Swinburne’s defense and its difficulties.

The relation of religion and ethics as two great and lofty domains of human life has received considerable attention from intellectuals throughout history, and at least from the time of Plato onward, as these two domains are responsible for the wellbeing and welfare of the mundane man and based on the degree of their dependence on or independence of each other they create totally different systems and patterns. Based on one of these assertions, ethics and ethical practices are impossible to be practiced unless by relying on the revealed teachings and this maximum reliance is to the extent that some or all of the ethical concepts would be semantically indefinable without reference to religious concepts. However, evidently, none of the various forms of such relations, even in their modified versions - which consider ethical qualities to be combined with some constraints pertaining to the voluntary acts of a compassionate and beneficent Allah - have had the strength or the stamina to overcome the critiques and problems ahead of them.

The variants of semantic, realization-based, demonstrative, and motivational and … relations between religion and ethics has long been the focus of attention among thinkers, at least from Plato onwards. For both areas undertake the prosperity and happiness of the mundane human beings, and they establish different foundations, based on the extent to which they are needless to, or in need of, one another. According to one formulation and with arguments as God’s absolute sovereignty, God’s creativeness, subsistence of accident with accident and ascription of actions to opposite attribute the exemplification of moral values and norms are contingent upon a series of religious propositions. However, ontological dependence of morality to religion, even in its more modest versions, that for example God is the legislator of moral laws, cannot overcome the troubles and criticisms like the arbitrariness of ethical attributes.

One of the main difficulties of conceptual and particularly realization-based dependence of moral attributes on religion is the irregularity of God’s will and voluntary actions and hence arbitrariness of morality derived from it. According to this critique, divine will and reluctance or command and prohibition without criteria and standards can shape moral concepts such as good and bad or at least have an influence on qualification of human actions to the predicates.But some philosophers and theologians, apart from other critiques against these two versions of religious morality, have attempted to resolve this problem by accommodating some determining factors in God, invoking to logical contradiction of bad actions, favour to attributes as divine simplicity and the like. These answers essentially have been incapable of solving this problem unless we consider the real object of God’s will and the fixed subjects of ethical propositions.

The role played by emotions, feelings, passions and moral sins and vices in human knowledge is a lasting concern of philosophers. Considering the divine knowledge as synonymous with wisdom and taking the self-refinement and self-parification as a necessary background of for divine knowledge, Mulla Sadra holds that the factors preventing the divine knowledge and those preventing the human perfection and wisdom are the same. Accordingly the proximity to sacred world and grasping the divine knowledge depend upon self-disipline and moral purification from guilties and sins like avidity, pride, egoism, back bite, ambition, hostility, drinking wine, lying … and depend upon commitment to sharia (divine law).