A Comparative Look at the Normative Aspect of Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi and Alasdair Macintyre's Thought

In recent decades, liberalism has faced a barrage of criticism directed to it by socialists in western world and Muslim thinkers in East. The present paper studies and compares the normative state of the aforementioned critics, which is contrary to the moral situation in liberal societies. To this end, Alasdair Macintyre is selected as the representative of socialism and Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi as the representative of Islamic thought. The result of the comparison between the view of each of these two thinkers shows that both of them criticize the liberal extreme individualism and ego-centrism in relation to morality as reflected by the negative aspect of their thoughts. However, the positive aspect of their views or their alternatives for this moral system is different. Macintyre supports socio-centrism in ethics and defines social life as something which has value in itself which gives form to morality, but Ayatollah Misbah Yazdi defines revelation and, in some cases intellect as the source of moral standards and rejects the idea that society possesses value in itself and holds that it is a means for meeting material and spiritual needs. Both thinkers seem to agree that felicity is the final end of morality and support state's participation in preserving morality.