An Examination of Muḥaqqiq Iṣfahānī's View concerning Moral Propositions and Values

Shaykh Muḥammad Ḥusayn Iṣfahānī, the Shiite scholar of Ūṣūl al-Fiqh (principles of Islamic jurisprudence), has appealed to remarks by Muslim philosophers in order to give a common-sense picture of the moral propositions being types of “mashhūrāt” (generally held) propositions and provided a new theory. According to his view, moral goodness and badness amounts to being praiseworthy or blameworthy, because semantically speaking, moral value is meant to refer to being worthy of praise and blame. There are two elements in Muḥaqqiq Iṣfahānī’s ontological account of moral goodness and badness: praise and blame by rational people, and an instrumental view of the praise and the blame, that is, rational people praise or blame an action because moral actions are ways to protect the social system, gain interests, and prevent harms. We criticize Iṣfahānī’s view in that, first, our evaluations of the moral are made in terms of discovery, rather than construction, and second, the value we perceive in the moral is one that can be perceived by seeing their essences, and so, they do not have an instrumental nature. In this paper, after an analysis of the gist of Muḥaqqiq Iṣfahānī’s claim and its implications, we will criticize his view.