The Status of Justice in the System of Jurisprudential Knowledge from the Perspective of Shahid Motahhari and Its Effect on the Relationships between Ethics and Jurisprudence

According to the principle of mutual implication between the judgments of reason and the judgments of Islamic law ("Whatever the intellect judges, Sharia judges"), which is accepted by most scholars of Shiite jurisprudential methodology, reason is considered as one of the sources of Islamic law, that is, it is possible to achieve the jurisprudential legal rule through what the reason understands. According to Shiite jurisprudents, goodness and the merit of justice and badness and the ugliness of injustice are the most important truths which on its way to achieving a religious judgment the reason understands. On this basis, the principle of justice is naturally expected to have an important status in the system of jurisprudential knowledge. However, this is not the case in existing jurisprudence. Expressing dissatisfaction with this fact, Shahid Motahhari considers this as the source of many shortcomings and deadlocks in the existing jurisprudence. He considers the reason for this to be the predominance of textualist thinking in jurisprudents and tries to refute the necessary principles to put the principle of justice in its proper place. To provide a suitable ground for maximum reliance on this principle to organize the rules of jurisprudence and the Islamic Sharia system. In this article, the principles considered by Shahid Motahari to place the principle of justice in its proper place are examined and its effect on how jurisprudence is related to ethics is considered and some of the challenges and questions ahead are evaluated.