نشریه اخلاق وحیانی
سال هفتم شماره 1 (پیاپی 12، بهار و تابستان 1396)

Environmental issues threaten the lives of modern societies, and the environmental education can be a way out of this threatened lives. Environmental education is a process that develops knowledge, attitudes, and actions needed for treating the environmental issues. The aim of the present study is to find out the foundations and objectives of environmental education according to Ayatollah Javadi’s Views. The methodology of this research is descriptive and inferential. Apart from determining the general foundation and objective of environmental education, i.e. instructing students to be good believer men/women, six meddle objectives have been derived from Ayatollah Javadi’s works, which are: educating the monotheistic attitude towards world and environment, making the student familiar with the philosophy of creation and his/her relationship with the environment, making the student aware of his/her responsibilities for the environment, developing the sense of friendship with environment and religious responsibility for it, developing the sense of empathy with and obligation to the members of society and future generations, and training the necessary skills in developing the environment and the correct use of it. At the end, the instances of these objectives are examined in more details.

Self-deception is a common phenomenon, which every human being experiences it in his/her life. However, it is not easy to explain its nature and the effective factors in its formation. In self-deception, the individual does something that brings him/her wrong belief and false knowledge. This brief definition was not acceptable for many scholars and made them redefine self-deception by appealing to the very concept of deception. The assimilation of these two phenomenon leads to contradiction and, then, to finding a way out of this problem. Although the term self-deception has not appeared in Islamic heritage, the background of its occurrence has been well discussed under another, which is arrogance. According to Islamic views, there are ten factors for self-deception, which being aware of them, individuals can keep themselves away from self-deception. This paper, which has a descriptive-analytic methodology, in the first place looks at the definition and nature of self-deception, and then turns to the epistemic-psychological factors in its formation according to the Islamic views, especially the views of Ayatollah Javadi Amoli. At the end there is a discussion on the ethical implications of this phenomenon.

Some of the universal and absolute ethical propositions in the religious sources, despite their universal appearance, have quantifiers with limited scopes. Even there are instances where we know it for certain that the proposition is not universal, but it is apparently absolute or universal. This issue makes us suspicious even about the universality and particularity of other propositions. In the present study, for finding out the real quantifier of these kinds of propositions, we consult the interpretations of Quran and Hadith commentaries, as well as using philosophical and logical analyses. The results show a few possibilities: (1) the propositions are particular, which is against the appearance of the propositions and can be only applied when the proposition has no quantifier, but when there is a quantifier, this possibility is not applicable; (2) relinquishment to the most perfect person, which is dependent on the acceptance of the “relinquishment rule”; (3) the propositions being the expressions of the requirement not the total cause, i.e. considering these propositions in the category of duties, and their universality being due to their nature, not for all cases; (4) particularity after the acceptance of the conventional appearance of these text in absolute or universal forms; (5) predicating on the polarized levels of meaning. The third, fourth and fifth possibilities can be merged. When we know that universal or absolute propositions in religious texts are not always universal and that they may have been restricted or particularized or predicated on different levels of meaning or they are only expressing the requirements and the requirements may have been vanished, our interpretations of religious ethical texts become more accurate and the claims for universality go away. The universal appearance may be due to rhetorical objectives and for recommendation and warning about a certain issue. Even in the cases that the universal quantifiers are explicitly present, we consider the possibility that there can be a rhetorical objective and the correspondent meaning is not intended. Taking the rhetorical intentions into attention may make us free form dogmatic interpretations and claims for universality.

The semantics of ethical subjects is an important stage in textual religious studies. The present paper is a study on the semantics of ethical subjects and its application to the concept of modesty. The methodology is a descriptive-analytic one and of the kinds of library researches. Semantics has four stages: (1) the etymology, which means gathering, examining and analyzing the views of etymologist and specialists; (2) the religious semantics which means the examination of religious texts and deriving the important qualities of the words from them; (3) finding the definition, which means characterizing the important specifications of the definition and their relationships; and (4) analysis and explanation of the definition by examining the different ontological, humanistic and subject-related sides of the word. According to these principles, modesty is a combination of threatened veneration, perceived supervision and self-controlling. The result is that semantics does not restricted to etymology and methodic move in the semantics of religious subjects requires propagation and instruction of its method to researchers of the religious studies.

The moral theory of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi is an important normative theory in the Islamic philosophical ethics. It is important to update this theory and specify its relationship with other normative theories in contemporary moral philosophy. Introducing the principal normative theories in contemporary moral philosophy, the present study specifies the relationship between the moral theory of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and these contemporary ones, so that we can find the evaluation criterions for moral values in Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s moral theory. In this way, his moral theory will be updated, which makes it possible to use this theory in applied ethics. Our findings show that Nasir al-Din’s moral theory has relationships with all three kinds of consequentialism, deontological ethics and virtue ethics. However, there are more elements of virtue ethics in his theory, so that we can say that the normative theory of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi is a version of virtue ethics. We have explained the evaluation criterions for moral values in the moral theory of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.

In the psychology of ethics, there is a question concerning the true nature of moral motivations; are they internal or external motivations, are they self-controlled or not? The contemporary Christian scholar, John Finiss, claims with an internalistic approach that moral motivations come from our natural capabilities and faculties, so that they cannot be self-controlled. Allameh Tabatabai also emphasizes on the human capabilities in the context of moral motivations, with a similar internalistic approach, but he explains the realization of moral motivations as a result of the combination of the natural desires and rationality. However, there is differences between their approaches to internalism and externalism and their explanations of moral motivations in the psychology of ethics. Furthermore, they determine different things as the main factor in moral motivation. Finiss regards a motivation as moral only when it is towards the basic goods; Allameh Tabatabai considers moral motivations as ones that are in keeping with the Divine consent. In this paper, the thoughts of these two thinkers on the moral motivations are studied comparatively by an analytical methodology.

Ethically, the most important purpose of content filtering and refinement in cyberspace is to prevent the violation of moral principles. Achieving this purpose, however, requires that all practitioners of filtering be aware of their duties and responsibilities and do their best to realize them. But until these duties are not recognized and specified, it would be an absurd expectation that filtering serve the moral purposes and be implemented in a moral way. In this paper, the most important responsibilities of citizens and public authorities for filtering are introduced, the related challenges are analyzed, and some strategies are presented for decreasing them. Responsibilities include information-giving, supervision, avoidance of bypassing the filtering, companionship between users and related administrations, privacy and trust, and challenges include technical and human mistakes, the conflict between moral responsibilities, and weakness of motivation. For the convenience and clarification of the discussion, responsibilities are divided into two general categories of shared and dedicated ones. There are other related discussions in this paper like the definition of moral duty, its importance, and the source and foundation of commitment to moral duty. The methodology of the paper is analytical and it is for practical applications, and besides its philosophical analysis it uses the moral teachings of Islam.