نشریه اخلاق پژوهی
پیاپی 1 (بهار 1396)

Moral studies in contemporary Iran face problems the ignorance of which is likely to halt the flourishing of this field. Today we see a revival of the field of ethics and it seems that there are more and more ardent students of the field. However, it cannot be expected to thrive unless the common, predominant conception of moral studies is corrected. In the hope of a wider flourishing of this field, I seek to identify and iterate some of the intellectual and attitudinal problems of this field. Here are some of the main problems: denying the originality of ethics and its importance, reducing ethics to jurisprudence or mysticism, a saintly conception of ethicists, contributions by non-specialists in the field, and the increase of isolated, disconnected writings regarding ethics.

The divine command theory, a well-known theory in normative ethics, takes goodness and badness of actions to depend on divine orders and prohibitions, and thus, takes the divine command to have a prominent role in ethics. The initial version of the theory pointing to the role of the notion of divine will in ethics can be found in the dialogues of Socrates, and in particular, Euthyphro, but it was later developed into more sophisticated versions. In addition to Church Fathers, and medieval scholars such as Augustin, Gregory the Great, Abelard, Scotus, William of Ockham, renaissance philosophers and the Enlightenment period (such as Luther, Preston, Bacon, and Suarez), also introduced versions of the theory. Descartes, Locke, Paley, and Kierkegaard can be considered as advocates of the view in the modern period. Many people believe that the recent, moderate version of the theory as suggested by Robert Merrihew Adams has revived the theory in recent decades and some people have subscribed to it. In this paper, we will have a historical review and an analysis of the view. We will briefly review different approaches to the role of God in ethics and traditional as well as modern versions of the divine command theory in western moral philosophy.

An argument raised for the moral wrongness of abortion from the time of conception is the argument from ‘A Future Like Ours’ which has many defenders and critics. Don Marquis who is known as having introduced the argument builds on the assumption that it is morally wrong to murder a human person to highlight a substantial similarity between an embryo and a mature human being and thus, show the moral wrongness of killing an embryo. Therefore, according to Marquis, just as it is morally wrong to kill a human being, by the same token, it is morally wrong to abort and kill an embryo. In this paper, I will examine and criticize the form and the content of the argument, and then examine David Boonin’s objection to the argument. Finally, I present a new version of the argument on the basis of assumptions in Islamic philosophy.

Virtue ethics is one of the oldest moral theories which has in recent decades attracted the attention of moral philosophers and was widely received by many researchers. Edmund Pincoffs, an advocate of virtue ethics, and according to some people, the contemporary reviver of the virtue theory, has provided a new, different version of the virtue theory by rejecting what he calls reductivism in ethics. In this paper, after sketching the principles of the virtue theory as introduced by Plato and Aristotle, the traditional classical pioneers of virtue ethics in Ancient Greece, we will compare classical virtue theories with Edmund Pincoffs’ version of virtue ethics. It is widely known that Plato and Aristotle had a teleological approach, taking the virtues to be non-relative and irreducible to one single virtue, but Pincoffs criticizes the reduction of morality to one or more moral virtues or principles, and instead of teleology, he subscribes to functionalism. We will compare the two versions of virtue ethics from 4 perspectives in analytical, historical terms: semantics, types of virtues, arguments for a virtue theory, and the criterion of selecting the virtues.

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.

Bernard Williams introduced the notion of ‘moral luck’ to emphasize that the moral value is not independent of external circumstances, including luck; rather they are, to a great extent, dependent on luck. In ordinary lives, moral agents may well be praised or blamed because of doing things over which they do not have, at least complete, control. Indeed, these praises or blames are tied with good or bad consequences of the action that agents are lucky or unlucky to face. This is where moral luck comes into play. The problem of moral luck is interlocked with the problem of moral responsibility, highlighting the question that if according to the common sense, moral judgment should only be made about things under the control of the agent (the principle of control), then why do we sometimes judge on the basis of things outside the control of the agent? The problem will be more significant if we have an eye to the claim of evolutionary ethics, because if we are committed to the principle of control, no moral judgment can be valid. In this paper, I will illuminate and examine Williams’ approach to moral luck.