نشریه اخلاق پژوهی
پیاپی 7 (تابستان 1399)

The law of contingent causation is divided into two parts: natural and rational, where the former governs the natural world and the latter governs the rational world. As having a body and reason, man combines both worlds, but this involves a conflict between the two worlds ‒ each seeks to dominate the other. The victory of reason over impulses or the victory of rational will over natural desires provides the nature-inhabitant person with a permission to enter the first moral world. In this paper, I offer an account of the reason’s move from the first to the second moral world ‒ a world far from the natural world and its dangers and a world above the first moral world in the determination of the will in terms of moral laws. In this second world, all the laws of the first moral world apply, albeit with a content added to each as a constitutive differentia of the second world, admitting those who have activated the differentia in their rational power.

Genuine knowledge of God is one of the most basic goal of the human creation, which can be obtained through monotheistic signs, but it cannot be obtained by everyone. This research aims to consider the role of morality in understanding monotheistic signs in accordance with Quranic verses and construct a conceptual model for this. The research is of a library kind and its method is descriptive-analytic as per the classical method in religious studies. The research shows that the attributes of piety, thankfulness, and patience help one understand divine signs. In the first instance, these attributes prepare the ground for reflection and thoughts, and in the second, they prepare the acceptance of the implications of monotheistic knowledge. Thus, when confronted with monotheistic signs, epistemic and practical preparations are evaluated, and if such evaluation yields an affirmative result, the process of understanding and accepting monotheism will begin. This paper concludes that the attributes of piety, thankfulness, and patience should be developed in order to expand one’s understanding of monotheistic signs.

In all fields, moral principles rest upon theoretical principles, where these rest in turn upon meta-theoretical foundations. For this reason, the agent is committed to a moral principle when it arises from his or her theoretical and paradigmatic insights. Theoretical principles of morality at the stage of conclusion are different from those at the stage of research, and as a consequence, moral principles of research at this stage are different from those at other stages. These theoretical principles require the inquirer to prefer people’s interests and publish or conceal the conclusions of their research in accordance with people’s interests, and act in a way that the society gets maximal interests and suffer from minimal harms as a result of the research. On this account, when the researcher arrives at the results, he or she is morally obliged to make them unavailable if he takes them to harm the society, and to publish them courageously, in familiar words, and with faithfulness if they do not, and then wait for feedback from other scholars. This research seeks to extract the theoretical principles at this stage and propose its moral principles.

According to Zagzebski’s virtue epistemology, an intellectual virtue aims at establishing a cognitive contact with the reality, and there is no distinction between moral and intellectual virtues. Intellectual virtues are subsets of moral virtues, which is why she seeks to find a definition of virtue which includes both. For Zagzebski, virtue is a deep and permanent acquired characteristic involving a particular motivation for the realization of the desired end and reliable success in bringing this end into existence. The “motivation” component in this definition indicates the internalist structure of her view and the “reliable success” component indicates the externalist structure of her view. For this reason, we shall refer to the structure of Zagzebski’s intellectual virtue as “composite.” In this analytic research, we draw on epistemological and ethical data in the literature to glean the main components of Zagzebski’s view of the structure of intellectual virtues and account for the role of each in the formation of the theory. I discuss the weakness and strength of each of these components, and conclude that the proper structure of “intellectual virtue” should follow the internalist tradition in epistemology which is influenced by “virtue ethics.” In fact, the externalist structure is not compatible with the foundations of Zagzebski’s virtue epistemology.

In this paper, we analyze the concept and nature of lies and their types with a focus on expedient lies, the criterion for identifying expediencies, and the conditions under which they are justified, as well as their implications and consequences in the field of criminal law. We conclude that expedient lies are justified in exceptional cases where the expediency is known and the rule of “the more important and then the less important” applies by someone who has intellectual virtues prior to moral virtues-someone whose practical reason can identify the expediency which is moral to be observed. In these exceptional circumstances, there is no right to telling lies. When the circumstances obtain, expedient lies are just morally justifiable. In principle, in the realm of criminal law, it is impermissible to extend such a justification about expedient lies to false testimonies as well as false complaints and defenses, and it is necessary to observe truthfulness in criminal trials, and particular in gathering evidence. Truthfulness in interrogation of the accused is an obligatory preliminary of the legitimacy of gathering evidence. Those in charge in criminal justice should also avoid any lies and deceptions in their jurisdiction.

Violence in relationships within family or “domestic violence” (as a kind of silent violence which tends to be ignored and rarely is it officially reported) is a negative phenomenon at moral and cultural aspects of the society, which of course has its philosophical and metaphysical foundations. A family establishes the first network of inter-individual relationships, and in its essence, it carries a hierarchy of relationships and relational values which secure the organization of the family. What unifies the members of a family are behaviors and relational actions they have encounter in proportion to their family roles. In this way, the outburst of violence, which in final analysis might involve the end of exerting and expanding one’s influence over other family members, might be positively or negatively justified through a variety of violent acts. In this paper, I begin by a phenomenologicalization of violence within family from a philosophical perspective to disclose the experiential-emotional context of its occurrence in the first social unit, and in the end, I propose the theory of “moral relationalism” as a theoretical solution to fundamentally moderate this kind of violence..