مجله پژوهش های اخلاقی
سال دوم شماره 3 (پیاپی 7، بهار 1391)

Moral explanation is one of the important problems in the contemporary analytic ethics which draws the moral philosopher's attention because of its relation to ethical realism. Moral thinkers have taken two general stances in this regard: some, like Gilbert Harman, denied the explanatory power of moral properties and other, like Nicholas Sturgeon, acknowledging that moral properties and facts are not reducible to natural properties, believes in the explanatory potency of moral properties. Harman thinks that even if we, like the advocates of non reductionist moral naturalism, accept that moral properties are not reducible to natural ones we still cannot contend that moral properties have theexplanatory weight, because unlike natural properties, they are not objective facts. According to him, for having a justified belief in a particular entity, we need to find a causal or at least an explanatory criterion concerning that entity. And since moral properties have none of them they are not real and objective facts. Contrary to him, Sturgeon, mentioning a lot of examples, asserts that moral properties have a causalexplanatory role in explaining a lot of facts of the world. So, the causal explanation is true of them. Sturgeon, offering a new method for testing the explanatory criterion, proves that this criterion is true of moral properties too.

By analyzing and dividing ego to unreal ego (the lower or personal ego) and real ego (sublime or collective ego), this article tries to solve the antinomy between the negation of self in self-sacrifice and acknowledgement of the self in self-respect from one side, and an apparent contradiction between self-esteem and respecting others from the other side. Then it applies the result of the argument in the case of the victim of Karbala in the history of Islam. By gathering self-sacrifice and self-respect and also by bringing selfesteem and honoring others closer together a new philosophy of life will be born in which one can sacrifice himself even in the heyday of his greatness (the negation of western nihilism) and one can reject the meanness and create a great change in the world even in his utmost devotion (the negation of eastern nihilism)

Farabi is a prominent Muslim philosopher who has offered important and effective discussions on ethics. These discussions are scattered in his various works. Ethically, Farabi is categorized under the teleologist moral thinkers, because he considers felicity and salvation as the end of ethics and the supreme intrinsic good. According to him, some factors such as: knowledge, training, and society are effective and useful in approaching salvation. He regards the virtues as the mean state of human faculties. On this basis, vices are defined as going to extremes. He also believes that moral properties are acquired and thus human voluntarily actions arising from the free will are morally qualified to evaluation. He has endeavored to make his moral discussions on the base of rational and logical arguments and offer a kind of philosophical ethics. On the other hand, he tried to harmonize his moral thoughts with religious teachings. There are also some ambiguous points in his moral thought such as: the illusion of relativity in knowing and approaching salvation, which can be solved by referring to his other discussions. In this article we try to explain and examine Farabi's moral thought.

In the divine command theories, ethics is normally based on religion and the causalreading of this theory emphasizes on the existential dependence of ethics upon religion. According to this interpretation, moral properties are existentially dependent on divine commandments. Quinn formulates his moral thought in two phases: in the first one, divine command and moral obligation are regarded as being coextensive and symmetrical. Coextension of and correlation between divine commands and moral obligations is the main feature of this viewpoint. In the second phase, he proceeds to reconstruct his divine command theory in the shape of the causal theory with the aid of cumulative arguments. Rather than equivalence, Quinn offers in his account of the casual theory that our moral obligations are determined by divine commands, meaning divine commands are the necessary and sufficient causal condition for the realization of our moral obligations. After facing with some true objections to this account, he offers a new and modified formulation of the causal theory by resorting to God's acts of will and contends that the new one is the most defensible account among others.

Hume regards natural capacity of taste, not reason, as fundamental to make and understand beauty and deformity, and good and bad. On the other hand, he believes that the activity of reason is a necessary condition for the judgments of taste (both in ethics and aesthetics). By examination of Hume's views concerning taste it becomes clear that despite the central role of taste in ethics and aesthetics, it presupposes perception. In fact, man initially has to imagine facts carefully and objectively to be able to response to them. For having general and objective judgments in ethics and aesthetics, we need to make a proper point of view.

The question of the nature of the regulative norms of society, called law, has been among the greatest concerns of the thinkers throughout the history of human thought. In response to this question, there are two major viewpoints titled as: "natural law" and "positive law". Natural law regards the legal propositions as indicating real facts but in the positive law these are considered as social conventions. A third modified theory, combining the two in a conventional-real theory, is more defensible. In this article we endeavor to examine the two first theories and explain the third one by analyzing all kinds of relationship between real facts and conventions or between "is" and "ought". However, before that we have to search and examine all the meanings of man made or conventional concepts in various branches of Islamic culture and knowledge. Finally, from the type of relationship between real facts and conventions we can draw conclusions concerning the stability and flexibility in law and the relationship of law with custom and culture.

Speaking of practical reason as a private faculty of the human soul has been permanently `in the center of Muslim ethical discussions and various ideas are offered about its nature. Generally, all viewpoints of Muslim philosophers concerning practical reason, in comparison with theoretical reason, are divided into three groups: 1. Both of them are the same in the act of perception; they are different by the object of perception not the perception itself. 2. They are the same both in the act of perception and the object of perception. 3. Theoretical reason is perceiver but practical one is stimulative. These views are examined in this article in detail.

Reason has a great role in directing human behaviors toward moral virtues and values. Qazi Abdul Jabbar is among moral thinkers who paid attention to this problem and found his moral thoughts on the basis of rationality. His view concerning the functions of reason in ethics can be studied in epistemological, ontological, and motivational approaches. From the epistemological dimension, reason can discover the basic statements of moral system and then apply them to the particular instances and discern the good or bad sides of moral actions as well. In the emotional dimension, reason discerns truly the ends and results of actions and stimulates motivational faculties to realize the actions. And from ontological aspect, man will realize himself by making rational choices.

Robert Hare believes that in any moral argument two basic characteristics must be observed: freedom of the moral agent, and rationality of the moral statements. But they are not ensured in deductive and inductive methods of reasoning. He has called the deductive method, meaning drawing particular behavioral statement from some evident universal premises, as "Cartesian method" that is condemned to failure, because in this method the role of the moral agent in making behavioral decisions is ignored. In his view, the current inductive method is not useful too, because it is unable to provide the necessity needed in the moral arguments and thus it leads to relativity. He finally adopted the Popper's falsifiability method, because he believes that the role of imagination, supposition, conjecture, detection, and innovation is particularly seen in this method, and this principle is the one he needs strongly to justify the principle of "universalizability" in issuing moral statements and responding to its objections. But Hare is faced with some basic problems in applying this method as well.