The Relationship between Human Nature and Moral Responsibility in Mulla Sadra

The principles of the Transcendent Philosophy as well as empirical observations indicate that people are different from each other in their primary nature. This explains why they are different in terms of their free will and voluntary acts. The present paper investigates Mulla Sadra’s view of the effects of human nature on their voluntary acts and examines its role in accepting responsibility. The formation of human nature in Mulla Sadra’s philosophy is different from that in other schools of philosophy. In the Transcendent Philosophy, the human nature originates in the material mode of the soul, and the differences among the natures of different human beings are rooted in the differences among corporeal substances. The attachment of this affair to the necessity of the cause-effect relation is the reason why moral responsibility is not explainable in Mulla Sadra’s philosophy. This problem poses certain challenges to Sadrian practical wisdom, the most important of which is the challenge of explaining the system of duty and recompense.