پژوهش نامه اخلاق
پیاپی 44 (تابستان 1398)

It is recommended in the Islamic sources that if human beings were not capable of crying in the prayers and mourning of the Infallible, the state of crying and weeping be taken. After conceptual analysis, categorization of traditions and explaining philosophy and functions of weeping, the purpose of this article is to examine its permission from the standpoint of ethics; that ethics has seen dissimulation as an exception in Hosseini mourning and even allowed it; to what extent it has credibility; and whether the quasi-license is relevant or not. Research has shown that dissimulation is rejected in all forms of worship including the mourning for the infallible; that a sincere intention is required for an action to be accepted; and that weeping, which is a kind of role-play and internal management, is different from a false dissemblance. This pretense is not an antonym of sincerity and synonym of dissimulation, but rather the outer against the inner; and if an action has external and internal manifestations, it will not be understood as dissimulation necessarily.

The ethical status of animals and the ethical responsibility towards them is an important issue in applied ethics. By equating animals with physical mechanisms, Descartes views them as pure bodies, making animals devoid of emotions such as pain, and mere resources which lack moral standing, and rendering humans free of ethical responsibility towards them. By contrast to this theory, Mulla Sadra provides an ethical responsibility towards animals and an appropriate basis for recognizing an original ethical status and position in favor of animals by identifying an animal self and its imaginal immateriality. This renders the individual to be ethically responsible for the abuse of animals in industrial detention centers, slaughterhouses and various laboratories, and to minimize the consequences of such abuses for animals, and consequently, for humans.

The question of feasibility and the way of ethical analysis of technological artifacts at the design stage, namely before they can be actualized and made available to the users, is one of the challenges of technology ethics. This is more the case, especially with emerging technologies, which are quite innovative and have major vague and uncertain consequences. In addition, the question of the feasibility and the way of incorporating specific (non-universal) ethical values into the design of technologies while maintaining their functionality is also a contentious issue. In this article, to answer the first question, a proper methodology for the ethical analysis of emerging technologies will be presented, and then to answer the second question, focusing on human improvement technologies (HIT), it will be shown that not only does the ethical analysis of a particular group of emerging technologies, called emerging trans-human technologies, indicate their conflicts with human ethical values, but also the possibility of redesigning them to incorporate these values ceases to exist.

The praised and dispraised concealment has a special place in Islamic ethics. Dispraised concealment requires clarification and divulgence. What is being explored in the present study is the concealment and divulgence of public crimes and wrongdoings committed by the offenders against people and the public fund. The controversial question here is what the moral duty of the offenders is to compensate for their crimes against the public, and to what extent they conceal their crimes. What is the duty of others for disclosure? This study first explains the first ethical principle in concealing secrets, flaws, crimes and errors of oneself and others, then identifies the moral duty of others against the offenders and the general errors in disclosing secrets and flaws, then again reiterates the moral duty of the offenders after committing criminal acts and public transgression, and ultimately reveals the moral duty of the oppressed and others (such as the media) in informing of the offenders’ oppression, its limits and conditions.

The followers of the divine command theory regard ethics as completely dependent on religion and do not regard a meaning and reality for it beyond the divine command and countermand. On the other hand, the followers of secular ethics view ethics as prior and superior to religion, and at least consider moral values as an independent meaning and reality. In the meantime, some theorists of Islamic thought, despite the rejection of the theory of the divine command, believe in religious ethics and deem religion consisting of ethics. The chosen theory is that ethics is the same as religion and religion is the same as ethics, and despite the inaccuracy of divine command theory, there is a reading of religious ethics that is superior to secular ethics in all semantic, ontological, epistemological, and psychological aspects.

This article comprises two parts: in the first part, it is proved that there is a variety of causes for the descent of divine disasters or blessings on servants. In some cases, these causes are in conflict with one another and cannot be aggregated into one case. In this regard, there are six causes for suffering from calamities and two causes for the descent of God’s blessings on the servants in Koranic verses and traditions. The second part proves that, due to the contradiction in the proofs of the disasters and blessings, the attribution of suffering from calamities or the descent of blessings on a person to a specific cause is certainly not morally justified, and the attribution that God certainly for this particular reason sends down the blessings or calamities is not right. There are two moral reasons for proving this: one is based on the immorality of lying about God and the other is based on the immorality of slandering the servants

After accepting the possibility of taking advantage of other sciences by both sciences of Islamic jurisprudence and ethics, it is time to state the duties of each researcher in jurisprudence and ethics in dealing with these judgments. This paper portrays a comprehensive model of the numerous hypotheses of the ethics scholars encountering the jurisprudential judgments, and presents their duties under three headings: the necessity to comply with the jurisprudential judgment, the necessity to suspend the final verdict, and the necessity to sustain the moral judgment and disregard the jurisprudential judgment.