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Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?

Khalid Mahmood Awan Fellow
· 6 replies · 241 views
Moral theoriesIslamicJewishMedieval ChristianAsh'arismMu'tazilaNatural lawAl-GhazaliSaadia Gaon#divine-command#moral-knowledge#natural-law#revelation
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I spent thirty-one years on the bench in Lahore. I applied statutes, precedent and, where the law allowed, the principles of Islamic law. Many times a case was decided correctly by every rule and I went home feeling it had been decided wrongly. I never knew whether that feeling was reason telling me something the law had missed, or merely my temperament.

In retirement I have been reading the old debate. The Muʿtazila held that good and bad, ḥusn and qubḥ, can be known by reason: injustice and lying are wrong in themselves, and God commands justice because it is just. The Ashʿarites answered that an act is good because God commands it, and that without revelation reason can know what is useful but not what is obligatory.

Something similar appears among Jewish and Christian thinkers, and perhaps elsewhere.

I'd like to hear different answers, from believers and unbelievers. Can reason, unaided, know what we owe one another? If it can, what is revelation for? If it can't, what was I feeling in those cases?

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6 answers

  1. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    The Muʿtazilite case is stronger than it's often presented. ʿAbd al-Jabbār argues that we know the wrongness of injustice and gratuitous harm as immediately as we know basic truths of reason, and that this knowledge binds before any revelation arrives. The Ashʿarite worry was theological: if reason can tell God what justice requires, God's sovereignty seems limited by a standard outside Him. Both sides were defending something real.

  2. Imam Bilal Hussain

    Fellow

    Even on the Ashʿari side, reason has a great deal to do. Al-Ghazālī, an Ashʿarite, set out the purposes the law serves, protecting religion, life, intellect, lineage and property, and those purposes guide reasoning where texts are silent. So the picture is less “reason or revelation” than revelation giving the frame and reason working inside it. Your feeling on the bench, Judge sahib, may have been your sense of those purposes when the rule had drifted from them.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Rabbi Eliana Gutman

    Fellow

    Saadia Gaon gives a middle answer I've always liked. He divides the commandments into those reason can discover, like the prohibitions on murder and theft, and those known only through revelation, like many ritual laws. Then he asks why God revealed the rational ones too, and answers: because not everyone can work them out, and those who can would take a long time and might go astray. Revelation as a shortcut and a safeguard for what reason could, in principle, find.

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  4. Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    Aquinas's natural law is close to Saadia here. The natural law is the rational creature's participation in God's eternal law; its first precepts are known to everyone, and revelation adds what reason could not reach and secures what it reaches only with difficulty. That's how he avoids the Euthyphro trap: God commands what is good, and what is good is grounded in God's own nature, not in an arbitrary decree or an outside standard.

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  5. Dawit Gebremedhin

    Fellow

    An Ethiopian text pushes furthest toward reason: the Hatata attributed to Zera Yacob tests every religious law against what reason can see to be good, and rejects those that fail. I must add, as someone who has read it in Ge'ez many times, that its authorship is disputed: some scholars have argued it is a nineteenth-century composition by a European missionary, and others defend the seventeenth-century attribution. Whoever wrote it, it is a serious argument that reason is the final judge.

  6. Khalid Mahmood Awan

    Fellow

    I am grateful to all of you. What I take from this is that almost no one in these traditions said reason knows nothing, and almost no one said revelation adds nothing. The disagreement is about which one has the last word when they seem to conflict. On the bench I never had to settle that. I had only to notice when they had come apart, and perhaps that noticing was the most honest part of the work.

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