Category
Ethics
How should we live and act? Moral theories, character, and hard cases.
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Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Here is the hardest case for the principle of discrimination. Suppose deliberately attacking a civilian population would end a war years early and save more lives than it costs, including more civilian lives. The arithmetic points one way. Elizabeth Anscombe's answer was…
Started by Aoife Kilbride6 replies -
Trustee or plain citizen? Nasr’s khalifa and Leopold’s land community
A Persian garden is a strange object: entirely human-made, geometric, irrigated by channels that took enormous labour, and yet everyone who walks in feels that it is a picture of something given, not imposed. I've been reading two environmental thinkers who seem…
Started by Reza Tehrani5 replies -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Who was al-Ruhawi, and what does his Adab al-Tabib actually say about the physician?
At a hospital conference in Cairo, a speaker mentioned al-Ruhawi's Adab al-Tabib as one of the earliest systematic works on medical ethics, written in the ninth century, and then moved straight on to modern guidelines. I've been unable to find much more…
Started by Omar Ragab4 replies -
Reading group: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it
I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in…
Started by Layla Sfeir6 replies -
Natural law is a form of ethical naturalism, and it needs no ontological naturalism
I keep meeting a confusion, in students and in some books: that "naturalism" is one view, and that a Catholic, by definition, can't be a naturalist. My thesis: natural law theory is a form of ethical naturalism, because it holds that moral…
Started by Ikechukwu Anyanwu4 replies -
Traditions that disagree about the self agree about how to live, so ethics can do without metaphysics
There is one comparison that always woke my students up. Put the great traditions side by side on what a person is, and they disagree completely: an immortal soul, an eternal self identical with the absolute, no abiding self at all, a…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Can reason tell right from wrong on its own, or does it need revelation?
In the courts I covered in Lahore, judges 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…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan6 replies