Concept tag
#moral-knowledge
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If morality depends on God, what is my atheist friend doing when she keeps her promises?
My uncle says that without God there's no reason to be good, and that people without religion only pretend to be moral. My closest friend from school is an atheist, and she's the most honest person I know. She returned money a…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
Can revelation give moral knowledge to someone who does not share the faith that received it?
For the past year I have been reading Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs and Opinions in the original Judaeo-Arabic. Saadia, writing in tenth-century Baghdad under the influence of the kalām, divides the commandments into those that reason can reach by itself (do…
Started by Tal Rosen5 replies -
Mu’tazilis, al-Māturīdī and Aquinas: three ways of saying reason can see part of the moral law
I started reading kalām to understand my own faith better. The question that keeps pulling me back is whether moral knowledge needs revelation. The classical positions, as I understand them: Muʿtazila: good and bad (ḥusn and qubḥ) are knowable by reason. That…
Started by Abdulrahman Al-Bassam4 replies -
Was the abolition of slavery a moral discovery or a moral change? A teacher’s test case
Every July my after-school reading circle reads Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. This year a student asked a question I could not answer cleanly: “When people stopped thinking slavery was okay, did they find…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies -
Could a psychopath genuinely know that cruelty is wrong? The amoralist and the clinical literature
Meta-ethicists argue about the amoralist: someone who sincerely judges that cheating or cruelty is wrong and feels no motivation whatever to avoid it. Internalists say such a person is impossible, that someone wholly unmoved has not really made the judgement, only learned…
Started by Martín Iriarte5 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