Moral Philosophy and Islam

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Moral Philosophy and Islam
OP - April 03, 2013, 01:08 PM

Many years ago I studied Moral Philosophy at University. One of the key texts was John Rawls A Theory of Justice. Following summarises the arguments

Quote
Original Position
First published Tue Feb 27, 1996; substantive revision Sat Dec 20, 2008

The original position is a central feature of John Rawls's social contract account of justice, “justice as fairness,” set forth in A Theory of Justice (TJ). It is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice.

In taking up this point of view, we are to imagine ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances.

They do know of certain fundamental interests they all have, plus general facts about psychology, economics, biology, and other social and natural sciences.

The parties in the original position are presented with a list of the main conceptions of justice drawn from the tradition of social and political philosophy, and are assigned the task of choosing from among these alternatives the conception of justice that best advances their interests in establishing conditions that enable them to effectively pursue their final ends and fundamental interests.

Rawls contends that the most rational choice for the parties in the original position are the two principles of justice.

The first principle guarantees the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of the good.

The second principle provides fair equality of educational and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and prerogatives of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/

I have never seen a detailed comparison of these ideas with those of Islam. A thread elsewhere is bugging me. It is as if Islam does not actually have an idea of fairness, of justice, of equality, of rights.

Is that correct? If so, why does no one state that?

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Reply #1 - April 03, 2013, 01:57 PM

Equality in the Rawlsian sense is not possible in Islam. In Islam, the elaboration of equality from the original position would tantamount to heresy. It would mean that denominators like gender, sexuality, religiosity or social role (as a spouse or a parent) would not be taken into consideration. Equality regardless of things like sexuality and religiosity in other words. This could fatally result in the possibility of gender equality, the abolition of homophobia and secularism (in that from behind the veil of ignorance, there would be no religious adherence). Who would want that?

I think I have a clue on why this acute topic for comparative studies haven't been subjected to more attention by people a whole lot more merited and knowledgeable than you and me. Firstly and most obviously, because there is no real concept of equality in Islam, other than the value of a human life. There seems to be some kind of equality there, although not consistent. And secondly, because a comparative study, done honestly, would be so conclusive in the unfavorable direction (for the moral relativists of the Western world) that there is no concept of equality, not even remotely a concept of morality in islam, other than the wishes and urges of a megalomaniacal God. No religion with a consistent and comprehensive morality (let alone a timeless one) would allow the ownership and abuse of a 9 year old, for example.

But how many intellectuals with the rigor of intellectual honesty could you count with your fingers? And the corollary is, how many cowards who take upon themselves and their frontier the chains of political correctness do you know of?

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Reply #2 - April 03, 2013, 09:52 PM

But

Quote
It may, superficially, appear distasteful to copulate with a woman who is not a man's legal wife, but once Shariat makes something lawful, we have to accept it as lawful, whether it appeals to our taste, or not; and whether we know its underlying wisdom or not. It is necessary for a Muslim to be acquainted with the laws of Shariat, but it is not necessary for him to delve into each law in order to find the underlying wisdom of these laws because knowledge of the wisdom of some of the laws may be beyond his puny comprehension. Allah Ta'ala has said in the Holy Quran: ?Wa maa ooteetum min al-ilm illaa qaleelan? which means, more or less, that, "You have been given a very small portion of knowledge?. Hence, if a person fails to comprehend the underlying wisdom of any law of Shariat, he cannot regard it as a fault of Shariat (Allah forbid), on the contrary, it is the fault of his own perception and lack of understanding, because no law of Shariat is contradictory to wisdom.

http://www.wikiislam.net/wiki/Adultery_is_Permitted_in_Islam

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #3 - April 03, 2013, 10:05 PM

When you delve into the realms of any Islamic science, what you find is not some well thought out, pre-planned attempt by the Prophet to make a working, globally adaptable system of laws. Instead, what you find in all instances, from marital guidelines to property and financial law, is a hodge-podge, after the fact attempt by scholars to find some sort of rhyme or reason in the ad hoc narrations attributed to Muhammad.

Muhammad did things and Muhammad said things. His followers hung on his every word and action. After he died and several centuries had passed, you had a confusing mess of hearsay that tried to transmit some of what he may have said and done, in the belief that it was all divinely inspired and must lead to some higher, moral way of life.

“The Messenger of Allah forbade us from blah blah blah.” “One day, a man asked the holy prophet blah blah blah and he said “yes.” From those ramblings, an entire system of law was built. It is not comprehensive, it is not consistent, and it is not practical. When holes are found, as they are bound to be, all a Muslim can say is “Allah and his messenger know best.”
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Reply #4 - April 03, 2013, 10:10 PM

Googling around and I think rules for market trading are not mentioned anywhere in koran and hadith and have therefore been made up from elsewhere - innovation. Are there other examples?

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #5 - April 03, 2013, 10:26 PM

Quote
"Seekinge too make a silke purse of a Sowes eare."

?

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/pigs-ear.html

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne,

"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
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Reply #6 - May 01, 2013, 03:56 PM

Go back to Descartes; the way he went to the very fundamentals of even questioning the very existence of the self to come then arrive at the building blocks of science. Islam has created a barrier there -go beyond that and you become a heretic, a free rational-thinker. To even question/doubt (belief in god in this case), which is one of the principle tools of scientific methodology, is wrong in Islam.

You do have Muslim scientists, but they're not looking at the world with a scientific view, they're looking at their specific job with those spectacles, and putting them on the shelf when it comes to religion and thus the cognitive dissonance. They don't use the same filter in every aspect of their lives. We all do it, use different mental tools to approach different situations, depending on how those tools were introduced to us through our lives/how we absorbed them.

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Reply #7 - May 01, 2013, 04:18 PM

Quote from: happymurtad on April 03, 2013, 10:05 PM
When you delve into the realms of any Islamic science, what you find is not some well thought out, pre-planned attempt by the Prophet to make a working, globally adaptable system of laws. Instead, what you find in all instances, from marital guidelines to property and financial law, is a hodge-podge, after the fact attempt by scholars to find some sort of rhyme or reason in the ad hoc narrations attributed to Muhammad.

Muhammad did things and Muhammad said things. His followers hung on his every word and action. After he died and several centuries had passed, you had a confusing mess of hearsay that tried to transmit some of what he may have said and done, in the belief that it was all divinely inspired and must lead to some higher, moral way of life.

“The Messenger of Allah forbade us from blah blah blah.” “One day, a man asked the holy prophet blah blah blah and he said “yes.” From those ramblings, an entire system of law was built. It is not comprehensive, it is not consistent, and it is not practical. When holes are found, as they are bound to be, all a Muslim can say is “Allah and his messenger know best.”

This explains so much.

Sometimes Islam can seem like a mass retrospective attempt at justifying or explaining or making coherent or presentable and meaningful the wanderings and wonderings of one man who lived 1400 years ago.

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Reply #8 - May 02, 2013, 06:58 AM

Moral philosophy and Islam is an oxymoron.
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