Moral agents and their deserts : the character of Mu'tazilite ethics / Sophia Vasalou.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vasalou, Sophia.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motazilites.

Islamic ethics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (268 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Must good deeds be rewarded and wrongdoers punished? Would God be unjust if He failed to punish and reward? And what is it about good or evil actions and moral identity that might generate such necessities? These were some of the vital religious and philosophical questions that eighth- and ninth-century Mu'tazilite theologians and their sophisticated successors attempted to answer, giving rise to a distinctive ethical position and one of the most prominent and controversial intellectual trends in medieval Islam. The Mu'tazilites developed a view of ethics whose distinguishing features were its austere moral objectivism and the crucial role it assigned to reason in the knowledge of moral truths. Central to this ethical vision was the notion of moral desert, and of the good and evil consequences--reward or punishment--deserved through a person's acts. Moral Agents and Their Deserts is the first book-length study of this central theme in Mu'tazilite ethics, and an attempt to grapple with the philosophical questions it raises. At the same time, it is a bid to question the ways in which modern readers, coming to medieval Islamic thought with a philosophical interest, seek to read and converse with Mu'tazilite theology. Moral Agents and Their Deserts tracks the challenges and rewards involved in the pursuit of the right conversation at the seams between modern and medieval concerns.

Contents:

The framework : the Mu'tazilites

Reading Mu'tazilite ethics

Ethics as theology

Approaches to the study of Mu'tazilite ethics

Theology as law

Moral values between rational knowledge and revealed law

Rights, claims, and desert : the moral economy of huquq

The Basran Mu'tazilite approach to desert

"To deserve" : groundwork

Justifying reward and punishment : the values of deserved treatments

Justifying punishment : the paradoxical relations of desert and goodness

The causal efficacy of moral values : between sabab and 'illa

The right to blame, the fact of blame : views of the person ab extra

Moral continuity and the justification of punishment

Time and deserving

An eternity of punishment : the Basran justification of dawam al-'iqab

Moral identity and the resources of Basran Mu'tazilite ontology

The primacy of revealed names : al-Asma' wa'al-ahkam

Why not Dhimma?

The identity of beings in Basran Mu'tazilite eschatology

Resurrection and the criterion of identity

Accidents and the formal reality of resurrected beings

Appendix : translation from Mankdim Shashdiw, "The promise and the threat," in Sharh al-usul al-khamsa.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-246) and index.

ISBN:

9786612158506

9781282158504

1282158503

9781400824526

1400824524

OCLC:

432996696