Branch of philosophy

Ethics (moral philosophy)

What ought we to do, and why?

A question you cannot avoid

A dilemma.

You are a doctor in a rural clinic. You have one remaining dose of a life-saving medicine. Two patients arrive at the same time: an elderly scholar who has served the community for decades, and a young mother with three children. There is no time to get more medicine. What do you do — and, more importantly, how do you decide?

The core

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks what we ought to do and why. Not what is legal, not what is customary, not what is convenient — but what is right, and how we can know the difference. Every human being who has ever restrained an impulse, felt guilt, or judged another person’s behaviour has engaged in ethical reasoning, whether they recognised it as philosophy or not.

The Western philosophical tradition has organised this inquiry around three major frameworks. Virtue ethics, originating with Aristotle, asks not “what should I do?” but “what kind of person should I be?” The right action is whatever a person of cultivated character — courageous, temperate, just, wise — would choose in the circumstances. Deontology, most associated with Kant, insists that morality consists of rules that bind universally: do not lie, do not use people as mere instruments, act only in ways you could will everyone to act. The consequences are irrelevant; what matters is the principle. Consequentialism, developed by Bentham and Mill, disagrees entirely: the right action is the one that produces the best outcome, typically the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Principles and character are interesting but secondary; results are what count.

Why none of them is enough

Each framework captures something real about moral experience, and each fails in a way the others expose. Virtue ethics tells you to be a good person but struggles when good people disagree. Deontology provides clear rules but cannot resolve conflicts between them — when telling the truth will cause suffering, which duty wins? Consequentialism can calculate outcomes but treats persons as variables in an equation, sacrificing individual dignity to aggregate welfare. The history of ethics is not a progression from error to truth but an ongoing negotiation between these genuine insights.

The twentieth century added a further complication. The emotivists — Ayer, Stevenson — argued that moral statements are not truth-claims at all. When you say “murder is wrong,” you are not describing a fact; you are expressing a feeling, like a shudder dressed up in the grammar of a proposition. If this is correct, then the entire enterprise of moral philosophy — the attempt to reason about right and wrong — is a mistake. We are not reasoning; we are emoting.

Most philosophers have rejected emotivism, but the challenge it posed has never fully been answered. On what foundation does morality rest? If not on God’s command, then on what? If on reason alone, whose reason? If on human nature, which account of human nature? The question is not academic. Every legal system, every educational curriculum, every parenting decision rests on an implicit answer to it.

In the Islamic tradition

Islamic ethical thought has been shaped by a tension that runs through the entire tradition: does morality come from God’s will, or does God’s will follow morality?

The Mu’tazilah took the second position. They argued that moral truths are objective, accessible to human reason, and binding on God Himself. God commands justice because justice is good; He does not make justice good by commanding it. This position — called al-ḥusn wa-l-qubḥ al-’aqlī (the rational goodness and badness of acts) — gave human reason genuine moral authority. It also meant that ethics could be studied, debated, and developed through independent inquiry, because moral truth was not locked inside revelation waiting to be extracted — it was available to any mind willing to think carefully.

The Ash’aritesrejected this. In their view, nothing is good or evil in itself. Good is what God commands; evil is what God forbids. If God had commanded the opposite, the moral valence would reverse. This is not arbitrariness, the Ash’arites argued, because God’s wisdom is beyond human comprehension — but its practical consequence was to remove independent moral reasoning from the picture. Ethics became a matter of obedience: identifying what God has commanded and following it. The intellectual skills required were jurisprudential (finding and applying the relevant text), not philosophical (reasoning about moral principles).

The Ash’arite position won institutionally. Over centuries, it produced an ethical culture in which the primary moral question was not “what is right?” but “what does the text say?” — not because Muslims lacked moral seriousness, but because the dominant theology had defined morality as textual compliance rather than rational inquiry.

Meanwhile, a parallel ethical tradition flourished in Sufi practice. The Sufi emphasis on akhlāq— the refinement of character through spiritual discipline — is recognisably a form of virtue ethics. Al-Ghazali’s Iḥyā’ ’Ulūm al-Dīn is, among other things, one of the most ambitious treatises on moral character ever written in any language. It insists that external compliance without internal transformation is morally worthless — a position that sits uncomfortably with any ethics that reduces morality to following rules.

Why this matters

Pakistan’s moral culture operates, in practice, on a confused mixture of these frameworks — and the confusion is not benign. In public discourse, divine command theory dominates: morality is what Islam prescribes, and the discussion ends there. But which Islam? Whose interpretation? The moment this question is asked, the framework collapses into sectarian disagreement, because divine command theory without independent moral reasoning has no way to adjudicate between competing commands.

At the same time, a practical consequentialism governs much of everyday life: people evaluate actions by whether they work, not by whether they are principled. Corruption is tolerated because it produces results. Dishonesty is normalised because honesty is costly. This is not moral failure in the usual sense — it is what happens when a society has no functioning ethical framework beyond compliance with commands and calculation of advantage.

Iqbal saw that the recovery of ethical seriousness requires something neither pure obedience nor pure calculation can provide: the cultivation of a self capable of genuine moral judgement. This is the connection between ethics and khudi. A person whose selfhood is undeveloped — who has never learned to reason morally, to weigh competing goods, to take responsibility for difficult judgements — is not a moral agent in any meaningful sense. They are a follower of rules or a calculator of advantage, but not a person who chooses the good because they understand it as good.

The ethical task Tadreej takes seriously is not teaching people what to think about right and wrong but cultivating the capacity to think about right and wrong at all — the disposition Tadreej calls Moral Seriousness. Without it, a society can have laws, customs, and religious injunctions, but it cannot have ethics in any sense that would survive the scrutiny of either philosophy or the Qur’an.

Connections

Free will and determinism Faith and reason

Appears in

Lecture I (Sections 1, 7–8) · Lecture IV (throughout) · Lecture VI (Sections 1–3)