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.
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