12 - Reason and revelation in Ibn Ḥazm's ethical thought

Summary

Normative ethics (akhlāq) in the sense of wise advice for a good and happy life, was written about by Ibn Ḥazm in two well-known books, Ṭawq al-ḥamāma ('The dove's neck ring’) and Mudāwāt an-nufūs ('Cures for souls’). The following article, however, is not concerned with his views on ethics in that sense, but with his answers to fundamental questions of modern philosophical ethics: the meanings of ethical concepts, the sources of our knowledge of them and of values in practice, the theory of moral motivation. In the religious tradition of medieval Islam, to which Ibn Ḥazm for all his individuality belonged, these questions were not marked off as a separate field of knowledge but fell somewhere between theology and law. More precisely, theology provided the framework of doctrines from which the principles of ethics could be derived, and these principles were applied by jurists in working out Islamic law.

Accordingly, we find Ibn Ḥazm's treatment of philosophical ethics mainly in his major work on theology, the Fiṣal, and his major work on jurisprudence, the Iḥkām. Both these works were written in the later years of his life, when his theological and legal position as a Zahirite was settled, and together with other works of the same period they supply a unified theory of ethics. His last work, Mudāwāt an-nufūs, although of a different literary genre, also throws light on this theory and is consistent with it. All these writings, then, will be used to reconstruct his ethics.