The Mu’tazili Position
The Mu’tazila, or strict rationalists, maintained that actions have an intrinsic moral value of either good or evil, which is necessary and independent of revelation. The Sacred Law comes with legal rulings that are secondary and that correspond to the intrinsic moral value of actions, which is primary. According to them, the intellect is the one that determines the moral value of actions, not Allah. Therefore, the intellect (aql) is capable of discerning the moral value of actions on its own, without any need for revelation.
The Sunni Position
There are two opinions among Sunni orthodoxy (Ahl al-Sunna) on this issue. Yet both opinions are in agreement that Allah alone is the One who assigns moral value to actions, not the intellect. This is a crucial point and the key difference between the Sunnis and the Mu’tazila. Due to this and other important differences, Sunni Orthodoxy considered the Mu’tazila innovators in creed, whose positions are not valid or followable.
The two Sunni opinions are as follows:
(1) The Ash’aris did not consider actions to have intrinsic moral value; rather, revelation and the Sacred Law form the basis of all morality. What Allah deems good is good, and what He deems evil is evil, irrespective of the judgment of human intellect. Because an action is commanded by Allah, it is good; and because it is prohibited by Allah, it is evil. The Sacred Law is the judge of what is right and wrong, while the intellect has no role in that judgment. It is merely a tool by which the Sacred Law can be understood. Morality cannot be ascertained until a messenger comes with revelation.
The basis of this position is that true moral value can only be known by appreciating the full context of any particular act. For example, severing a person’s arm would seem to be inherently evil. However, if a person had gangrene which would spread to destroy the entire body, then a doctor’s severing of his arm would be seen as a good and beneficial act. Full context of any given act is known only to Allah; the intellect does not have access to the entire context, and hence cannot ascertain the moral value of acts. Only revelation affirms morality.
(2) The Maturidis adopted a middle position between the two positions described above. Like the Ash’aris, they too considered assignment of moral value as belonging to Allah rather than the intellect. Allah alone is the Hakim (Authoritative Judge). Yet the intellect is not merely a tool to understand the Sacred Law. It can perceive the moral value of actions, and with some actions can do so independent of the Sacred Law. However, this would occur only by Allah creating that knowledge in the servant’s intellect.
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Regarding
Euthypro dilemma
There are two horns:
(1)the argument tries to establish that either God wills what is good based on such already being good, or (2) God arbitrarily determines what is good (so, had he willed not worshiping Him could have been “goodâ€)
In an attempt to answer scholars like Hamza Tzortis say as you have quoted him from his website:
Quote:
This intuitively sounds like a valid contention. However, a little reflection exposes it as a false dilemma. The reason is due to a third possibility: God is good. Professor of Philosophy Shabbir Akhtar, in his book The Qur’an and the Secular Mind, explains:
“There is a third alternative: a morally stable God of the kind found in scripture, a supreme being who would not arbitrarily change his mind about the goodness of compassion and the evil of sexual misconduct. Such a God always commands good because his character and nature are good.â€
But this raises further questions from the atheists: [quote]“Is God’s nature good because God chooses it, or is his nature good due to some outside factor?†This is due to the fact that the Euthyphro dilemma assumes that goodness is a property, and if we say that God has a property that allows us to derive other properties, we open ourselves up to the Third Man argument of Plato’s Parmenides.
