Death & Dying: A Selected Bibliography

Our latest bibliography in the Directed Reading series covers "death and dying" from vantage points provided by religious worldviews, philosophy, science and medicine, as well as from the humanities in general.

Although most of the great philosophers have touched on the problem of death, few have dealt with it systematically or in detail.—Robert G. Olson

Even those who think that death is a continuation, and not an ending, can benefit from contemplating the implications of annihilation. That annihilation would be bad for them explains why it is important to live forever: it is the only way to avoid the evil of annihilation. If, on the other hand, annihilation would not be bad for them, the question arises as to why they value the prospect of immortality.—Steven Luper

Death...the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.—Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

The Epicurean argument that "death is nothing to us:"
1. An event can be good or bad for someone only if, at the time when the event is present, that person exists as a subject of at least possible experience, so that it is at least possible that the person experiences the event.
2. The time after a person dies is at a time at which that person does not exist as a subject of possible experience.
3. Hence the condition of being dead is not bad for that person.
4. It is irrational to fear a future event unless that event, when it comes, will be bad for us.
5. [Therefore,] it is irrational to fear death.—Martha Nussbaum

That fear of Acheron must be hurled out headlong, that fear which shakes human life at its very foundations, covering everything over with the blackness of death, and which does not leave any pleasure fluid and pure. —Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), III. 37-4.

Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. —Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, III. 972-975.

1. It is not bad for us that we once failed to exist.
2. Our posthumous nonexistence is like our pre-natal nonexistence in all relevant respects.
3. If two things are alike in all relevant respects, and one of them is not bad for us, then the second is not bad for us either.
4. So it is not bad for us that we will fail to exist once more. —Steven Luper, formulating the argument above from Lucretius

The bad consequences of the fear of death [are] of four kinds: dependence upon religion; inability to enjoy other pleasures (culminating in the extreme case, in a total hatred of life); pointless frenetic and anxious behavior, together with the subjective feeling of a great weight or burden; and, finally, various forms of harmful and immoral behavior aimed at siezing a kind of worldly immortality in the form of money, power, and reputation. —Martha Nussbaum on the principal nefarious effects of the fear of death according to Lucretius

As Lucretius and his mentor Epicurus suggested, fearing what it will be like to not exist after we die is as silly as revulsion at the thought of what it was like to not exist before we were born. However, we might have a different reason for not objecting to our vital non-existence: it was followed by our existence! Nor would we worry about post-vital non-existence if it, too, were followed by existence. [....] But temporary nonexistence is not the same as permanent nonexistence; it becomes permanent by virtue of what happens (or not) in the future; since nonexistence might be temporary, the prospect of nonexistence per se is not upsetting. It is the permanence of nonexistence that worries us. Unlike the temporary nonexistence that is now behind us, the death before us is likely to make us nonexistent permanently.—Steven Luper

While life is good, it seems more would be better (even if each additional year is less valuable than its predecessor), and the better more life would be, the worse death is. This reasoning commits us to the harm thesis: death is, at least sometimes, bad for those who die, and in this sense something that 'harms' them. Even after our lives are over, it seems that we have a stake in what happens in the world, for posthumous events can advance (and others can impede) the projects we undertake while alive or our directives concerning what will be done to our property after we are dead. If this view is correct, we must accept the posthumous harm thesis, according to which events occurring after we die can harm us. —Steven Luper

Seneca said that to overcome the fear of death we must think of it constantly. The important thing, however, is to think of it in the proper manner, reminding ourselves that we are but parts of nature and must reconcile ourselves to our allotted roles. [....] The fear of death displays a baseness wholly incompatible with the dignity and calm of the true philosopher, who has learned to emancipate himself from finite concerns. Essential to the Stoic outlook was the Platonic view that philosophizing means learning to die; that is, learning to commune with the eternal through the act of philosophic contemplation.—Robert G. Olson

Philosophers as different—and of different times and places—as Condorcet, Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell understood death as the natural and proper terminus of life such that we can joyfully if not calmly (cf. ataraxia) face death if we've lived a good or fulfilling life, what the classical Greek philosophers characterized as a life suffused with eudaimonia. For Condorcet and Russell, eudaimonia in fact crowds out the fear of death, while Nietzsche, like the Stoics, found therapeutic value in the constant awareness of death (cf. the Latin maxim, Memento mori, the precise meaning and implications of which changed under the impact of Christianity). For Heidegger, to deny the lucid awareness of death is to live inauthentically or, after Sartre, in bad faith. Indeed, the cultivation of this awareness accords a significance or urgency to life that would otherwise be lacking.

So-called 'Irish wakes' and the euphemisms of the funeral business notwithstanding, the traditional Judeo-Christian view of human mortality is insistent that death is both terrible and terrifying.—John Donnelly

But if death is an evil, it is the loss of life, rather than the state of being dead, or nonexistent, that is objectionable.—Thomas Nagel

[It is a] generally accepted fact that human beings naturally tend to fear dying. It is to be expected that men will try to avoid the fear and repress it, if possible. One way of doing this would be to convince oneself that one was immortal through one's works, so that death was not really or fully the end of one's existence. It would be hard to convince oneself of such a claim on a conscious level, just because of its literal falseness. But such belief in one's immortality could perhaps survive on an unconscious level where it would be less subject to rational scrutiny, and perhaps be capable of counteracting one's fear of death. The unconscious delusion of one's immortality (or living on) through one's works can, if we adopt Freudian teminology, be thought of as an unconscious defensive mechanism of the ego that protects us from conscious fear about death by repressing that fear and counterbalancing it in such a way that it for the most part remains unconscious. —Michael A. Slote

It is well known that the fear of dying is a prime source of much of human religiosity. Belief in an afterlife of the traditional religious sort is one way that men can assuage their anxiety about dying. What is perhaps not so well known is how the fear of dying can give rise to (and explain) certain attitudes and activities of people who are not in any ordinary way religious, and perhaps also certain attitudes and activities of religious people that are not generally associated with religion.—Michael A. Slote

There is a famous long passage in the Pensées where Pascal talks about diversion, its role in human life, and its sources. Men 'cannot stay quietly in their own chamber' alone and meditating, for any length of time. We need or think we need diversion and activity and cannot be happy without diverting ourselves from ourselves because of the 'natural poverty' of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely. [....] The vanity of our lives consists, for Pascal, in the fact that when we divert ourselves (from ourselves), we typically deceive ourselves about our motives for behaving as we do. [....] But why, in the end, should we not want to think about ourselves? Pascal suggests that the reason is that thinking about ourselves makes us think of our feeble and mortal condition. He also says about man: 'to be happy he would have to make himself immortal; but, not being able to do so, it has occurred to him to prevent himself from thinking of death.' Presumably, then, Pascal thinks there is a connection between thinking about oneself and thinking unpleasant thoughts about one's death; and this seems to be quite plausible. For at least while we are absorbed in things outside us, we do not think of ourselves, or thus, it would seem, of our death; whereas if and when one does think about oneself, one might very easily think about one's death. It would seem, then, that the explanation of our diverting ourselves from (thinking about) ourselves is that this at least to some degree enables us to avoid thinking anxiously about our mortality.—Michael A. Slote

References:

• Donnelly, John, ed. Language, Metaphysics, and Death. New York: Fordham University Press, 2nd ed., 1994.
• Luper, Steven. The Philosophy of Death. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Olson, Robert G. "Death," in Paul Edwards, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan & The Free Press, 1967: 307-309.

I would like to thank Daniel Goldberg of the Medical Humanities Blog for posting the first draft of this bibliography at his blog in 2007.

Senator Sessions & the E-Word

Senate Minority leader Jeff Sessions has, what I consider to be a jaded conception of empathy and its role in judging. Presumably, in his view, empathy is a squishy, biased response to a litigant that distorts the “neutral, “impartial,” perspective a judge must adopt to dispense justice. Empathize with litigant X entails prejudice against litigant Y. The conclusion simply doesn’t follow and more important it distorts judging. I may feel the pain of firing someone or disciplining my child and yet, if I’m honest and fair, I will carry through with the firing or disciplining anyway. Anyone who can’t do this shouldn’t be a judge. Moreover, any decision-maker regarding the complex interests and conflicts of several people should be able to feel the loser’s pain and ratify the loss nonetheless. This is simply a feature of practical reasoning about the interests of other people. The conflation of empathy for X and judging in favor of X simply on the grounds of empathy is fundamentally fallacious and dangerous. Empathy–feeling someone else’s pain–helps a judge see a relevant fact of the conflict that the non-empathetic judge fails to see. It serves the cardinal principle of practical reasoning: know all the facts before you decide. It in no way dictates a result; it simply guarantees the result to be based on all the relevant facts.

Global Distributive Justice: A Selected Bibliography

This bibliography in the Directed Reading series covers the ethics, economics and politics of global distributive justice. The material excerpted below is from several titles in the list and will serve as an introduction to our subject matter.

The prima facie duty to relieve suffering is in general quite strong. Other moral considerations must be at least as strong to override its dictates. But in our ordinary thinking, we rarely allow a fair contest to take place. Instead, we routinely underestimate the inherent force of the duty to relieve suffering. We pit it against its competitors in an already weakened and diminished state. (Note that the duty to relieve suffering comes in two parts: a prohibition against inflicting suffering, and a requirement to prevent it. What we tend to underestimate is less the former than the latter.) We do so because of three deeply rooted habits: a tendency to forget the meaning of suffering, to forget the existence of suffering, and to forget or understimate our ability to prevent suffering. These three habits are mutually reinforcing. —Jamie Mayerfield, Suffering and Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

We inhabit a world in which the lives of many millions of people are impaired and shortened by extreme moral poverty. How much ought affluent people—people like you and me—to be doing to help them?

The only way ultimately to end the scandal of world poverty will be by large-scale collective action—and this will not simply be a matter of raising levels of material 'aid' from rich to poor, either, but requires transforming the political, economic, and social structures that produce these patterns of deprivation.

[T]here is the following argument from rectificatory justice: we are collectively responsible for the injustice done in creating and sustaining other people's poverty, this puts us under a duty to redress that injustice, and I must discharge my share of that duty. [....] Another possibility is an argument from distributive rather than rectificatory justice. This holds that it is simply the fact that the world's resources are inequitably distributed, rather than the explanation of how that distribution came about that gives us a duty to change it, and makes it wrong for me not to discharge my share of that collective duty. A third, distinct possibility is an argument from regulative justice, objecting to the rules that currently govern international trade and financial accountability—to the rules themselves, rather than from the distributions resulting from their application. These rules, it might well be argued, unfairly enforce others' poverty for our advantage; we are collectively responsible for reforming them; and I ought to play my part in doing so.

Confronted with other peoples' need, there are two questions to ask: 'What can we do to stop this from happening again?' and 'What can we do to help these people now?' Recognizing that humanitarian aid will not answer the first question does not detract from its importance in addressing the second.

According to the life-saving analogy, it is wrong not to donate your time and money to humanitarian aid-agencies, because refusing to do this is, in a morally relevant way, like failing to save someone's life right in front of you.

Not contributing to aid agencies is like failing to avert threats to life directly: it exhibits a failure of beneficence, and that makes it morally wrong.—Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

PRINCIPLE OF GROUP RESPONSIBILITY: If A's interests are vulnerable to the action and choices of a group of individuals, either disjunctively or conjunctively, then that group has a special responsibility to (a) organize (formally or informally) and (b) implement a scheme for coordinated action by members of the group such that A's interests will be protected as well as they can by that group, consistently with the group's other responsibilities.

PREVENTING EXPLOITABLE VULNERABILITIES: No one should be forced into a vulnerable or dependent position, insofar as this can be avoided. If people are placed in such a position (either through personal choice or natural or social necessity), vulnerabilities/dependencies should be reciprocal and, ideally, symmetrical among all those who are involved. In no case should they be so severe or asymmetrical that one party has exclusive, discretionary control over resources that the other needs to protect his vital interests.

PROTECTING THE VULNERABLE: When people are particularly vulnerable to or dependent upon you, for whatever reasons, you have a special responsibility to protect their interests. When they are vulnerable to you individually, you must seek to produce the result directly through your own efforts. Where they are vulnerable to a group of you, the group as a whole is responsible for protecting their interests; and you as an individual within that group have a derivative responsibility to help organize and participate in a cooperative scheme among members of that group to produce that result.—Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Severe poverty is by far the greatest source of human misery today. Deaths and harms from direct violence around the world—in Chechnya, East Timor, Congo, Bosnia, Kosovo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq and so on—provoke more publicity and handwringing. But they are vastly outnumbered by deaths and harms due to poverty.

The official position articulated by the United States and practiced by the developing countries can...be characterized by these three elements: We are able to reduce severe poverty and the hunger and diseases associated therewith at modest cost; we are willing to spend a tiny fraction of our national income toward such a reduction, but we are not legally or morally obligated to give any weight at all to this goal.

[T]here are at least three morally significant connections between us and the global poor. First, their social starting positions and ours have emerged from a single historical process that was pervaded by massive grievous wrongs. The same historical injustices, including genocide, colonialism, and slavery, play a role in explaining both their poverty and our affluence. The affluent countries and the elites of the developing world divide these resources on mutually agreeable terms without leaving 'enough and as good' [Locke] for the remaining majority of humankind. Third, they and we co-exist within a single global economic order that has a strong tendency to perpetuate and even to aggravate global economic inequality.—Thomas W. Pogge, ed., Global Justice. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.

For moral cosmopolitans the circumstances of justice and the nature of social cooperation have been altered so fundamentally [by economic integration, including transnational production structures, and globablization generally] that we are entitled to transpose egalitarian concepts of distributive justice that apply within the state onto the international or transnational level. [....] And yet we are not dealing with a 'now vanished Westphalian world' (to paraphrase Allen Buchanan), but rather a world in which solidarist and cosmopolitan models of governance coexist, usually rather unhappily, with many aspects of the old Westphalian order. First, there is deformity in terms of the distribution of advantages and disadvantages: in the way, for example, security is defined and the choices taken by institutions and states as to whose security is to be protected; or, very obviously, in the massive inequalities of the global economic order. Second, there is deformity in terms of who sets the rules of international society. Institutions are not, as some liberals would have us believe, neutral arenas for the solution of common problems, but rather sites of power, even of dominance. The vast majority of weaker actors are increasingly 'rule takers' over a whole range of issues that affect all aspects of social, economic, and political life. Third, there is deformity in terms of the very different capacities of states and societies to adapt to the demands of the global economy, combined with the extent to which the economic choices of developing countries are, if not dictated, then certainly shaped by the institutions dominated by the strong and often backed by coercion in the form of an expanding range of conditionalities. And finally, deformity is evident in the limited capacity of international law and institutions to constrain effectively the unilateral and often illegal acts of the strong. In this sense we are not moving beyond sovereignty, but rather returning to an earlier world of differentiated and more conditional sovereignties.—Andrew Hurrell in Pogge, ed., Global Justice (2001) (above).

Our world is arranged to keep us far away from massive and severe poverty and surrounds us with affluent, civilized people for whom the poor abroad are a good cause alongside the spotted owl. In such a world, the thought that we are involved in a monumental crime against these people, that we must fight to stop their dying and suffering, will appear so cold, so strained, and ridiculous, that we cannot find it in our heart to reflect on it any further. That we are naturally myopic and conformist enough to be easily reconciled to the hunger abroad may be fortunate for us who can 'recognize ourselves,' can lead worthwhile and fulfilling lives without much thought about the origins of our affluence. But it is quite unfortunate for the global poor, whose best hope may be our moral reflection.

1. The worse-off are very badly off in absolute terms.
2. They are also very badly off in relative terms—very much worse off than many others.
3. The inequality is impervious: it is difficult or impossible for the worse-off substantially to improve their lot; and most of the better off never experience life at the bottom for even a few months and have no vivid idea of what it is like to live in that way.
4. The inequality is pervasive: it concerns not merely some aspects of life, such as the climate or access to natural beauty or higher culture, but most aspects or all.
5. The inequality is avoidable: the better-off can improve the circumstances of the worse-off without becoming badly off themselves. [....]
6. There is a shared institutional order that is shaped by the better-off and imposed on the worse off.
7. This institutional order is implicated in the reproduction of radical inequality in that there is a feasible institutional alternative under which severe and extensive poverty would not persist.
8. The radical inequality cannot be traced to extra-social factors (such as genetic handicaps or natural disasters) which, as such, affect different people differentially. [....]
9. The better-off enjoy significant advantages in the use of a single natural resource base from whose benefits the worse-off are largely, and without compensation, excluded. [....]
10. The social starting positions of the worse-off and the better-off have emerged from a single historical process that was pervaded by massive grievous wrongs.—Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.

Islam & Justice: An Introduction

Justice, ‘adl (also as or related to haqq—‘right,’ qist—‘equity,’ sidq—‘truth,’ and ihsān—‘virtue’ or ‘beneficence’), is one of the foremost themes in the Qur’ān, indeed, it is part of the metaphysical rationale for creation: ‘God created the heavens and earth for a purpose: to reward each soul [i.e. provide just recompense] according to its deeds. They will not be wronged’ (45: 22). Mankind alone is responsible for whatever justice—or injustice—is in the world (10: 44). Divine justice is more than a quid pro quo exchange, at least with regard to merit- or desert-based principles, for God ‘doubles any good deed and gives a tremendous reward of His own’ (4: 40).

The Qur’ānic concern for justice reiterates one of the fundamental demands (as ‘righteousness’) made by God upon man in revelations to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The fact that the Qur’ān often refers to terms such as ‘adl (equitable, just), ihsān (beneficence) and ma‘rūf (a generally accepted good) without defining them, suggests a relation to justice prior to the Qur’ānic revelations, thereby re-affirming its importance and reminding its readers of the continuity with earlier revelations. Moreover, this pre- and extra-Qur’ānic reference to justice can also be inferred from the fact that mankind is endowed with a universal and objective moral nature or fitra (incipient or dispositional moral and spiritual awareness). It is fitra that forms the objective basis for the equal treatment of all human beings, linking natural law, human nature, and the divine command to build a just society. Perhaps the quintessential articulation of the importance of justice in the Qur’ān is found in 4: 135:

You who believe, uphold justice and bear witness to God, even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives. Whether the person is rich or poor, God can best take care of both. Refrain from following your own desire, so that you can act justly—if you distort or neglect justice, God is fully aware of what you do.

The call to justice is complemented by numerous admonitions against injustice in the Qur’ān.

‘Adl, a noun, comes from the verb ‘adala, which means, among other things, to straighten or modify; to depart or deflect from one (presumably wrong) path to the other (presumably right one) [cf. Q1: 17 on ‘the Straight Path,’ al-sirāt al-mustaqīm, and the literal meaning of sharī‘ah as ‘the way or path’ to water]; to equalize; and to balance, weigh, or be in equilibrium. Among the numerous suggestive synonyms we cite nasīb and qist, rightful share; qistās and mīzān, scale; and taqwīm, straightening. Other synonyms imply the classical Greek virtue sōphrosynē: temperance, harmony, self-mastery, and with respect to action: balance, proportionality and judiciousness, or the Aristotelian principle of the (Golden) Mean between extremes. The semantically rich metaphorical image of ‘the scale’ (mīzān) is used in the Qur’ān with reference to divine justice on the Day of Judgment (yawm ad-Din).

Divine justice by definition perfect, eternal and ideal, we are urged to make every effort to approximate and reflect this metaphysical fact (a capacity owing to fitra), reward or punishment in the next life allotted in accordance with the sincerity and strength of our endeavors to instantiate this divine (ideal) model, one reason for the association of justice with ihsān, beneficence or moral excellence, that is, doing the utmost good. The imperative of justice is both an individual and collective obligation for Muslims, so that while we may distinguish between personal and political virtues, they are necessarily tied together. Mohammad Hashim Kemali provides a succinct summary:

Justice is generally understood to mean ‘putting everything in its rightful place,’ and in the context of Sharī‘ah as ‘giving everyone his or her entitlement.’ Islam’s unqualified commitment to impartial justice is manifested in numerous places in the Qur’ān. We also note the Qur’ānic conception of justice is neither rigid nor rule-bound but open to a variety of considerations. This can be seen in various places in the text of such concepts as ma‘rūf (decent, fair, customary) and ihsān (equity, the doing of good) next to ‘adl (justice). The Qur’ān and Sunnah also integrate intuitive insight (firāsah) and considerations of a just policy (siyāsah shar‘iyyah) into its vision of justice. Moreover, Sharī‘ah validates ijtihād bi’l-ra’y (opinion-based legal judgement) as a basis of adjudication in the absence of a clear text. When the judge adjudicates on the basis of ijtihād, he relies not only on his understanding of Sharī‘ah but also his conscience, insight and experience. This is equivalent to saying that equity and fairness constitute important ingredients of both ijtihād and ‘adl in Islam. Mohammad Hashim Kemali, Shari‘ah Law: An Introduction (Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2008): 199-200.

The Prophet Muhammad appears to have had a keen sense of justice, publicizing widespread inequity and oppression in and around Mecca: a new if not stricter standard of justice was needed to address questions of fairness and exploitation not beholden to tribal status and the privileges of wealth. Whatever dimensions of justice were part of the bedouin ethic of muruwwa in the Jahiliyya, they precipitously declined in the time and place of Muhammad, hence the Meccan revelations regarding the treatment of orphans and the plight of the poor. The Qur’ān evidences the urgency of addressing issues that fall under the rubric of socio-economic or distributive justice, rebuking those who have greedily consumed their inheritance while loving wealth ‘with a passion’ (89: 19-20). Moreover, the enshrinement of zakāt (alms-giving) as the third pillar of practice in Islam makes this duty integral to Muslim identity, effectively institutionalizing a ‘right’ for the needy and deprived to a share in the community’s wealth: no longer would the provision of basic material needs be at the whim or discretion of tribal chiefs. In addition to this compulsory obligation, Muslims of sufficient means are expected to practice voluntary charitable giving (sadaqah). The Qur’ān’s ill-understood opposition to usury (ribā) further illustrates the attempt to deal with problems of distributive justice (as Rosen remarks, the term 'more accurately refers to any form of unjust enrichment').

Historically, questions of political justice were first broached in the Khārijite opposition to the Umayyad caliphate. The Khārijites invoked the doctrine of qadar (power; free will, thus the corollary proposition that each individual is responsible for his or her acts) against the Umayyad rulers’ attempt to legitimize their rule through the principles of ijma‘ (consensus, agreement) and bay‘ah (oath of allegiance), fortified with the theological doctrine of jabr (lit., compulsion; predestination; here in the sense that Umayyad rule was seen as ordained by God). The ‘absolute justice of God’ was one of the five tenets of Mu‘tazilite kalām (theology), unremarkable as such until we learn that it was bound up with debates over the nature of evil and injustice, including the metaphysical and ethical scope of man’s free agency. The Mu‘tazilites even took to referring to themselves as ‘The People of Justice and Unity.’ The pursuit and realization of justice for the Mu‘tazilah was both determined and constrained by the powers of reason (‘aql).

‘The Father of Arab Philosophy’ and Islam’s first significant philosopher, Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. c. 866) held justice to be the central virtue owing to its balancing and coordinating functions vis-à-vis other (principally classical Greek) virtues, thereby demonstrating the integration of Peripatetic and Neoplatonic ideas into a distinctively Islamic philosophy. Islam’s first truly systematic philosopher, al-Fārābī (c. 870-950), envisioned the ideal Islamic polity portioning such goods as security, wealth, honor and dignity according to a desert principle of distributive justice. Rational justice, formulated in terms of a social contract theory inspired by Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics, as well as the Islamic sciences generally, was the center point of Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna) (979-1037) political scheme to secure the common welfare from a pool of basic resources. For Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (1126-1198), justice is the sum and highest of all virtues of man as a citizen of the polity. Furthermore, it inheres in the fulfillment of role responsibilities and duties in a social division of labor structured according to the standards and strictures of philosophy (falsafah). While some virtues, like wisdom and courage, are class-specific, justice is pertinent to all citizens, provided they perform the vocation for which they are fitted ‘by nature.’

Justice in jurisprudential terms entails in the first instance equal treatment of all before the law (fiqh). With the sharī‘ah as lodestar (i.e., God’s Will in ideal and abstract form), both ethics and law in Islam approach justice through the doctrinal formula of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ (al-amr bi’l-ma‘rūf wa’l-nahy ‘an al-munkar). In short, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), as the human endeavor to understand and interpret God’s Will, is a system of ethico-legal obligation formulated in imperative or obligatory (amr) and prohibitive (nahy) terms, with all human actions exhaustively classified as mandatory (fard or wājib), encouraged (mustahabb or mandūb), permissible (halāl or mubāh), discouraged (makrūh), or forbidden (harām). Procedural justice in Islam tends toward a communalist conception of personalism rather than corporatist and administrative principles insofar as trust is placed in the ‘just judge’ or ‘just witness,’ trumping the judicial system as such. In other words, the status and personal qualities of juridical actors are paramount and this might be charitably described as one of the implications of a religious formulation of virtue jurisprudence.

The Islamic modernism or ‘reformism’ of a Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) or a Muhammad Rashīd Ridā (1865-1935) devotes more attention to issues of individual freedom and national self-determination than institutional and public policy questions regarding the mechanics of distributive justice. Exemplified in the works of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Nahdah’s (renaissance; rebirth) second generation of Muslim intellectuals (i.e. after World War II) brought back to the political and economic foreground pressing questions of distributive justice, albeit in a manner that lacked the complete historical compass and ethical range of earlier philosophical and jurisprudential discussions. Most recently, Muslim scholars have persuasively argued for the relevance of Islamic conceptions of justice and jurisprudence to the ideals and values intrinsic to international human rights, such rights being the primary means for realizing and exploring principles of international justice. The Islamist social organization and political party Hizbullāh in Lebanon, and what might be called its Sunni counterpart Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have made the pursuit of social justice a religious obligation central to their welfare work and political platforms. In Turkey, we find the (post-?) Islamist Justice and Development Party (AK Party) proclaiming (in its political program) a commitment to laws “based on [the] fundamentals of universal justice and human rights.”

Further Reading: Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women (Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2001); Mashood A. Baderin, International Human Rights and Islamic Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sohail H. Hashmi, ed., Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983 ed.); Majid Khadduri, The Islamic Conception of Justice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); M. Ali Lakhani, Reza Shah-Kazemi and Leonard Lewinsohn, The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam: The Teachings of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom/North Vancouver, BC: Sacred Web Publ., 2006); Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 4th ed., 2007); Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lawrence Rosen, The Justice of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and, Amr G.E. Sabet, Islam and the Political: Theory, Governance and International Relations (London: Pluto Press, 2008).

A different version of the above is found in Juan E. Campo, ed., Encyclopedia of Islam (New York: Facts on File/Checkmark Books, 2009): 416-418.