Perspectives on Morality and Human Well-Being. Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi
authentic representation of Islam’s consequentialist moral philosophy, and which adequately addresses the essential plurality of Islamic concerns about the individual’s life and society, and predicts new facts and possibilities for an Islamic economy. (b) Focus on understanding the nature of real-life Muslim societies, rather than of some utopian Islamic society, that may have existed in the distant past. This is because the existing Muslim societies, though no more than a pale shadow of their ideals (and which societies are exact replicas of their ideals?), are the only places where the Islamic principles can be implemented, even though some of these may have universal relevance as well.
On the basis of these rules we identify four fundamental axioms which are authentic representations of Islam’s moral vision, giving it concrete form, and providing an overarching analytical framework for deducing empirically falsifiable statements about Islamic economics: tawḥīd (unity); al-‘adl wa al-iḥsān (equilibrium); ikhtiyār (free will); and farḍ (responsibility).8 The unity axiom acts as a ‘unifier’ of all the constitutive elements of human life into a mutually consistent and supportive totality, in which economic and ethical aspects of life are inextricably linked with each other. The equilibrium axiom denotes an all-permeating social balance. It fixes the direction of change in the basic socio-economic structure of a society by setting up a just system of rewards and incentives, promotes peace and harmony that decides conflicting claims on economic resources on the basis of fairness and justice. The free will axiom defines (substantive) freedoms to make the choices that people have reason to value (e.g., to be literate, to be healthy, to be well-fed, to be politically free, etc.); and it also helps secure freedom from self-love, avarice and greed. These freedoms leave maximum space to engage in morally edifying social and economic activities. The responsibility axiom denotes a person’s moral commitment to improve the quality of social life, especially of the least-privileged in society, who have a prior right in the nation’s wealth to ensure that social harmony, rather than discord, flows from freedom. These axioms, in their fullness, generate new knowledge about the moral and economic aspects of human life and about the many ways in which the mundane and the spiritual dimensions and human well-being leaven each other to let individual genius flower and enhance social good. The claim is that these axioms illustrate the essentially pluralistic nature of Islamic ethics, and provide an adequate evaluative criteria to judge the working of an Islamic economic system in real-life Muslim societies. Above all, they define the Islamic moral vision of a good life, and spell out the basic organising principles of a distinct paradigm to organise human experiences and initiatives. There is nothing preordained or deterministic about this moral vision and its consequences. Indeed, it is meliorist in intent: that humankind can change the world for the better by observing the Right Path.
A few assertions can be made about the relevance of some of the (secular) economic and ethical principles briefly discussed in Section II above. Thus, for instance, Benthamite Utilitarianism (which emphasises the maximisation of total utility but does not worry about its distribution) and the Pareto-optimality principle (which rules out the possibility of improving upon competitive market solutions which are efficient, though not necessarily equitable) are not relevant in conceptualising the workings of the Islamic economic system. The reason being that these principles are totally insensitive to distributional problems and leave little room for a reformative public policy to redress distributive inequities, poverty and human deprivation. In particular, the selfinterest principle, which neo-classical economics regards as the hallmark of rational behaviour (one that worries only about efficient solutions) will find no more than a faint echo in the Islamic system because the latter defines economic rationality more broadly. In particular, the former’s contention that ethical behaviour is a sign of irrationality will be flatly denied in the Islamic system – indeed, it would be denied in any real life system that does not regard sanity as a moral crime. In the same vein, the libertarian moral-rights philosophy (which only recognises the individual’s unlimited moral right to private property and rules out any reformist redistribution of income and wealth, and which rejects the moral right of the poor to aid) is also contrary to the Islamic ethos. In sharp contrast, Islam insists on the prior moral (and legal) right of the poor on the wealth of the rich and recommends radical changes in the basic structure of property rights to meet these rights. However, broadly consistent with the Islamic ethical vision are the more reformist moral theories – e.g., the Rawlsian Justice-as-Fairness and the Difference principles and Sen’s Capability Calculus – which insist on social justice, recognise the prior claim of the poor in the wealth of the rich, and recommend a purposive social policy that is impartial with respect to its underlying principles and seeks the voluntary support of the people for its implementation.
Notes
1. It may be instructive to quote from Smith (1962): “In the European historical experience, which itself varied widely, the secularization process coexisted with an intensification of religiosity on the personal and popular levels…Religious beliefs and practice, as faith, intensified rather than declined during the secularization of the state...” (p. 272).
2. Hayek (1960) takes the same position: it is wrong “to suggest that those who are poor, merely in the sense that there are those in the same society who are richer, are entitled to a share in the wealth of the latter….” (p. 101; emphasis added).
3. Wilson (1997) in his excellent comparative study of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, points out that while Christianity urges the rich to help the poor, it does not go as far as saying that the poor have a right on the wealth of the rich (pp. 70-74). It may also be noted that the Islamic assertion that the poor have a right in the wealth of the rich directly contradicts the libertarians’ claim that the poor do not have a moral right in the wealth of the rich.
4. Rawls (1999) defines a society beyond justice as one “in which all can achieve their complete good, or in which there are no conflicting demands, and the wants of all fit together without coercion into a harmonious plan of activity” (p. 249).
5. Thus, for instance, it has been argued that since the profit-and-loss sharing (PLS) principle is the only one most recommended by the Sharī’ah, it alone must be the most efficient and equitable. But this is circular reasoning: it makes the desired efficiency and equity outcomes contingent on the adoption of the PLS principle, which is prejudged as the only one available which is Islamically just! However, as should not be entirely unexpected, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons why an ‘unrestricted’ PLS-only system is likely to be both inefficient and inequitable [Naqvi (2000)].
6. The problem noted in the text is a historical one. Rahman, F. (1980) notes: “…Islamic ethics proper, systematically based upon a genuine understanding of the purposes of the Qur’ān, did not develop until later in Muslim history…The leaders of the Sharī’a made practically no distinction between ethics and law…” (emphasis added; p. 239).
7. Chapra (2000) wisely remarks: “The increasing volume of literature on maqāṣid al-Sharī’ah is also a reflection of the realization that the taking of these into account is at least as important as the letter of the text” (p. 107). Also timely is his warning that “if the ‘ulamā’….react aggressively and harshly to even moderate forms of rational thinking, which are necessary for enabling fiqh to meet the challenges faced by the Muslim ummah, then adverse reaction might occur” (p. 105).
8. The power of reasoning in creating new Islamic knowledge