On Naseer Ahmed's Article "The Divine Origin of Morality"
By Ghulam Mohiyuddin, New Age Islam
17 February 2025
This is a response to Naseer Ahmed Sahab's article titled "The Divine Origin of Morality" posted in New Age Islam on February 15, 2025. Naseer Sahab is selling man's capabilities short! His search for objective moral standards is a wild goose chase. His thinking comes from a period when everything was divinely ordained and man was just a recipient of divine favours. Man was first given a woman, devised from his ribs. He was given an apple to teach him about sin. He was sent the Commandments from the sky so that he may not lie or steal.
Meanwhile man, on his 200,000-year trek on Earth, learned a host of lessons to help him survive but, according to Naseer Sahab, he just could not, on his own, learn that lying and stealing are bad for him and lead to unpleasant consequences! Let us suppose that man did learn moral behaviour on his own. Should such morality then be called "subjective" and branded as "moral relativism", bereft of an "objective moral standard"? Moral philosophers come up with such fanciful formulations but Naseer Sahab takes them as God's truth! Man learns what he learns, he uses what he has learned to better himself and his community, and let the idea of objective standards be given a decent burial.
The ethical and moral systems of religions echo what man had already learned from his long and arduous journey. The religious aura gives such constructs additional authority but such authority cannot trump the inherent sensibility of the moral rules. The inherent sensibility of moral rules also explains their universality. Such universality is absent in other religious dogmas, e.g. theological beliefs.
Instances of genocide, oppression, and injustice can be blamed more on failures of religions rather than on any fault of moral codes.
To conclude, Naseer Sahab's rhetoric is couched in elegant prose but his arguments are just not persuasive.
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Ghulam Mohiyuddin is a retired psychiatrist.
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