Philosophy

This essay compares patterns in Ḥanafī and Mālikī rulings about marital annulments and shows how they are connected to differences in how these two schools treated the relationships between marriage, sales, and worship law. Drawing on a variety of jurisprudential texts from the 5th/11th to the 9th/15th centuries, including Ibn Rushd’s (d. 595/1198) Bidāyat al-Mujtahid and Burhān al-Dīn al-Farghānī al-Marghīnānī’s (d. 593/1197) al-Hidāyah, we first show that Ḥanafī and Mālikī rulings on annulments were consistently inconsistent: when they differed, Mālikīs consistently ruled to permit annulments that Ḥanafīs prohibited. Focusing then on annulments based on defects in dower and maintenance, we show how Mālikī rulings manifest a comparatively stronger emphasis on the analogy between marriage and sale, while Ḥanafī rulings manifest a comparatively stronger emphasis on the analogy between marriage and worship. Finally, we discuss how these differences in emphases may help explain the sch...

James Sterba uses the Pauline Principle to argue that the occurrence of significant, horrendous evils is logically incompatible with the existence of a good God. The Pauline Principle states that (as a rule) one must never do evil so that good may come from it, and according to Sterba, this principle implies that God may not permit significant evils even if that permission would be necessary to secure other, greater goods. By contrast, I argue that the occurrence of significant evils is logically compatible with the existence of a good God because victims of significant evils may themselves reasonably consent to their suffering. In particular, I argue that they may be able to accept their suffering if it turns out that there was no way for God to secure relevant greater goods (or prevent other, greater evils) except by way of allowing their suffering, and God also provides them with other compensating, heavenly comforts. After using this consent-based argument to address Sterba’s lo...

Huckleberry Finn believes that by helping Miss Watson’s slave Jim escape to freedom, he is doing something wrong. But Huck does it anyway—and many want to give him moral credit for this choice. If Huck is to be worthy of such moral esteem, however, it seems there must be some implicit way of appreciating and responding to considerations as moral reasons that does not involve explicitly believing that those considerations are moral reasons. This chapter argues that an agent like Huck can implicitly appreciate a consideration as a moral reason to φ‎ by presenting it under the light of a particular phenomenologically-mediated mode of presentation: one that presents that consideration via the light of a felt directive force “pointing” towards φ‎-ing—lending weight to it, or soliciting it—in a particular authoritative way. Thus, I suggest, Huck may be understood on analogy with a young jazz piano virtuoso. As she may appreciate that the G-seventh chord having been played just so constitu...