Muslim ethics presumes existing moral drive rather than asking why be moral

Evidence

The interpretation of this goodness was left to the moral subject whose rational-intellectual apparatus would dictate to her, from within her soul, the necessity of the inclination to see the world as goodness and to act in it as requiring such goodness. This doctrine of kalam al-nafs presupposes the moral subject, which is to say that before the subject becomes an interpretive subject, a hermeneutical agent, there exists a moral drive to render interpretation nothing but an ethical exercise. As I have argued elsewhere, the modern question as to why be moral did not arise in the same way for Muslim jurists and theologians. Ethics was not a challenge, but a question of how best to put it into practice. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 515

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains kalam al-nafs as the doctrine that a moral drive precedes interpretive activity.
• XREF: Contrasts sharply with modern moral philosophy’s ‘why be moral’ problem — connects to MacIntyre and Anscombe on the death of moral authority.