نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 دانشیار دانشکده الهیات و معارف اهل البیت، دانشگاه اصفهان
2 Kazan Federal University
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
This paper argues that Peter Singer’s restriction of moral value to sentient beings stems not from consequentialism itself, but from his epistemological commitment to empirical, third-person verifiability as the sole criterion for consciousness. This commitment excludes inanimate nature a priori, even though preference utilitarianism’s formal structure—maximizing satisfied preferences—could logically accommodate broader criteria of value. By contrast, Mulla Sadra’s Transcendent Theosophy offers a non-empirical epistemology: knowledge is not a mental representation but a mode of existence (ilm = wujūd). Existence is graded and self-evident, and consciousness emerges as a continuous spectrum—from mineral receptivity to plant growth, animal perception, and human intellection—each level possessing its own mode of awareness proportionate to its existential intensity. This ontology dissolves the sharp sentience/non-sentience dichotomy.
Critically, Sadra’s framework can be incorporated into Singer’s theory without altering its normative calculus. We replace “sentience” with “intensity of existence” as the criterion for moral considerability. The principle is: every being possesses direct moral value proportional to the intensity of its existence. This criterion is continuous (no binary cutoff), avoids pseudo-psychism (no hidden minds attributed to rocks), and transcends anthropocentrism. It preserves consequentialist maximization while expanding the moral circle to include all existents—from atoms to angels—each valued according to its ontological grade.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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