Ethics as Self-Cultivation: A Reflection on the Relationship between Moral Duty and Islamic Education

This study aimed to reinterpret and reexamine the notion of moral duty within the framework of the Islamic intellectual tradition in order to propose an integrative, context-sensitive, and practically oriented model for moral education. To this end, the three major schools of normative ethics—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—were critically and analytically examined, and their philosophical and practical limitations in explaining the complex and multicultural moral situations of the contemporary world were analyzed. The findings indicated that, despite their philosophical merits, none of these schools succeeded in offering a comprehensive framework for guiding the moral agent in diverse cultural and ethical contexts. Drawing upon the anthropological and epistemological foundations of Islam—particularly Allameh Tabataba’i’s theory of fitrah (innate human disposition)—ethics was interpreted not as a set of external obligations but as an inner, gradual, and identity-forming process. The research employed a transcendental–comparative analysis through which five foundational components of moral duty were identified: moral capability and realism, responsible will, stabilization of moral character, socio-cultural contextuality, and rational interaction among principles, consequences, and character. The results revealed that the three-stage process of Islamic self-cultivation (tazkiyah, tahdhib, and jihad al-akbar) could elevate moral duty from a merely formal obligation to an existential commitment. Accordingly, the proposed model, by integrating rationality, spirituality, and moral agency, opened a new horizon for the theoretical and pedagogical reconstruction of Islamic ethics and provided a framework for strengthening spiritual capital and nurturing a self-aware, responsible, and virtuous human being.

کلیدواژه ها:

Moral Duty ، Self-Cultivation ، moral education ، Cultural Contextuality ، Normative Ethics ، Fitrah (Innate Disposition)