Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

This essay offers an integrated philosophical and theological commentary on three Qur’anic verses — Sūrat al-Ḥajj 22:31, 22:32, and Āl ʿImrān 3:83 — reading them as a compact scriptural statement of moral and metaphysical realism. It argues that the Qur’anic vision of ḥanīfiyya (primordial inclination to the One), the catastrophic simile of shirk as a fall from the sky, the doctrine that veneration of God’s symbols proceeds “from the piety of hearts” (min taqwā al-qulūb), and the declaration that the whole cosmos submits to God “willingly or unwillingly” (ṭawʿan wa karhan) together articulate a worldview in which moral and religious truth is grounded in the very structure of reality rather than constructed by human sentiment or convention. After situating the discussion within contemporary metaethics — using the 2009 and 2020 PhilPapers surveys to show that moral realism is the majority position among professional philosophers — the essay presents the Arabic text and six English translations of each verse, surveys classical and modern tafsīr (al-Ṭabarī, al-Zamakhsharī, al-Qurṭubī, al-Bayḍāwī, Ibn Kathīr, and the moderns Quṭb, Mawdūdī, and Asad), and then marshals the strongest historical and contemporary arguments for moral realism (Plato, Aquinas, Moore, Ross; Brink, Shafer-Landau, Nagel, Parfit, Enoch, Cuneo). It mounts an emphatic realist refutation of anti-realism (Hume, Nietzsche, Ayer, Stevenson, Mackie, Blackburn, Gibbard, Hare, Joyce). Finally, it maps these debates onto the classical Islamic controversy over ḥusn wa qubḥ (Muʿtazilī objectivism versus Ashʿarī voluntarism, with the Māturīdī and Ibn Taymiyyan middle positions) and the work of George Hourani and Ramon Harvey, concluding that the Qur’anic verses supply a theistic grounding for the objectivity of value that secular realism reaches for but cannot fully underwrite.

Demographics: Where Professional Philosophers Stand on Moral Realism

Before turning to scripture, it is worth establishing an empirical baseline about the metaethical question at the heart of this essay, because a common assumption — that “serious philosophers” have abandoned belief in objective morality — is simply false.

The most authoritative data come from the PhilPapers Surveys conducted by David Bourget and David Chalmers. In the 2009 survey of 931 target faculty, the published figures in “What Do Philosophers Believe?” (Philosophical Studies 170.3, 2014) were moral realism 56.4%, moral anti-realism 27.7%, and other 15%. Among atheist philosophers, 59% were realists and 32% anti-realists; among theists, 81% were realists and 15% anti-realists.

The 2020 PhilPapers Survey, the largest ever conducted, presented each of its 40 core questions to all 1,785 respondents. On the question “Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?” the published results (survey2020.philpeople.org) are moral realism 62.07%, moral anti-realism 26.12%, and other 12.68% (N = 1,719 after excluding “skip” and “insufficiently familiar”). In the matched longitudinal table of “Philosophers on Philosophy: The 2020 PhilPapers Survey” (Philosophers’ Imprint 23.11, April 2023), designed for legitimate comparison with 2009, moral realism rose to 59.8% (from a 2009-matched 57.74%) while anti-realism held essentially flat (25.2% vs. 25.43%).

Related 2020 results reinforce the realist tilt of the profession: cognitivism (the view that moral claims express truth-apt beliefs) is endorsed by 69.25% versus 20.72% for non-cognitivism (N = 1,636). Most strikingly, when the sample is restricted to specialists, realism does not weaken — among philosophers whose area of specialization is meta-ethics/normative ethics, the AOS-filtered data show moral realism at 69.20% versus 21.88% anti-realism (N = 224). In other words, the philosophers who have thought hardest about the subject are more likely to be realists, not less.

The interpretive lesson is important and I take a definite position on it: moral realism is not a naïve pre-philosophical prejudice that sophistication dissolves; it is the considered majority view, and it grows more dominant among the specialists. This is the intellectual context in which the Qur’anic affirmation of an objective, cosmically grounded moral-religious order should be read — not as an embarrassing relic but as a claim that coheres with the mainstream of reflective ethical thought.

The Verses: Arabic Text and Six Translations

Qur’an 22:31 (Sūrat al-Ḥajj)

Arabic:

حُنَفَآءَ لِلَّهِ غَيْرَ مُشْرِكِينَ بِهِۦ ۚ وَمَن يُشْرِكْ بِٱللَّهِ فَكَأَنَّمَا خَرَّ مِنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ فَتَخْطَفُهُ ٱلطَّيْرُ أَوْ تَهْوِى بِهِ ٱلرِّيحُ فِى مَكَانٍ سَحِيقٍ

1. Sahih International: “Inclining [only] to Allah, not associating [anything] with Him. And he who associates with Allah – it is as though he had fallen from the sky and was snatched by the birds or the wind carried him down into a remote place.”
2. Yusuf Ali: “Being true in faith to Allah, and never assigning partners to Him: if anyone assigns partners to Allah, is as if he had fallen from heaven and been snatched up by birds, or the wind had swooped (like a bird on its prey) and thrown him into a far-distant place.”
3. Pickthall: “Turning unto Allah (only), not ascribing partners unto Him; for whoso ascribeth partners unto Allah, it is as if he had fallen from the sky and the birds had snatched him or the wind had blown him to a far-off place.”
4. Muhammad Asad: “(inclining) toward God, [and] turning away from all that is false, without ascribing divine qualities to aught beside Him: for he who ascribes divinity to aught but God is like one who is hurtling down from the skies – whereupon the birds carry him off, or the wind blows him away onto a far-off place.”
5. Arberry: “being men pure of faith unto God, not associating with Him anything; for whosoever associates with God anything, it is as though he has fallen from heaven and the birds snatch him away, or the wind sweeps him headlong into a place far away.”
6. Abdel Haleem: “Devote yourselves to God and assign Him no partners, for the person who does so is like someone who has been hurled down from the skies and snatched up by the birds or flung to a distant place by the wind.”

Qur’an 22:32 (Sūrat al-Ḥajj)

Arabic:

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ شَعَـٰٓئِرَ ٱللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِن تَقْوَى ٱلْقُلُوبِ

1. Sahih International: “That [is so]. And whoever honors the symbols of Allah – indeed, it is from the piety of hearts.”
2. Yusuf Ali: “Such (is his state): and whoever holds in honour the symbols of Allah, (in the sacrifice of animals), such (honour) should come truly from piety of heart.”
3. Pickthall: “That (is the command). And whoso magnifieth the offerings consecrated to Allah, it surely is from devotion of the hearts.”
4. Muhammad Asad: “This is [to be borne in mind]. And anyone who honours the symbols set up by God [shall know that] verily, these [symbols derive their value] from the God-consciousness in the [believers’] hearts.”
5. Arberry: “All that; and whosoever venerates God’s waymarks, that is of the godliness of the hearts.”
6. Abdel Haleem: “All this [is ordained by God]: anyone who honours the sacred ordinances of God will have good reason to do so in his heart.”

Qur’an 3:83 (Sūrat Āl ʿImrān)

Arabic:

أَفَغَيْرَ دِينِ ٱللَّهِ يَبْغُونَ وَلَهُۥٓ أَسْلَمَ مَن فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ طَوْعًا وَكَرْهًا وَإِلَيْهِ يُرْجَعُونَ

1. Sahih International: “So is it other than the religion of Allah they desire, while to Him have submitted [all] those within the heavens and earth, willingly or by compulsion, and to Him they will be returned?”
2. Yusuf Ali: “Do they seek for other than the Religion of Allah? – while all creatures in the heavens and on earth have, willing or unwilling, bowed to His Will (accepted Islam), and to Him shall they all be brought back.”
3. Pickthall: “Seek they other than the religion of Allah, when unto Him submitteth whosoever is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, and unto Him they will be returned?”
4. Muhammad Asad: “Do they seek, perchance, a faith other than in God, although it is unto Him that whatever is in the heavens and on earth surrenders itself, willingly or unwillingly, since unto Him all must return?”
5. Arberry: “What, do they desire another religion than God’s, and to Him has surrendered whoso is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, and to Him they shall be returned?”
6. Abdel Haleem: “Do they seek anything other than submission to God? Everyone in the heavens and earth submits to Him, willingly or unwillingly; they will all be returned to Him.”

Classical and Modern Tafsīr

22:31 — Ḥanīfiyya and the Fall from the Sky

The verse opens with a state (ḥāl): the believers are to be ḥunafāʾ lillāh, “inclining to God.” Al-Qurṭubī (d. 671/1273), in al-Jāmiʿ li-Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, notes that the word ḥunafāʾ belongs to the aḍdād — the class of Arabic words carrying opposite senses — and means both “standing upright” (mustaqīmīn) and “inclining toward the truth” (māʾilīn ilā l-ḥaqq); it stands grammatically as a circumstantial accusative. He rejects the narrow reading that ḥunafāʾ means merely “pilgrims” as “a specification with no proof.” Surah Quran The lexical root ḥ-n-f, as al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s Mufradāt records, denotes al-mayl — “to incline from error toward uprightness,” the exact inverse of janaf (inclining away from uprightness toward error). Almaany Ḥanīfiyya is therefore not a static label but a dynamic orientation: the soul’s continuous leaning away from falsehood and toward the One. This connects directly to the Qur’anic doctrine of fiṭra (30:30), the primordial nature “upon which God originated humankind,” glossed in the prophetic ḥadith reported by Abū Hurayra: “No child is born except upon the fiṭra, then his parents make him a Jew or a Christian or a Zoroastrian.” Al-Ṭabarī records the reading that fiṭra here is Islam — the innate, upright monotheism that culture may obscure but cannot erase.

Then comes one of the Qur’an’s most vivid similes. Al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), in Jāmiʿ al-Bayān, reads the image as a similitude of the polytheist’s remoteness (buʿd) from guidance and his destruction: he is “like one who falls from the sky and is snatched by birds and perishes, or is blown by the wind into a far place.” He derives makān saḥīq from the Arabic idiom asḥaqahu Allāh — “God set him far away.” Quran

The richest allegorical decomposition is al-Zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) in al-Kashshāf. He observes that the simile may be read either as a compound (murakkab) image — the mushrik has destroyed himself utterly and irreversibly, as one who falls from the sky is torn to pieces in the talons of birds or hurled by the wind into some distant abyss — or as a decomposed (mufarraq) allegory in which each element maps onto a spiritual reality. Great Tafsirs On the second reading, al-Zamakhsharī says explicitly: God “likened faith in its loftiness (al-īmān fī ʿuluwwihi) to the sky, and the one who abandons faith and associates partners with God to the one who falls from the sky; and the vain desires (al-ahwāʾ) that tear apart his thoughts to the snatching birds; and Satan (al-shayṭān), who flings him into the valley of misguidance, to the wind that sweeps away what it blows into some deadly abyss.” Great Tafsirs (A famous fourfold reading in which the sky is īmān/tawḥīd, the birds are devils, and the wind is desire is often attributed online to al-Rāzī, but is in fact from Ibn al-Qayyim’s treatment of the Qur’anic parables; the securely classical source for the element-by-element allegory is al-Zamakhsharī.)

Al-Qurṭubī’s emphasis falls on utter powerlessness: on the Day of Resurrection the mushrik “owns no benefit for himself and can ward off no harm — like one fallen from the sky, unable to defend himself”; the birds “tear him with their talons.” Quran He also records a second view linking the image to the moment the disbeliever’s soul departs and, refused entry at the gates of heaven, is cast back down (the ḥadith of al-Barāʾ). Quran Al-Bayḍāwī (d. c. 685/1286), in Anwār al-Tanzīl, glosses each verb — “fallen” = dropped, birds “snatch him” = seize him swiftly, wind “hurls him” = drops him, makān saḥīq = far — concluding that “his deliverance is not to be hoped for” (lā yurjā khalāṣuhu). Almaany

Among the moderns, Sayyid Quṭb, in Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān, reads the scene cinematically: the mushrik “falls from the sublime height of faith” and, deprived of the “firm basis of belief in God’s oneness,” is snatched by his own desires “like one snatched by birds of prey,” while false beliefs “throw him off course, just like storms.” الموسوعة الشاملة لتفسيرQur’an Wiki Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, in Tafhīm al-Qurʾān, makes the ontology explicit: “The word ‘sky’ in this parable stands for the natural state of man wherein he is the servant of none except God” Islamic Studies — that is, the fiṭra — while the “birds” are Satan and the misguiders who pounce, and the “wind” is the play of “lusts, emotions and fancies.” Islamic Studies Mawdūdī notes that saḥīq derives from s-ḥ-q, “to grind,” so the far place is one “so deep that anything that falls into it is reduced to particles.” Islamic Studies Muhammad Asad reads the passage as a moral-psychological description of the disintegration of the self that severs itself from the One reality.

22:32 — Sacred Symbols and the Piety of Hearts

Al-Qurṭubī explains that shaʿāʾir (singular shaʿīra) derives from the root sh-ʿ-r, “to mark or make known”: a shaʿīra is “everything in which God has a command that He has made known and marked,” related both to a war-band’s shiʿār (recognition-sign) and to ishʿār al-badana, the nicking of the sacrificial camel’s flank so that flowing blood marks it as consecrated. Thus “shaʿāʾir Allāh” are “the emblems of His religion, especially those connected with the Hajj rites.” Quran Al-Ṭabarī takes them broadly as all the God-appointed landmarks and acts of the pilgrimage — the Jimār, al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa, al-Mashʿar al-Ḥarām, Muzdalifa — and holds, without restriction, that the veneration of all of them proceeds “from the piety of their hearts.” Quran

The verse’s decisive theological move is the clause fa-innahā min taqwā al-qulūb. Al-Qurṭubī locates the reality of taqwa in the heart, citing the ṣaḥīḥ ḥadith in which the Prophet pointed to his chest and said, “Taqwa is here.” Quran He then offers what he calls a “subtle indication” (ishāra laṭīfa) that is the single most important classical gloss for our purposes: the mere purchase of a sacrificial animal might be driven by minimal legal obligation and so “does not prove sincerity”; but when a person magnifies the offering — going beyond the minimum that would legally suffice, choosing it “fine and fat” (a reading traced to Ibn ʿAbbās and Mujāhid) — then “no motive appears for his act except the veneration of the Sacred Law, and that is from the piety of hearts.” Outward veneration beyond the required is thus evidence of an inner state. Al-Bayḍāwī calls this inner taqwa “the highest rank of taqwa” (arqā marātib al-taqwā). Al-Zamakhsharī, commenting on the neighboring verse 22:30, had already defined veneration (taʿẓīm) itself as an inward act: “knowing that [the sanctities] are obligatory to observe and preserve, and undertaking their observance.” greattafsirs The later mufassir Ibn ʿĀshūr (d. 1393/1973) makes the grammar carry the metaphysics: taqwa is annexed to “hearts” because “veneration of the symbols is a heart-held conviction (iʿtiqād qalbī) from which the outward act arises.”

The structure here is philosophically rich: the visible rite is not self-standing but is the outward manifestation of an inner orientation toward the real order established by God. The symbol has value because of what it points to and because of the state of soul that honors it — a striking scriptural anticipation of the realist thesis that right action tracks a mind-independent order and derives its worth from that tracking.

3:83 — The Submission of the Cosmos

Āl ʿImrān 3:83 universalizes the vision. Ibn Kathīr, following Mujāhid and Wakīʿ, reads wa-lahū aslama man fī l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍi ṭawʿan wa-karhan (“to Him has submitted whoever is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly”) alongside 13:15 (“to Allah prostrate all who are in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, and their shadows”) and 16:48–49. The disbeliever, he says, “unwillingly submits to Him in body only, since he is under God’s power,” My Islam whereas the faithful believer “submits to God in heart and body.” QuranReflect Al-Jalālayn glosses ṭawʿan as submission “without refusal” Surah Quran and karhan as submission “by the sword and by seeing what refusal results in.” Mawdūdī draws the metaphysical conclusion with unusual clarity: “The basic principle characterizing the universe — in other words, the religion of the universe and of every part of it — is Islam, insofar as the universe is in a state of total obedience and service to the Will of God.” The question “Do they seek other than the religion of God?” is therefore rhetorical and cosmological: to seek a way other than submission to the Real is to set oneself against the grain of the entire created order — precisely the incoherence dramatized by the man who “falls from the sky” in 22:31.

Read together, the three verses form a single argument. There is a real order (3:83: the cosmos submits). The human being is made to incline toward it (22:31: ḥanīfiyya, fiṭra). To honor its sacred markers is to act from an inner alignment with the real (22:32: taqwā al-qulūb). And to refuse it — shirk — is not a neutral alternative preference but a catastrophic detachment from reality, a fall (22:31). This is, in scriptural idiom, a thesis of moral and metaphysical realism.

The Case for Moral Realism

Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts or truths that hold independently of what any individual or culture believes or desires — that “cruelty is wrong” is true in something like the way “water is H₂O” or “7 is prime” is true. The Qur’anic verses presuppose exactly such objectivity: the wrongness of shirk and the rightness of submission are presented as features of reality, not projections of taste. The Western philosophical tradition has defended this objectivity with a battery of powerful arguments.

Historical Defenders

Plato. In the Republic and Phaedo, Plato held that Goodness and Justice are real, eternal, mind-independent Forms — more real than the sensible particulars that imperfectly participate in them. The Form of the Good is the highest object of knowledge, the source of both being and intelligibility. On this picture, to know the good is to apprehend an objective reality, and moral error is a failure of vision. The resonance with the Qur’anic “religion of the universe” is direct: value is woven into the fabric of what is.

Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s Natural Law theory holds that God’s eternal law — His rational ordering of all things toward their ends — is participated in by rational creatures as natural law, apprehended through reason. Its first, self-evident precept, grasped by the innate habit Aquinas calls synderesis, is that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided” (Summa Theologiae I–II, q.94, a.2), from which all other precepts follow according to our natural inclinations (to preserve life, to know and worship God, to live in society). Crucially, natural law is not an arbitrary external code but “general rules that any rational agent can come to recognize simply in virtue of being rational.” Aquinas thus fuses theism and rational moral objectivity — a structure that maps almost exactly onto the Qur’anic pairing of fiṭra (innate orientation) with a divinely grounded moral order, and onto the Muʿtazilī–Māturīdī claim that reason can discern good and evil.

G. E. Moore. In Principia Ethica (1903), Moore argued that goodness is a simple, non-natural, indefinable property — as unanalyzable as yellow. His Open Question Argument contends that for any proposed naturalistic definition of “good” (e.g., “good” = “pleasant” or “good” = “what we desire to desire”), the question “This is pleasant, but is it good?” remains open and intelligible, which it could not be if the two were identical in meaning. To identify goodness with any natural property is to commit the “naturalistic fallacy.” Moore’s non-naturalism preserves the objectivity of ethics (moral judgments are true or false) while insisting on its irreducibility to science.

W. D. Ross. In The Right and the Good (1930), Ross defended a pluralist intuitionism: we know, by self-evident insight, a set of prima facie duties — fidelity (promise-keeping), reparation, gratitude, justice, beneficence, self-improvement, and non-maleficence — none of which is absolute, and which must be weighed in particular situations. Ross’s realism is uncompromising: “The moral order … is just as much part of the fundamental nature of the universe … as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.” This is the very analogy — moral truth as akin to mathematical truth — that later realists would deploy against the anti-realist.

Contemporary Defenders

David Brink. In Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (1989), Brink defends a naturalist realism on which moral facts are objective and causally efficacious, akin to the theoretical posits of science, and not dependent on the agent’s antecedent desires. He answers Mackie’s arguments from disagreement and queerness by arguing that moral properties supervene on natural properties and can be known a posteriori, much as scientific kinds are, and that moral disagreement is no more threatening to realism than persistent disagreement in science or philosophy.

Russ Shafer-Landau. In Moral Realism: A Defence (2003), Shafer-Landau defends a non-naturalist realism on which moral truths are “real and true even if no one believes them” — stance-independent, mind-independent facts. He argues that moral properties are constituted by, though not reducible to, descriptive ones, and that ethical knowledge is possible through a broadly intuitionist epistemology. He is among the leading respondents to evolutionary debunking arguments (see below).

Thomas Nagel. In The View from Nowhere (1986), Nagel argues that the capacity to step back from one’s own perspective and view oneself as “one person among others equally real” generates agent-neutral reasons: if my pain gives me a reason to want it relieved, then from the objective standpoint my pain is simply bad, giving anyone reason to want it relieved. Reason itself, pressed toward objectivity, forces us to acknowledge the reality of others’ well-being as a source of reasons for us — agent-neutral values being, in his phrase, “what everyone ought to value, independently of its relation to himself.” Moral objectivity is thus not a metaphysical extravagance but the natural terminus of taking the objective standpoint seriously.

Derek Parfit. In On What Matters (2011), the culminating work of one of the century’s most rigorous moral philosophers, Parfit defends “Non-Realist Cognitivism”: there are objective normative truths that are true or false in a robust but non-metaphysical, non-religious sense — irreducibly normative, discoverable by careful reasoning, and existing in the way that mathematical and logical truths exist, “not as parts of the natural universe nor in Plato’s heaven.” PhilArchive His Convergence (Triple Theory) argument contends that the best versions of Kantian ethics, rule consequentialism, and Scanlonian contractualism converge on the same principles — “climbing the same mountain from different sides” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews — which, if true, is powerful evidence that they are tracking a single moral reality rather than expressing divergent attitudes. Parfit also directly confronts Nietzsche (below), arguing that Nietzsche conflated “what we ought to do” with “what is commanded.” Philosophy Now

For the purposes of this essay, these secular realisms are allies of the Qur’anic vision but also, from a theological standpoint, incomplete: they affirm that there are objective normative truths while struggling to explain what grounds them. The Qur’anic verses supply precisely that grounding — the normative order is real because it is rooted in the will and wisdom of the Real (al-Ḥaqq), toward whom all things incline.

The Refutation of Anti-Realism

Moral anti-realism comes in several forms: non-cognitivism (moral utterances do not express beliefs but attitudes), error theory (they express beliefs, but all such beliefs are systematically false), and various subjectivisms and constructivisms. I will argue, emphatically and from the realist side, that each of the major anti-realist programs fails.

Hume and the Is–Ought Gap

David Hume argued that moral distinctions are not derived from reason but from sentiment — reason is “the slave of the passions” — and famously noted the unexplained transition from “is” to “ought.” Projectivists take him to hold that we “gild and stain” the world with sentiments and then mistake them for real features.

Realist rebuttal. First, the is–ought gap, even if genuine, is not an argument against moral facts; it is at most an argument that moral conclusions require moral premises — which the realist happily grants (the natural law tradition and Ross both begin from self-evident normative first principles). Second, the “companions in guilt” strategy is devastating here: epistemic norms (“you ought to proportion belief to evidence”) and the norms of practical rationality are equally non-derivable from purely descriptive premises, yet the Humean cannot coherently deny them, since his own argument presupposes that we ought to reason well. If the is–ought gap refuted moral facts, it would refute epistemic facts too — and with them the very standards by which Hume argues. Third, the sentimentalist account inverts the order of explanation: we do not disapprove of gratuitous cruelty because we happen to feel aversion; we feel aversion because we perceive it to be vile. The phenomenology of moral experience is cognitive and world-directed, not a mere efflux of feeling.

Nietzsche’s Genealogical Skepticism

Nietzsche declared that “there are no moral facts whatever, only a moral interpretation of phenomena,” and sought to unmask morality — especially “slave morality” — as the sublimated expression of ressentiment and will to power.

Realist rebuttal. Genealogy commits the genetic fallacy: to explain the causal origin of a belief is not to show it false. That our grasp of the wrongness of torture has a psychological or social history no more refutes it than the history of arithmetic refutes “7 is prime.” As Parfit incisively argued, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer inherited from Christianity the assumption that “ought” statements are disguised commands (both used the German sollen for “You should not kill” and “Thou shalt not kill” alike), so that with the death of the commander morality must collapse; but “what ought to be done” is categorically distinct from “what is commanded,” and the former survives the withdrawal of any commander. Moreover, Nietzsche’s own project is drenched in evaluative commitment — he ranks nobility above baseness, honesty above self-deception. His critique is not the abolition of value but a rival table of values, which quietly presupposes that some things really are better than others.

Ayer, Stevenson, and Emotivism

A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) held, on the strength of the verification principle, that since “torture is wrong” is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable it is literally meaningless as a statement of fact — it merely evinces emotion (the “boo/hurrah” theory). C. L. Stevenson refined this into a theory of emotive meaning and the persuasive function of moral language: moral utterances aim to influence attitudes.

Realist rebuttal. Emotivism’s foundation is self-destroying. The verification principle itself is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable; by its own criterion it is meaningless. This is not a quibble but a fatal, widely recognized self-refutation, and with the collapse of logical positivism (its verifiability criterion “widely rejected by the second half of the 20th century”) its motivating framework fell. Emotivism also flagrantly distorts moral phenomenology and grammar: we say we believe torture is wrong, that we know it, that we might be mistaken, that we discovered we were wrong — the full apparatus of cognition, which “boo!” cannot bear. And it makes moral disagreement unintelligible: if I say “abortion is wrong” and you say “no, it is not,” we contradict each other, but two people shouting “boo!” and “hurrah!” do not contradict anything.

Mackie’s Error Theory and the Argument from Queerness

J. L. Mackie (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977) conceded that ordinary moral discourse is cognitivist — it purports to describe objective prescriptive facts — but argued that all such claims are false, because objective values would be metaphysically “queer” entities, “qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe,” requiring an equally queer faculty to know them; he added the argument from relativity (widespread disagreement).

Realist rebuttal. First, the argument from queerness proves too much and again founders on companions in guilt: normativity as such — including epistemic reasons, logical entailment (“you must not both assert and deny p”), and mathematical necessity — is every bit as “queer” as moral normativity, yet no one proposes an error theory of logic or arithmetic. Terence Cuneo’s normative web argument (The Normative Web, 2007) makes this decisive: moral facts and epistemic facts stand or fall together (both are irreducibly normative); epistemic facts exist (to deny them is self-defeating, since the denial itself claims to be epistemically justified); therefore moral facts exist. Second, Parfit and others reply that “queerness” merely restates the non-naturalist’s claim that normative truths are sui generis and non-spatiotemporal — which is not an objection but the view itself; numbers are also non-spatiotemporal and causally inert, yet real. Third, the argument from disagreement is weak: disagreement is compatible with realism (there is vast disagreement in physics, history, and philosophy), much moral disagreement traces to non-moral factual disagreement or distorting interests, and there is in fact a large and growing convergence on fundamentals (the wrongness of slavery, gratuitous cruelty, treachery) — the phenomenon of moral progress, which anti-realism struggles to describe as progress at all rather than mere change.

Blackburn’s Quasi-Realism and Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivism

Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism attempts to “earn the right” to realist-sounding talk (truth, objectivity, knowledge) starting from an expressivist, projectivist base — sentiments “spread onto the world.” Philopedia Allan Gibbard’s norm-expressivism analyzes moral judgments as expressions of acceptance of systems of norms.

Realist rebuttal. Quasi-realism faces the Frege–Geach (embedding) problem: moral sentences function logically in unasserted contexts (“If torture is wrong, then getting your brother to torture is wrong”) exactly as fact-stating sentences do, licensing modus ponens; but if “torture is wrong” merely expresses an attitude, it expresses no attitude when it appears in the antecedent of a conditional, and the inference should equivocate — yet it plainly does not. Expressivist attempts to reconstruct logical validity in terms of “attitude consistency” have been widely judged to fall short of genuine logical entailment. Worse, quasi-realism confronts the creeping minimalism or collapse problem: the more successfully Blackburn earns the right to say “it is true that cruelty is wrong,” “there is a fact that cruelty is wrong,” “we know cruelty is wrong,” the harder it becomes to state any content to his denial of realism. If the quasi-realist can say everything the realist says, the view either collapses into realism or becomes an empty relabeling. As Parfit put it, if expressivists claim their normative statements are true in the same sense realists intend, the dispute dissolves in the realist’s favor.

Hare’s Prescriptivism and Joyce’s Fictionalism

R. M. Hare’s universal prescriptivism held that moral judgments are universalizable imperatives (“prescriptions”). Richard Joyce’s moral fictionalism accepts Mackie’s error theory but recommends that we retain moral discourse as a useful fiction.

Realist rebuttal. Prescriptivism inherits the Frege–Geach problem and cannot account for the truth-aptness embedded in ordinary moral reasoning; and its universalizability requirement, pressed hard, tends back toward the objective agent-neutrality that Nagel and the Kantians treat as a realist discovery. Fictionalism is the most candid anti-realism — and thereby the most telling admission of realism’s pull: it concedes that morality is indispensable to human life while denying it is true. But indispensability is itself evidence. This is the force of David Enoch’s deliberative indispensability argument (Taking Morality Seriously, 2011): irreducibly normative truths are indispensable to the rationally non-optional project of deliberation — one cannot sincerely deliberate about what to do without presupposing that there are truths about what one ought to do — and what is indispensable to a non-optional project we are justified in believing real, just as we are justified in believing in the theoretical posits indispensable to our best explanations. The fictionalist who goes on deliberating, deploying moral concepts to guide a life, has already conceded in practice what he denies in theory.

The Evolutionary Debunking Challenge and the Realist Reply

A final contemporary anti-realist move (Sharon Street, and popular Darwinian arguments) claims that our moral intuitions are the products of natural selection aimed at reproductive fitness, not at tracking moral truth, so their reliability is undercut. Realist rebuttal: Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and Enoch reply that (i) the argument, generalized, would debunk our mathematical and logical intuitions too — and our capacity to run the debunking argument itself — so it self-destructs; (ii) selection may have given us general rational capacities that then track normative truths (a “third-factor” account); and (iii) the debunker must use normative premises (“we ought not trust unreliable faculties”), presupposing the very normativity in question. The debunking argument thus cannot be run without standing on realist ground.

Islamic Metaethics: Ḥusn wa Qubḥ and the Grounding of the Real

The Western realism/anti-realism debate has a striking classical Islamic analogue in the controversy over ḥusn wa qubḥ — whether the goodness and badness of acts are objective and rationally knowable or constituted by divine command.

The Muʿtazila were ethical objectivists and rationalists. They held, as the historian M. Abdul Hye summarizes, that “moral qualities of good and evil are objective; they are inherent in the very nature of things or actions and as such can be known by reason.” Reason, not merely revelation, is the criterion of moral value; God commands the good because it is good. This is a theistic moral realism close in structure to Aquinas’s natural law and to Plato’s Euthyphro-answer that piety is loved by the gods because it is pious. The philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) stood broadly in this objectivist line.

The Ashʿarīs, by contrast, were voluntarists and, in effect, divine command theorists: acts are neither good nor bad in themselves; “goodness and badness of actions are not qualities inhering in them; these are mere accidents.” What is just is what God legislates; God could in principle have commanded otherwise. This is the theological cousin of a certain kind of anti-realism — value is not a stance-independent feature of acts but is constituted by the will of the Lawgiver. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, an Ashʿarī, expended great effort to sever wrongness (qubḥ) from any real, act-intrinsic property such as injustice (ẓulm), precisely to block the Muʿtazilī conclusion that value is objective and knowable prior to revelation.

Between these poles stand the middle positions. The Māturīdīs (following Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī, d. 333/944) affirmed that reason can genuinely apprehend the good and bad in acts while preserving God’s transcendence and the necessity of revelation for the details of worship — a nuanced correlation of reason (ʿaql) and revelation (naql). Ibn Taymiyya developed a distinctive teleological-realist position on which acts do have real, consequential properties grounding their value, integrating divine wisdom (ḥikma) with the reality of benefit and harm.

Here Mustafa Akyol, writing in the Cato Institute essay “Where Islam and Reason Meet,” makes an observation I regard as decisive for reading our verses: “the Qur’an offers a stronger basis for ethical objectivism. It often simply commands believers to act justly, without further explanation, implying that people have an innate sense of it. It also speaks of goodness as maʿrūf, or ‘the known’—known by reason, not necessarily by revelation.” The Qur’anic vocabulary of maʿrūf (the recognized-good) and munkar (the disavowed-evil) presupposes a moral reality that human nature already recognizes — exactly the fiṭra of 22:31 and 30:30.

The modern scholarship confirms the objectivist reading of Qur’anic ethics. George Hourani, in Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics (1985) and Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of ʿAbd al-Jabbār (1971), demonstrated that the Muʿtazila held “the values of human and divine actions are knowable in principle by natural human reason,” and centered the entire Islamic ethical tradition on “two related debates: over the ontological status of value, and over the sources of our knowledge of value” — the very axes of the Western realism debate. Ramon Harvey, in Transcendent God, Rational World: A Māturīdī Theology (2021), reconstructs al-Māturīdī’s system in dialogue with Husserlian phenomenology and analytic theology, defending a contemporary kalām jadīd in which a transcendent God and a rationally intelligible moral world are jointly affirmed — a direct modern counterpart to the realist synthesis this essay commends.

Weaving the Threads: The Qur’anic Grounding of Moral Realism

We can now draw the strands together. The three verses articulate a layered realism:

1. Ontological realism about the moral-religious order (3:83). Reality is not normatively neutral. The cosmos submits — it runs according to a divinely instituted order (the “religion of the universe,” in Mawdūdī’s phrase). This is the theistic analogue of Ross’s dictum that the moral order is “part of the fundamental nature of the universe.” Value is not projected onto a valueless world (contra Hume and Blackburn); it is discovered in a world already ordered to the Good — the Platonic Form of the Good, refracted through tawḥīd, as the source of both being and value.
2. Moral epistemology grounded in fiṭra (22:31, ḥanīfiyya). The human being is constitutively oriented to the real order; ḥanīfiyya is the soul’s built-in inclination toward the One, and maʿrūf is the good that this nature already recognizes. This is the theological counterpart of Aquinas’s synderesis and of Ross’s self-evident intuition — and it neutralizes the evolutionary debunker, for on this view our moral perception is not an accident of blind selection but a designed capacity to track the real.
3. The interiority of value (22:32, taqwā al-qulūb). Right action is the outward expression of an inner alignment with the real; the symbol has worth because of the reality it marks and the state of soul that honors it. Al-Qurṭubī’s “subtle indication” — that veneration beyond the legal minimum proves sincerity — is a scriptural insistence that outer conforms to inner, act to orientation, exactly as the realist holds that right action tracks and expresses a mind-independent good.
4. Anti-realism as ontological catastrophe (22:31, the fall). Most powerfully, the Qur’an gives us an image of what anti-realism is: to sever oneself from the real order — shirk — is not to adopt a permissible alternative valuation but to fall from the sky, to be snatched by the birds of one’s own desires (al-Zamakhsharī’s ahwāʾ) and blown by the winds of Satan (al-Zamakhsharī’s shayṭān) into a “remote place” where one is, in Mawdūdī’s gloss, “ground to particles.” This is a phenomenology of value-detachment: the self that projects value onto a valueless world, having “abandoned faith in its loftiness,” has nothing to hold it and is scattered. The realist’s charge against anti-realism — that it cannot make sense of the objectivity our moral experience presupposes, and leaves us in free fall — is here rendered as unforgettable scriptural image.

The convergence is not accidental. The strongest secular realisms — Nagel’s objective standpoint, Parfit’s convergence of the best theories, Enoch’s indispensability, Cuneo’s normative web — all reach toward an order of value that binds independently of our attitudes but leave its ground unexplained (Parfit’s normative truths “exist” but “not as parts of the natural universe nor in Plato’s heaven” PhilArchive — a location notoriously hard to specify). The Qur’anic verses, read with the Muʿtazilī–Māturīdī objectivists and with Hourani and Harvey, supply the missing ground: value is real because reality itself is the ordered self-disclosure of the Real, al-Ḥaqq — a name of God that means, at once, the True and the Real.