We cannot properly call such a system an ethical system at all. Central to any valid system of ethics is the notion of moral responsibility, of a moral person who can legitimately be held responsible for his actions: a person who is capable of rational thought, who is capable of deliberation, who displays intentionality, who is capable of choosing and is, in some way, free to choose. Under the Koranic system of predestination, “men” are no more than automata created by a capricious deity who amuses himself by watching his creations burning in hell. We cannot properly assign blame or approbation in the Koranic system; man is not responsible for his acts, thus it seems doubly absurd to punish him in the sadistic manner described in the various suras quoted earlier.
Bousquet begins his classic work on Islamic views on sex with the blunt sentence: “There is no ethics in Islam.” The Muslim is simply commanded to obey the inscrutable will of Allah; “good” and “bad” are defined as what the Koran, and later, Islamic law considers permissible or forbidden. The question posed by Socrates in the Euthyphro, “Whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?” receives a very definitive answer from an orthodox Muslim: something is good if God wills it, and bad if God forbids it; there is nothing “rationally” or independently good or bad. But as Plato pointed out this is not a satisfactory answer. As Mackie puts it (n.d., Chapter 31): “If moral values were constituted wholly by divine commands, so that goodness consisted in conformity to God’s will, we could make no sense of the theist’s own claims that God is good and that he seeks the good of his creation.” In an earlier work (1977, Chapter 29), Mackie observes that the Muslim view has the consequence:
that the description of God himself as good would reduce to the rather trivial statement that God loves himself, or likes himself the way he is. It would also seem to entail that obedience to moral rules is merely prudent but slavish conformity to the arbitrary demands of a cap icious tyrant. Realizing this, many religious thinkers have opted for the first alternative [i.e., “the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy”]. But this seems to have the almost equally surprising consequence that moral distinctions do not depend on God, …hence ethics is autonomous and can be studied and discussed without reference to religious beliefs, that we can simply close the theological frontier of ethics.
It is worth emphasizing the logical independence of moral values from any theistic system. Russell formulates this insight in this manner:
If you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God Himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God (n.d., Chapter 3).
We cannot escape our moral responsibility that our independent moral understanding gives us.
Nor can we regard the concept of hell as ethically admirable. All but two suras(i.e., the fatihah and sura 9) tell us that God is merciful and compassionate, but can a truly merciful God consign somebody to hell or everlasting torment for not believing in Him? As Russell put it, “I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.” As Antony Flew remarked, there is an inordinate disparity between finite offenses and infinite punishment. The Koranic doctrine of hell is simply cruelty and barbaric torture and divinely sanctioned sadism. More than that, it means Islam is based on fear, which corrupts true morality. (“There is no God but I, so fear Me” [sura 16.2]). As Gibb said, “Man must live in constant fear and awe of [God], and always be on his guard against Him—such is the idiomatic meaning of the term for ‘fearing God’ which runs through the Koran from cover to cover” (1953, Chapter 5). Instead of acting out of a sense of duty to our fellow human beings, or out of spontaneous generosity or sympathetic feelings, under Islam we act out of fear to avoid divine punishments and, selfishly, to gain rewards from God in this life and the life to come. Mackie (Chapter 31) argues correctly that
This divine command view can also lead people to accept, as moral, requirements that have no discoverable connection—indeed, no connection at all—with human purposes or well-being, or with the well-being of any sentient creatures. That is, it can foster a tyrannical, irrational morality. Of course, if there were not only a benevolent god but also a reliable revelation of his will, then we might be able to get from it expert moral advice about difficult issues, where we could not discover what are the best policies. But there is no such reliable revelation. Even a theist must see that the purported revelations, such as the Bible and the Koran, condemn themselves by enshrining rules that we must reject as narrow, outdated, or barbarous. As Hans Kueng says, “We are responsible for our morality.” More generally, tying morality to religious belief is liable to devalue it, not only by undermining it temporarily if the belief decays, but also by subordinating it to other concerns while the belief persists.
We are told that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent; yet He behaves like a petulant tyrant, unable to control his recalcitrant subjects. He is angry, He is proud. He is jealous: all moral deficiencies surprising in a perfect Being. If He is self-sufficient, why does He need mankind? If He is all-powerful, why does He ask the help of humans? Above all, why does He pick an obscure Arabian merchant in some cultural backwater to be His last messenger on earth? Is it consistent with a supremely moral being that He should demand praise and absolute worship from creatures He Himself has created? What can we say of the rather curious psychology of a Being who creates humans—or rather automata—some of whom are preprogrammed to grovel in the dirt five times a day in homage to Himself? This obsessive desire for praise is hardly a moral virtue and is certainly not worthy of a morally supreme Being. Palgrave[Chapter 21] gave this vivid but just description of the Koranic God:
Thus immeasurably and eternally exalted above, and dissimilar from, all creatures, which lie leveled before Him on one common plane of instrumentality and inertness. God is One in the totality of omnipotent and omnipresent action, which acknowledges no rule, standard, or limit, save His own sole and absolute will. He communicates nothing to His creatures, for their seeming power and act ever remain His alone, and in return He receives nothing from them; for whatever they may be, that they are in Him, by Him and from Him only [sura 8.17]. And secondly, no superiority, no distinction, no pre-eminence, can be lawfully claimed by one creature over its fellow, in the utter equalisation of their unexceptional servitude and abasement; all are alike tools of the one solitary Force which employs them to crush or to benefit, to truth or to error, to honour or shame, to happiness or misery, quite independently of their individual fitness, deserts, or advantage, and simply because “He wills it,” and “as He wills it.”