Mulla Sadra's Virtue Legal Theory: Virtue Ethics as the Foundation of Political and Legal VirtueTheory

The article  examines the requirements of the theory of moral virtue ethics among Islamic philosophers — such as al-Farabi, Khwaja Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Sina — in the domain of political and legal theories is considered essential for the social extension of Islamic philosophy. This endeavor, however, necessitates a coherent examination of the concepts of virtue ethics across the three domains: moral, political, and legal theories, as a unified normative theory — something that has not yet received adequate scholarly attention. In this research, we aim to focus on the foundations of philosophical virtue ethics in Mulla Sadra’s philosophy provides a basis for moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of law, in order to outline his general principles as the foundations of a coherent normative moral-political-legal school of thought. It appears that within the system of Sadraean Transcendent Wisdom (Hikmat al-Muta'aliya), moral philosophy — understood as fundamental values grounded in anthropological concepts such as happiness (sa'ada), virtue (fadila), and justice ('adala) — serves as a basis for deriving political foundations such as the virtuous city (al-Madina al-Fadila), the promotion of virtues, the avoidance of vices, and ultimately the regulation of foundational legal concepts such as the expansion of goods, the removal of evils, and the protection of lives and property. The aforementioned rules and foundations are organized and framed in coherence with fundamental anthropological values. According to the findings of the present research, these foundations possess the capacity to formulate a moral-political-legal theory of virtue ethics in accordance with Mulla Sadra's particular version of this tradition.