Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Islam Arastirmalari Dergisi, cilt.2025, sa.54, ss.35-75, 2025 (Scopus, TRDizin)
This article critically examines the emerging trend in the past decade of framing Islamic ethics as aligned with virtue ethics theory and describing Islamic ethics as virtue ethics. “It first identifies and categorizes the claims advanced by contemporary scholars who reference the term “Islamic virtue ethics” in an effort to justify this characterization. This is followed by an exposition of the fundamental propositions of virtue ethics. In the evaluative section these claims are analyzed in the context of virtue ethics’ core propositions to assess whether Islamic ethics can be regarded as virtue ethics. The article concludes that, while a virtue theory can indeed be derived from the foundational sources of Islamic ethics, the central propositions of modern virtue ethics render it untenable to classify Islamic ethics as virtue ethics. The approach of virtue ethics is found to be fundamentally incompatible with the moral vision articulated in the core sources of Islamic ethics. Virtue ethics rejects rules and principles—and by extension, moral authority and moral law—prioritizes virtue over action, and grounds morality in personal intellectual and moral development. In contrast, Islamic ethics present themselves as conveyors of truth and moral reality. Furthermore, the ethical works produced within Islamic disciplines are analyzed for their points of convergence and divergence with virtue ethics, and it is concluded that they too diverge from the basic principles of virtue ethics.