Social Criticism and Islamic Ethics After 9/11: How Muslim Anthropologies Matter

Moral subjectivity is an important theme in Miller’s body of work, even though he invokes the term infrequently. Miller’s moral subject is the bearer of inherent and inviolable dignity and, on account of this dignity, the bearer of certain inviolable rights, the bearer of the right to defend those rights against threats, and the bearer of the right to be indignant against actual infractions. A subject forfeits these rights, including, notably, the right to pursue and revise his or her conception of the good, only if the subject threatens to deny or actually denies other moral subjects this right. It is the embrace of reciprocal and hence equal freedom to determine and pursue the good that makes someone a moral subject and an equal member of a community of moral agents. To refuse such consent is to merit rebuke, ostracization, and even punishment from a moral society. While I stand in fundamental agreement with Miller on this point, in this chapter I consider the difficulties that Miller’s account of the free moral self presents to accounts of religious identity, especially Muslim identity as conceived by the moral authorities and religious doctors of the Islamic tradition. I stage a dialogue between Miller and prominent Islamic thinkers and highlight what each can (and also, alas, may not be able to) learn from the other. I conclude with some suggestive ideas in Miller’s account that could bring the two into alignment and even reinforce what I am calling the troika of religious authenticity, moral selfhood, and human dignity.