ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates al-Ghazālī's ethical stances in light of evolutionary ethics. Two key concerns are important to address in this regard. One is the problem of evil, which is related to God's omnibenevolence. Why would a loving God create such a cruel process where 99% of all species have been wiped from the face of the planet? The second issue is the objectivity of morality. The argument here is that morality is entirely contingent on the process of evolution. If the tape of life was replayed, we might have obtained different moral codes, making morality entirely subjective. It is shown in this chapter that these concerns are irrelevant in al-Ghazālī's framework. Since God transcends the categories of being morally good or bad, the problem of evil isn't really a problem in al-Ghazālī's theology. Furthermore, al-Ghazālī is a divine command theorist, i.e. it is God who ultimately indexes the good and bad, and a moral non-nativist, i.e. humans have no inbuilt moral foundations. It follows that whatever the genealogy of moral-making capacities and moral frameworks early humans and their ancestors could have had or had, the issue of evolution undermining objective morality is entirely non-problematic.
