Popularizing Ethical Theories (A Critique of Adel Zaher’s Theory of Popular Ethisc)

Popularization domain has also covered the scientific theories and among them, theories of popularized ethics have emerged. Focusing on human mind and its independence, popularized ethics simply takes human mind, rather than religion, as the ultimate reference of ethical criteria as well as the norms governing the human characteristics and behavior. Rejecting the religious ethics, Adel Zaher, Arab-decent contemporary scholar, sees the epistemological foundation of ethics in human independent mind. For him, ethics is logically independent of religion and it is possible to achieve the epistemological foundation without religious knowledge. He attempts to deny the claim that religious epistemology is prior to ethical epistemology and dependency of the latter to the former. Enumerating the theories viewing religion to be dependent on ethics and, consequently, ethics popularized, this paper intends to analyze and criticize Adel Zaher’s viewpoint of popularized ethics.