Truth, Ethics, and Benefit: A Multi-Source Framework for Practical Deliberation

Modern Western philosophy has gained analytic clarity by separating the questions “How do I know if something is true?”, “How do I know if something is ethical?”, and “How do I know if something is beneficial?” into the distinct sub-disciplines of epistemology, normative ethics, and decision theory. It has lost, in the process, the practical unity within which actual human agents must answer these three questions simultaneously when they decide how to act. This paper argues that the three judgments are irreducible to one another — Hume and Moore are right about the formal point — but cannot be responsibly isolated either. Their integration in any actual deliberation is achieved through the agent’s intentional orientation (niyya, qaṣd), and operates within historically embodied traditions of practical reasoning. Drawing primary sources from both the analytic philosophical tradition (Russell, Hume, Kant, Moore, Wittgenstein, MacIntyre, Plantinga, Husserl) and the classical Islamic intellectual tradition (Qurʾān and Sunna; al-Ghazālī, al-Shāṭibī, Ibn Taymiyya; Ashʿarī/Muʿtazilī meta-ethical debate; Saʿīd Nursī; Tāhā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān), the paper develops a four-source framework — revelation (waḥy), reason (ʿaql), sense-experience (tajriba), and conscience (qalb / ḍamīr) — in which the four sources are mutually necessary but asymmetrically ordered. Six falsifiable commitments are stated. The framework is stress-tested against six pressure points (Hume’s challenge; Ashʿarī/Muʿtazilī meta-ethics; slavery and abolition; divergent fatāwā on organ donation; naskh and epistemic stability; AI personhood); five tests confirm and one (slavery) reveals genuine strain that is reported rather than papered over. The paper closes with the formal specification of a deliberation algorithm — input fields, scoring formula with maqāṣid tier weights, hard constraints, intention modifier, output classification — implementable as a decision-support tool that structures user reasoning without issuing fatāwā or replacing scholarly consultation. Three worked examples (workplace honesty, organ donation, ribā-adjacent financial decision) walk the algorithm end-to-end. A Turkish executive summary, a cross-traditional concept-mapping table across five axes (truth, knowability, ethics, benefit, intention), and a primary/secondary bibliography in IJMES transliteration are included. Keywords: Islamic ethics; comparative philosophy; epistemology; maqāṣid al-sharīʿa; niyya; intentionality; is/ought problem; Ashʿarī ethics; Saʿīd Nursī; Tāhā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān; deliberation theory; decision support; yaqīn; correspondence theory of truth.