…are counted among the certainties, whereas judgments derived from experience are not primary. Yet these widely acknowledged propositions—mashhūrāt—are more forceful than many empirical judgments; the awareness of them, and the assent given to them, is stronger and more firmly rooted in the minds of all nations than the awareness of many empirical or even mutawātir propositions whose mass-transmission is limited to some peoples rather than others.

Viewed from this perspective, our opponents have offered no argument to show that such propositions do not yield certainty. Their claim that we accept them only because of custom, psychological inclination, or the interest of maintaining order does not contradict their certainty; rather, it supports it, as we shall explain, Allah willing. Every empirical judgment rests on habitual association, yet its being habitual does not strip it of certainty. In the same way, the fact that the soul’s faculties demand these judgments merely indicates attraction and repulsion—precisely what we mean by good (ḥusn) and evil (qubḥ)—and therefore does not deny that they are true and known propositions. Likewise, the world’s orderly functioning depends on them, but this in no way undermines their truth or our knowledge of them. Nothing the objectors have cited casts doubt upon them. Admittedly, we do not call them “primary” in the technical sense the logicians give that term—any more than we call empirical or mutawātir propositions primary—yet that does not prevent their belonging to the class of certainties.

Fourth category:
The special property of reason and innate disposition is to approve what is good and to condemn what is evil.

Fourth category (continued):
They contend: “These propositions rest on nothing but common repute; for if a human being were left alone with his pure intellect, imagination, and senses,”—and so on until his words—“he would never judge by them in obedience to his intellect, imagination, or senses, just as we judge that usurping someone’s property is evil or that lying is evil and should never be committed.”

We reply: We do not concede this, for it is a mere allegation. His statement “usurping a person’s property is evil” is too general, for property may be taken justly or unjustly. Our discussion concerns the case in which one knows that his property has been taken unjustly—for instance, when two people share ownership of wealth in every respect and one of them seizes more than half from the other, and the like—for in such circumstances the intellects of all rational people…