…and even their wahm (the instinctive estimative faculty) declares it to be vile.
As for this wahm, the author explains it in Al-Ishārāt, saying:
“Moreover, animals—rational and non-rational alike—grasp, within particular sensibles, particular non-sensory meanings that do not reach them through the external senses: a ewe, for instance, perceives in the wolf an unseen meaning, and a ram perceives in the ewe an unseen meaning. This is a particular cognition by which judgment is passed just as the senses pass judgment on what they behold. You therefore possess a faculty whose function is of this sort.”
This very faculty, which they have called wahm, is what enables a person to sense a friend’s friendship and an enemy’s enmity; through it each spouse perceives in the other what is desirable. By means of it one is drawn toward another or repelled from him. Hence they say: “The greatest judge over souls is the wahm.”
It is well known that this faculty inclines toward a person whom it knows to be just, truthful, and benevolent, and recoils from one it knows to be deceitful, oppressive, and malevolent; indeed, it reacts in this way even when it anticipates neither benefit nor harm from that person. Souls are innately fashioned to love justice and its people and to detest injustice and its people. The love embedded in the fiṭrah (inborn nature) is what we mean when we call something good, and the aversion embedded in it is what we mean when we call something evil—just as, with outward forms, we say “this face is handsome” and “that face is ugly.” Outward beauty is perceived by the outward senses, while inward beauty is perceived by the inner heart. Since souls are naturally disposed to love the one and loathe the other, this is precisely what is meant by good and evil. How, then, can anyone claim that if a human being were left to his senses, intellect, and wahm he would not judge in this way, when the very nature of the children of Adam is to approve the former and condemn the latter?
As for the intellect, its most distinctive trait in man is that he knows what benefits him and therefore pursues it, and knows what harms him and therefore shuns it. By “good” we mean what is beneficial, and by “evil” what is harmful. How, then, can it be said that the human intellect does not distinguish between good and evil, and what greater contrast could there be…