The practical part of philosophy, ethics, the Mutakallimun among the Arabians discussed in connection with the justice of God. In opposition to the Jabariya and the Ashariya who advocated a fatalistic determinism denying man's ability to determine his own actions, some going so far as to say that right and wrong, good and evil, are entirely relative to God's will, the Muʿtazila insisted that man is free, that good and evil are absolute and that God is just because justice is inherently right, injustice inherently wrong. Hence reward and punishment would be unjust if man had not the freedom to will and to act. The Karaites Joseph Al Basir and Jeshua ben Judah discuss the problem of the nature of good and evil and vindicate their absolute character. God desires the good because it is good, and it is not true that a thing is good because God has commanded it. Freedom of man is a corollary of the goodness of God. The Rabbanites take it for granted that good is good inherently, and God desires and commands it because it is identical with his wisdom and his will. Freedom of man does follow as a corollary from the justice of God and it is also taught in the Bible and the Talmud. The very fact of the existence of a divine law and commandments shows that man has freedom. And those passages in Scripture which seem to suggest that God sometimes interferes with man's freedom are explained away by interpretations _ad hoc_. Our own consciousness of power to determine our acts also is a strong argument in favor of freedom. Nevertheless the subject is felt to have its difficulties and the arguments against free will taken from the causal sequences of natural events and the influence of heredity, environment and motive on the individual will are not ignored. Judah Halevi as well as Abraham Ibn Daud discuss these arguments in detail. But freedom comes out triumphant. It is even sought to reconcile the antinomy of freedom vs. God's foreknowledge. God knows beforehand from all eternity how a given man will act at a given moment, but his knowledge is merely a mirror of man's actual decision and not the determining cause thereof. This is Judah Halevi's view. Abraham Ibn Daud with better insight realizes that the contingent, which has no cause, and the free act, which is undetermined, are as such unpredictable. He therefore sacrifices God's knowledge of the contingent and the free so as to save man's freedom. It is no defect, he argues, not to be able to predict what is in the nature of the case unpredictable. Maimonides cannot admit any ignorance in God, and takes refuge in the transcendent character of God's knowledge. What is unpredictable for us is not necessarily so for God. As he is the cause of everything, he must know everything. Gersonides who, as we have seen, is unwilling to admit Maimonides's agnosticism and transcendentalism, solves the problem in the same way as Ibn Daud. God knows events in so