Before naming the steep path of freeing captives and feeding the needy, Al-Balad reminds the human of the faculties already given: 'have We not made for him two eyes, a tongue and two lips, and shown him the two highways?' (90:8-10). Classical commentators read 'the two highways,' al-najdayn, as the paths of good and evil, and treat the verse as establishing that moral discernment is built into ordinary human capacity, alongside sight and speech, rather than requiring some rare or specially granted insight available only to a few.
The pairing of physical faculties, eyes and lips, with the moral faculty of recognising the two ways is read by commentators as a deliberate rhetorical move, listing capacities everyone already possesses and takes for granted before naming a further capacity, discernment between right and wrong, as equally native to human nature rather than externally imposed. The verse is cited in later Islamic ethical writing as a scriptural basis for holding that ordinary moral responsibility does not depend on advanced learning, since the two highways are described as already shown to every person prior to the surah's subsequent list of specific obligations. The verse is regularly quoted, on its own, in modern Islamic writing on moral education as evidence that basic ethical accountability requires no special training beyond ordinary human faculties.