Ockham Quote on Moral Knowledge: Reason and the Will of God

Quote

"The right and the good are the right and the good because God has willed them: the reason does not discover the moral order as an independent fact but as the order that the divine will has established." — William of Ockham, as reported in the tradition of divine command ethics (14th century)

Author

William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) was the Franciscan philosopher and theologian, one of the greatest logicians of the medieval period, and the most famous representative of the divine command ethics — the view that the moral law is grounded in the will of God.

Source

The teaching is a report of Ockham's doctrine preserved in the tradition of the divine command ethics. The formulation follows the standard account of the voluntarist position that Ockham defended against the intellectualism of Thomas Aquinas.

Context

The teaching belongs to the great medieval debate over the ground of the moral law. The intellectualist position, associated with Aquinas, held that the moral order is grounded in the rational nature of God: the good is good because the reason of God sees it as good, and the human reason can discover the moral order by the natural reason, independent of the revelation. The voluntarist position, associated with Ockham, held that the moral order is grounded in the will of God: the good is good because the will of God has willed it, and the human reason discovers the moral order not as an independent fact but as the order that the divine will has established. The debate is the medieval form of the question that still structures the meta-ethics: is the moral order discovered or commanded, a fact of the reason or a decree of the will?

Meaning

The quotation states the divine command ethics with complete clarity. "The right and the good are the right and the good because God has willed them" — the ground: the moral quality of the action is grounded in the divine will — the action is right because God has commanded it, and it would not be right without the command. "The reason does not discover the moral order as an independent fact" — the rejection of the intellectualism: the moral order is not a fact that the reason discovers independently of the will, like a mathematical truth. "But as the order that the divine will has established" — the discovery: the reason discovers the moral order as the order that the will has established — the knowledge of the moral law is the knowledge of the divine commands. The doctrine is the ancestor of the modern divine command theory in the meta-ethics, and it stands in contrast to the naturalism and the rationalism that ground the moral order in the nature of the world or the nature of the reason.

Related Wisdom

The quotation belongs to the ethics of the moral law and the medieval philosophy of the reason. Its account of the divine will connects to the meta-ethics and to the wider wisdom tradition's debate over the ground of the moral order — the fact, the reason, or the will.