The Structure of Ockham's Moral Theory

THE STRUCTURE OF OCKHAM'S MORAL THEORY ?. Introduction Ockham's moral theory, like his nominalism, finds its place among the most notorious, and yet widely misunderstood, doctrines ofmedieval philosophy, (a) Many take Ockham's as the paradigm of"Divine Command Morality," according to which moral norms are entirely a function of the arbitrary choices of the free will of an omnipotent God. Paul Helm's recent comment is merely representative when he writes, What can be labelled an Ockhamist Divine Command Theory holds that morality is founded upon a free divine choice. If God commands fornication, then fornication is obligatory, and it is within God's power to do so. He could establish another moral order than the one he has in fact established and he could at any time order what he has actually forbidden.1 Maurice De Wulf had characterized Ockham's moral theory the same way at the beginning of the century: Applied to the Deity, this absolute autonomy of volition makes the Free Will of God the sovereign arbiter of moral good and evil. But if nothing is of itselfmorally good or evil, the study of nature can teach us nothing about morality.2 Likewise, Armand Maurer sees Ockham's doctrines ofdivine omnipo1 Paul Helm, "Introduction," in Divine Commands and Morality, Oxford University Press, 1981, 3. 2 Maurice De Wulf, History of Medieval Philosophy, translated by P. Coffey, Longmans, Green, and Co. 1909, 425. 2 MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS tence and free will so converging as to rob morality of its footing in nature. For he observes, Because God is omnipotent and absolutely free, he is not bound to impose a given set of laws upon men. We should not imagine him as ruled by an eternal or divine law from which human laws flow as necessary conclusions from premisses. The laws he imposes on men are completely arbitrary, so that he can change or annul them at will.3 and concludes that the moral code which binds humans is "not rooted in human nature."4 Again, Dom David Knowles contends, The methodological use of the absolute power of God is corollary of the emphasis on the absolute freedom of God first emphasized in a tendentious manner by Scotus. Ockham followed Duns here, stressing the primacy of the will and the concept of freedom both in God and man.... Acts are not good or bad of themselves, but solely because they are commanded or prohibited by God. Not only murder and adultery, but even hatred of God could become ethically good actions at God's commands.5 (b) Some felt the epistemological corollary of such Divine-Command Ethics to be scepticism about our natural knowledge of moral truths. Thus, De Wulf complains that for Ockham, "intelligence is powerless to instruct us on the requirements of the Divine Law...."6 Lamenting "Ockham's view of God's absolute power" and his use of it "with devastating effect to show the impossibility of discussing matters of faith," Leff protests that given "the sheer unrestricted limits ofHis omnipotence " and radical freedom, "anything was possible, and so there could be no means of knowing what He might will."7 Knowles, also, joins this chorus: 3 Armand Maurer, A History of Philosophy: Medieval Philosophy, Random House, 1962. 4 Maurer 287. 5 David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, Random House, 1962, 324. 6 De Wulf 425. 7 Gordon Leff, Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham, Penguin Books, 1958, chap. 9, 289. The Structure of Ockham's Moral Theory3 as we know nothing by pure reason of God's attributes or way of acting , and as the first article of the creed is an assertion of the omnipotence of God, ethics becomes entirely dependent upon revelation, which is the only channel by which God's will becomes known to us.8 So, too, Helm: From this position Ockham could consistently only regard ethics as a matter of special divine revelation in Scripture or elsewhere, and not a matter of natural law discerned through reason or conscience.9 (c) The principal difficulty with this interpretation is that it overlooks Ockham's repeated reference to right reason in his most concentrated discussions ofmoral philosophy. Gilson...