William of Ockham’s Voluntarism: The Primacy of God’s Will in Ethics

Most people assume that when something is morally wrong – cruelty, theft, hatred – it is wrong because of what it is, not merely because someone forbids it. William of Ockham, the 14th-century English Franciscan friar and philosopher, disagreed profoundly. For Ockham, the source of all moral value is not the nature of an action but the will of God. This position, known as voluntarism, reshaped the landscape of medieval ethics and sent ripples through centuries of philosophical and theological debate that continue to this day.

Who was William of Ockham? 🔗

William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347) was born in the small village of Ockham in Surrey, England. He entered the Franciscan Order and studied theology at Oxford, where he developed a reputation as one of the most incisive philosophical minds of the Late Middle Ages – a period he shared with figures like Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Beyond ethics, Ockham made lasting contributions to logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and political theory. He is best known to general audiences today for Ockham’s Razor, the methodological principle that one should not multiply explanations beyond necessity. But his ethical voluntarism is equally significant – and considerably more controversial.

Ockham’s philosophical outlook was shaped in large part by his nominalism: the view that universal categories (like “goodness” or “justice”) are not real features of the world but merely names we attach to individual things. This had a direct bearing on his ethics. If there is no abstract, universal essence of “the good” floating independently in reality, then moral goodness cannot be a fixed property inherent in actions themselves. Something else must determine it – and for Ockham, that something else was the free will of God.

What is voluntarism? 🔗

Voluntarism, from the Latin voluntas meaning “will,” is the doctrine that the will takes priority over the intellect in determining action and, in its theological form, that God’s will is the ultimate source of moral norms. As the New World Encyclopedia notes, voluntarism originates in the writings of Augustine, Anselm, and Duns Scotus, but reaches its most sophisticated development in Ockham’s work. The key distinction voluntarism draws is this: it is not that God commands something because it is good; rather, something is good because God commands it.

This might seem like a subtle difference, but it is enormous in its implications. The first view – that God recognizes and endorses an independent moral order – leaves room for human reason to discover moral truths by reflecting on the nature of things. The second view – Ockham’s view – means morality has no foundation outside the divine will. There is no independent moral standard to which even God is answerable.

Ockham vs. Aquinas: two contrasting visions 🔗

The sharpest contrast to Ockham’s position is that of Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, God’s commands align with an eternal moral law that is rooted in divine reason. Human beings can access moral truths through natural reason because God built rational order into creation. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts Ockham’s disagreement plainly: in Aquinas’s framework, many assume God commands kindness because kindness is already good. Ockham reverses this entirely. In his view, God is not conforming to an independent moral standard – God is the standard. Kindness is good because God commands it, full stop. This makes Ockham a thoroughgoing divine command theorist: God’s will establishes right and wrong.

The core of Ockham’s ethical voluntarism 🔗

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ockham’s ethics is fundamentally will-based. External behavior or actions are morally neutral in themselves. They derive their moral worth from the intentions that underlie them. Two people can perform the same physical act – say, walking to church – but the person going to worship is morally praiseworthy, while the person going only to gossip is not. The act is identical; what differs is the will behind it. This means that for Ockham, intentions are the fundamental bearers of moral value, not actions themselves.

On top of this, certain intentions become morally obligatory, permitted, or forbidden simply because God decrees so. This combination – that morality is about the will of the agent, and that the ultimate authority over what counts as good willing is God – is what makes Ockham’s ethics distinctively voluntarist at two levels: human ethics rests on the agent’s will, and the agent’s will is itself governed by a divine will that operates with complete freedom.

Actions are morally neutral 🔗

One of Ockham’s most radical claims follows from this framework: all actions are, in themselves, morally neutral. As the New World Encyclopedia explains, the very same action may be good when done with one intention and bad when done with another. Ockham’s own example – someone attending church to honor God versus someone going to boast – illustrates that the act of going to church carries no intrinsic moral quality. The moral quality arrives entirely through the intention, and the intention is evaluated against what God has willed.

This rejection of inherent moral qualities in actions was a direct challenge to natural law theory, which held that certain acts are intrinsically good or evil by their nature. For Ockham, that framework placed unnecessary constraints on both human moral reasoning and, more importantly, on God’s omnipotence.

Divine omnipotence and the two powers of God 🔗

Central to understanding Ockham’s voluntarism is his treatment of divine omnipotence. Ockham made a crucial distinction – widely discussed in medieval theology – between two aspects of God’s power. According to Philopedia, these are potentia Dei absoluta (God’s absolute power: what God could do, unconstrained by any current order) and potentia Dei ordinata (God’s ordained power: what God actually wills and does according to the existing order of creation and the laws God has freely established).

This distinction does significant philosophical work. It allows Ockham to say that God could, in principle, have established entirely different moral rules – God’s absolute power faces no external constraints beyond the principle of non-contradiction. At the same time, within the actual order God has ordained, morality is stable and binding. God is not currently rewriting the moral law arbitrarily. But the important point is that the current moral order is contingent: it is the way it is because God freely chose it, not because it had to be this way.

Biting the bullet: the Euthyphro dilemma 🔗

Philosophers have long pressed divine command theorists with a challenge drawn from Plato’s Euthyphro: Is something good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? If the former, morality seems arbitrary. If the latter, there is a standard of goodness independent of God – which limits divine omnipotence. Ockham chose the first horn without flinching. As documented in a review of divine command theory’s history, Ockham accepted that if God were to command lying, theft, or even hatred of God himself, those acts would become morally obligatory – because rightness is simply defined by what God commands. His primary concern was to defend God’s absolute freedom. Nothing outside God – not even a timeless moral order – can bind the divine will.

This is a position of striking intellectual honesty. Ockham did not try to soften it or hedge it. For him, the consequence was a necessary implication of genuine divine omnipotence. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Ockham held that God has always commanded – and always will command – kindness. Nevertheless, it remains possible for God to command otherwise. That possibility is what omnipotence requires.

The role of human reason and faith 🔗

If morality is determined by God’s will and not by any rational structure built into nature, then human reason faces serious limitations in the moral domain. Ockham was a committed fideist – he held that only faith gives access to theological truths, and that the ways of God are not open to reason alone. As Wikipedia’s account of Ockham summarizes his position, God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation that operates apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover on its own.

This does not mean reason has no role at all. Ockham conceded that, through experience and natural reasoning, human beings can arrive at some moral knowledge outside positive divine and human law. He even accepted the possibility of what he called the “virtuous pagan” – someone without access to revelation who nonetheless achieves genuine moral virtue. But moral virtue alone, for Ockham, is not sufficient for salvation. Salvation requires grace. And knowing God’s full moral commands requires faith and revelation, not just philosophical reflection.

In this way, Ockham drew a firm boundary between what philosophy can establish and what only theology can reveal. This was not a skeptical or dismissive move – it was, for Ockham, a way of preserving the proper sovereignty of God over creation and over the moral order.

Criticisms and challenges 🔗

Ockham’s voluntarism has never been short of critics. The most persistent objection is the arbitrariness problem: if God can make any action good simply by willing it, then morality appears to have no stable rational foundation. It becomes entirely contingent on divine decisions that human reason cannot predict or evaluate. Critics argue this leads toward moral relativism – the content of ethics could, in principle, be the opposite of what it currently is, with no rational recourse available to humans.

Philosophers like Aquinas’s defenders responded that God’s commands are not arbitrary because they flow from a necessarily good divine nature. On this view, God could not command cruelty because such a command would contradict who God is. But Ockham rejected this reasoning. For him, tying God’s will to a necessary rational nature was itself a limitation on divine omnipotence – and that was a price he was not willing to pay.

There is also a practical challenge. If moral truths are known only through divine revelation and not through reason, how do human beings without access to that revelation navigate the moral life? Ockham’s answer – that natural reason provides partial guidance, while revelation provides the full picture – leaves a genuine tension that later thinkers would work hard to resolve.

Ockham’s legacy: from medieval ethics to modernity 🔗

Ockham’s voluntarism did not remain confined to 14th-century theological debate. As one analysis of Ockham’s philosophy observes, his voluntarist theory of morals – rooted in his broader nominalism – contributed to the widespread individualism in Western thought. When God’s absolute freedom is replaced with the individual’s freedom (as in later existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre), the structural logic is remarkably similar: moral values are not written into the nature of things; they are constituted by an act of will. God’s freedom becomes our freedom.

Ockham also paved the way for the Protestant Reformation. His sharp separation of faith from philosophical reason, his emphasis on Scripture as the primary authority, and his nominalist suspicion of abstract metaphysical entities all fed into the intellectual climate that would produce Luther and Calvin. Divine command theory as a recognizable ethical position – held by thinkers from Augustine to Calvin to contemporary philosophers like Robert Adams – owes much of its philosophical articulation to Ockham’s rigorous development of it.

In contemporary philosophy, Ockham’s challenge endures. The Euthyphro dilemma remains one of the central problems in the philosophy of religion and meta-ethics. His insistence on the primacy of will – both human and divine – over intellect finds echoes in modern debates about moral realism, moral relativism, and the foundations of ethical obligation. Whether or not one finds Ockham’s conclusions persuasive, his diagnosis of the problem – that any ethical theory must account for the relationship between authority, will, and goodness – remains as sharp and as urgent as it was in the 14th century.

What do you think? If moral goodness is entirely determined by God’s will rather than by the nature of actions themselves, does that make ethics more or less stable as a guide for human life? And if we remove God from Ockham’s framework – as later secular thinkers did – does replacing divine will with individual human will produce a coherent alternative, or does it simply relocate the same problem?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ockham/
2. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Voluntarism
3. https://iep.utm.edu/ockham/
4. https://philopedia.org/philosophers/william-of-ockham/
5. https://cwi.pressbooks.pub/aiethics/chapter/divine-command-theory/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_command_theory