No Standard Above God: The Ashari Case Against Rational Ethics

Ashari theology, and through it the Hanbali school and much of the wider Sunni world, holds that acts are not good or evil in themselves, independent of God's judgment, and that human reason on its own cannot establish what is morally obligatory or forbidden; what is good is simply and entirely what God commands, and that command is knowable only from revelation, never derived by unaided reasoning about the nature of the act itself. Islamic Creeds: A Selection presents this as following directly from the refusal to place any standard, including a standard of reason, above God, since if an act were good or evil prior to and independent of God's command, God's own will would be answerable to that prior standard rather than being the source of moral value itself, a conclusion Ashari theologians judged incompatible with God's absolute sovereignty. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition records that this position was formulated as a direct and deliberate counter to the rational ethics associated with the Mutazila, who held that reason alone can discern basic moral truths independently of revelation, and that God, being perfectly just, necessarily commands what reason itself would already recognize as good, a claim Ashari theologians regarded as subordinating God to a standard outside himself.