The decisive question is not whether human beings have freedom, dignity, or rights. It is whether those things are grounded in a good that human beings discover and participate in—or whether the exercise of will is increasingly treated as sufficient to create the very standards by which it is judged.

 From Nominalism to Nietzsche – How We Got Into the Mess We’re In Today - The Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix

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  Sun, Jun 8 at 12:47 AM

  https://dphx.org/tob-tuesdays-10/#:~:text=Ockham%27s%20solution%20was%20to%20get,language%2C%20only%20its%20external%20properties....

"... Language itself has fallen under the modern guillotine of Nominalism as new words and pronouns rapidly multiply to describe self-constructed realities rather than an interior, objective order of reality. The “betterment of mankind” has morphed into the “betterment of the individual self” with the teeth of civil laws to back up one’s perception of self and reality. After all, if, according to Ockham and Nominalism, God could command anything He wanted and make it Law, then why can’t man – made in His image and likeness – do the same?"

ChatGPT: The passage presents a distinctly classical and Thomistic critique of modernity: when reality is no longer understood as possessing an objective order that reason can discover, both language and law risk becoming instruments for imposing the will upon reality. Its central question is whether modern individual self-definition repeats, at the level of human society, a theological problem associated with certain interpretations of William of Ockham's nominalism and voluntarism.

There are several important arguments here, but also a historical distinction worth preserving.

1. From an objective order to a self-constructed reality

In the classical tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, words are not merely labels we arbitrarily attach to things. Language expresses concepts through which the intellect grasps something about reality.

For Aquinas, human reason does not create the natures of things. It seeks to understand them.

• The classical position: Reality has an intelligible structure that precedes our individual judgments. Language can express that structure more or less accurately.

• The nominalist tendency: Universals do not exist as independent realities outside the mind in the way some realists maintain. General terms are understood through their relation to individual things.

• The modern constructivist tendency: In some contemporary theories, the language used to describe a person is treated not merely as a way of recognizing reality but as a means of constituting social reality itself.

These are three distinct positions, not three interchangeable descriptions of the same philosophy. Nominalism does not necessarily entail modern constructivism. Nevertheless, the passage identifies a genuine philosophical question: does language answer to reality, or is reality increasingly expected to answer to language?

That question becomes especially significant when disagreements over words acquire legal consequences.

2. Ockham, divine omnipotence, and the will of God

The passage's most important philosophical claim concerns William of Ockham.

William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347)

Ockham is associated with nominalism and a strong account of divine freedom. His theological writings raise difficult questions about the relationship between God's absolute power, His ordained order, and moral obligation.

The crucial distinction is between two conceptions of divine authority.

The Thomistic account

For St. Thomas Aquinas, God's will is not arbitrary. God wills in accordance with His perfectly wise and good nature. The eternal law expresses divine wisdom, and natural law is the rational creature's participation in that eternal law.

God does not have to consult a law external to Himself. Yet neither is His will capricious: His goodness and wisdom are inseparable from who He is.

The voluntarist account

Certain forms of theological voluntarism place greater emphasis on God's sovereign will in determining moral obligations. Ockham's account of divine power is more complicated than the popular slogan that God can simply make anything right or wrong. He distinguishes God's absolute power from the order He has actually established, and his discussions of morality require careful qualification.

Nevertheless, the criticism identifies a potential problem: if obligation is understood primarily as the product of an authoritative will, rather than as intelligibly grounded in the good, what prevents authority from becoming arbitrary?

The Thomistic response is that God's sovereignty does not make goodness arbitrary, because God's will is inseparable from His nature as the supreme good.

3. The passage's central inference: if God can legislate reality, why can't man?

This is the rhetorical heart of the argument.

The reasoning runs as follows:

1. God is understood as the supreme lawgiver.

2. If divine commands are interpreted as making things right simply because God wills them, moral order appears to depend on will rather than an intelligible good.

3. Modern individualism elevates personal autonomy and self-definition.

4. The individual then claims a comparable authority to determine the meaning of his or her own identity.

5. Civil law is invoked to protect or enforce that self-definition in public life.

The proposed analogy is powerful, but it has a theological weakness.

Being made in God's image does not mean possessing God's authority over the nature of things.

In classical Christian theology, human beings participate in divine reason; they do not possess divine omnipotence. We are capable of discovering, interpreting, and applying moral truth, but we do not thereby become the authors of the good itself.

Aquinas's account of natural law makes this distinction particularly clear. Human legislation is legitimate insofar as it participates in reason and justice. A human enactment does not become morally just merely because a legislator has commanded it.

Consequently, the argument is strongest when understood as a critique of a shared voluntarist structure of reasoning, not as a claim that Ockham's philosophy historically caused contemporary theories of identity.

4. From the betterment of mankind to the sovereignty of the individual

The contrast between the “betterment of mankind” and the “betterment of the individual self” identifies a transformation in the perceived purpose of social and political life.

In an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework, the human good is not simply whatever an individual happens to desire. Human flourishing involves the development of rational and moral capacities, the exercise of virtue, and participation in a common good.

The individual matters profoundly, but the individual is not the sole measure of the good.

By contrast, some modern individualist theories begin with personal autonomy and treat the protection of individual choice as a central political objective. When autonomy is understood as an entitlement to determine the meaning of one's own identity, conflict can arise between subjective self-understanding and competing claims about objective human nature.

Civil law then becomes the arena in which those claims are contested.

However, it is important to distinguish protecting a person's civil liberties from accepting every philosophical claim that person makes. A legal system can protect people against unjust treatment without necessarily endorsing every underlying theory of identity or reality.

The philosophical issue is therefore not whether individuals deserve dignity or legal protection. It is whether personal autonomy is itself the ultimate source of moral truth, or whether autonomy must be exercised within an objective moral order.

5. How this connects to your broader critique of modern rights theory

This argument also connects to the problem you have been examining in modern rights language, particularly through Thomas Fleming, Michel Villey, John Rist, and Russell Hittinger.

The relevant distinction is between two ways of understanding rights.

Classical natural-law framework	Voluntarist or radical individualist framework
Rights are understood in relation to justice, human nature, duties, and the common good.	Rights may be framed primarily as claims of individual autonomy.
Law should recognize and protect an objective moral order.	Law may be asked to validate competing individual choices or self-definitions.
Freedom is exercised toward genuine human goods.	Freedom risks becoming the power to choose one's own conception of the good without an objective standard.
Authority is constrained by reason and justice.	Authority may be understood primarily through the will of the person or institution exercising it.

These are ideal types rather than exhaustive descriptions of the various thinkers or modern legal systems.

The connection to Villey's historical critique of subjective rights is particularly relevant. His concern was that the modern conception of a right as a power or faculty belonging to an individual differs from the classical understanding of ius as that which is just or due within a particular relationship.

Hittinger's work on natural law similarly emphasizes that human goods are not simply invented by individual choice. A right must be understood in relation to the good it protects and the obligations that make a just social order possible.

This does not establish that every modern rights claim is illegitimate. It does, however, raise a question that a purely individualistic theory can struggle to answer: what objective standard determines which claims ought to be recognized as rights, and which claims conflict with justice or the common good?

6. The deepest problem: voluntarism can undermine the authority it seeks to establish

There is an additional difficulty in the passage's argument.

If the ultimate justification for a moral or legal rule is simply that a sufficiently powerful will has established it, the same logic can be applied to the rule's opponents. One will commands; another will resists. Without a standard of justice beyond the competing wills, it becomes difficult to explain why one command is morally authoritative rather than merely more powerful.

The Thomistic alternative is not to deny the authority of God or the legitimate authority of human law. It is to distinguish authority that serves the good from power that attempts to define the good merely by commanding it.

That distinction applies to theology, political authority, and law alike.

The analogy should not be pushed too far: modern identity theories have multiple intellectual sources, and contemporary legal protections cannot simply be derived from Ockham's medieval theology. But the underlying philosophical question is coherent and important.

The passage's strongest conclusion is this: if human reason is no longer understood as answerable to an objective order of truth and goodness, then individual autonomy and legal power can begin to assume roles that classical Christianity reserves for neither the individual will nor the state.

The decisive question is not whether human beings have freedom, dignity, or rights. It is whether those things are grounded in a good that human beings discover and participate in—or whether the exercise of will is increasingly treated as sufficient to create the very standards by which it is judged.

• Sun, Jun 8 at 12:47 AM

  https://dphx.org/tob-tuesdays-10/#:~:text=Ockham%27s%20solution%20was%20to%20get,language%2C%20only%20its%20external%20properties.