Reason Discloses What Revelation Confirms

Mutazili theology, inherited in this respect by Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili thought, holds that good and evil are objective moral qualities that human reason is capable of recognising on its own, independently of what revelation happens to say about them. On this account a person could, in principle, come to know that honesty is good and cruelty is evil through unaided reasoning, prior to and apart from any scripture instructing them so. Revelation's role is accordingly not to constitute morality from nothing, inventing categories of good and evil that would otherwise not exist, but to confirm and complete a moral order reason can already partly access, filling in details reason alone could not reach, such as the specific content of ritual obligation, while leaving the basic moral categories themselves within reason's own competence. This is a substantive and contested epistemological claim about where moral knowledge comes from, not merely an observation that scripture and common sense usually happen to agree. The Mutazilah gave this position a technical name, husn wa qubh aqli, the rational goodness and badness of acts, distinguishing it from the Ashari counterposition that an act's goodness or badness is established only by revelation and has no standing independent of what God commands or forbids.