…require positing that an accident subsist in another accident, for accidents themselves are described by further attributes, all of which inhere in the underlying substance. Thus we say, “This is an intense blackness,” or, “This is a rapid movement,” or, “a slow one.” They themselves concede that the intellect can know whether an act is a mark of perfection or of deficiency, or whether it harmonizes with the agent or conflicts with him—yet all of these are attributes of the act and subsist in the thing described.

Some people imagine that goodness and evil are essential, inalienable qualities of whatever is so described, and that calling goodness an inherent attribute must mean precisely that. The matter, however, is not so. A thing may be good in one circumstance and evil in another, just as it may be beneficial and beloved at one time, harmful and detested at another; goodness and evil hinge on this very consideration. In like manner, something may be good at one time and bad at another by virtue of a change in its attributes.

As for the goodness and evil of human actions, they come down to whether the acts benefit or harm the doers, and there is no doubt that this is known by reason. For that reason al-Razi, at the end of his life, adopted the view that rational goodness and evil are established with respect to human deeds. Affirming the same for Allah Most High, however, is bound up with the meanings of Allah’s love and pleasure, His wrath and anger, and His joy at the repentance of the penitent—topics that have been treated at length elsewhere. The question is whether these constitute attributes distinct from the divine will, as the early generations and leading scholars unanimously held, or whether they are identical with the will itself, as some of the Muʿtazilah, the Jahmiyyah, and those who side with them maintain.

Clarifying that the propositions of goodness and evil are among the most certain of certainties:

Our aim here is to cite those propositions renowned among all the children of Adam—for example, their saying, “Justice is good and beautiful, and the one who practices it deserves praise and honor, whereas injustice is ugly, blameworthy, and evil, and its perpetrator deserves censure and humiliation.” These critics deny that such propositions are certainties, and this would oblige the philosophers to reject rational goodness and evil altogether, for in their view no demonstrative rational proposition would then exist in the intellect. And there are some people…