I imagine some ORMs don't have this so people can do order by computed columns like "order by assets - liabilities"
To your point it probably makes sense to have an order method that verifies column names and an order_raw method that takes a string so the caller understands the risk, while protecting the usual case.
If you have to specify all the columns of a table in Rails, then ActiveRecord ought to be able to restrict the order params to only column names.