Is God Necessarily Good?
I mentioned earlier that if God is essentially good (by “good” I just mean the attribute of omnibenevolence, a.k.a. all-loving, morally perfect, etc.), then he can plausibly be taken to be Trinitarian also. Could there be good reasons for thinking God essentially has the attribute of is goodness?
Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne argues that “it is logically necessary that an omniscient and perfectly free being be perfectly good,” where a being is “morally perfectly good” just in case he always does the morally best action (Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism [Oxford, ed. 1993], p. 188; Ch 11 respectively). Unfortunately, Swinburne’s argument is less than clear. As best as I can gather from the text, Swinburne’s argument seems to be as follows:
(1) An omniscient being knows all true propositions (2) A perfectly free being will always do an action if he judges that there is overriding reason for doing it rather than refraining from doing it (3) An action is morally good if, all things considered, it is better to do than not to do (4) There is overriding reason to do morally good actions than to refrain from doing them (5) A judgment about what is and is not a morally good action is either a true or false proposition (6) Therefore, an omniscient being will always make judgments about overriding reasons for doing actions which are true judgments (7) Therefore, an omniscient and perfectly free being will always do a morally good action
Though I am less than confident in my ability to structure it validly, I think this is a good argument at heart. One of the most attractive features of this argument is its independence of the notion of God as a greatest conceivable being, thus bypassing problems of whether perfect goodness is a great-making property.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:40 pm
I particularly like the first premise… There is a precision to this definition of omniscience that really can help the debate on God’s foreknowledge… I have posted about it and linked back to your blog.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:13 am
What over-riding reason exists in (4) if Morality is subjective in (3)??
April 28th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Great observation, Raphael. In fact, the whole of Swinburne’s chapter on this argument went toward showing (5) true (where ‘true proposition’ is meant to be understood as ‘objectively true proposition’). Obviously if (5) is true then morality is not subjective.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:20 am
I see.
For this to be true, morality must exist independently from God. We cannot use God’s perfect goodness to prove the cause for morality as we used morality to prove the cause of His goodness.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Goodness here is defined as a property of God’s actions (or even potential or counterfactual actions). As such, goodness is not at all independent of God lest God’s actions be independent of himself—which is incoherent.
September 24th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
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