unsurpassability

This highlights the fact that unsurpassability makes (P1) even harder to support: if someone held that (P1) were the result of a requirement of unsurpassability, this would effectively require them to argue that being unsurpassable makes it impossible to use something surpassable for an unsurpassably good and rational intent.

Archive 2005-02-01 2005

If the NPW argument is to be a reductio of 1, it has to give unsurpassability full play - it must not arbitrarily limit it.

Archive 2005-02-01 2005

But if it does give unsurpassability full play, I think it is dead in the water.

No Prime World, and Unsurpassable Being 2005

This highlights the fact that unsurpassability makes (P1) even harder to support: if someone held that (P1) were the result of a requirement of unsurpassability, this would effectively require them to argue that being unsurpassable makes it impossible to use something surpassable for an unsurpassably good and rational intent.

No Prime World, and Unsurpassable Being 2005

Whatever unsurpassability is, it can't entail the surpassability of the goodness and rationality of God's intentions, nor his ability to effect them even with a surpassable product.

No Prime World, and Unsurpassable Being 2005

But unsurpassability seems to throw a wrench in the works here, too; if we take unsurpassability seriously, then Aquinas's response to the contrariety argument seems plausible; and if it does, world-actualizing action is a kind of action of which it is false to say that surpassability in its product precludes unsurpassability in the action itself, because again this would actually depend on what was actually intended in the action.

Archive 2005-02-01 2005

This action, of course, would also be unsurpassable; unsurpassability, understood in this way, has the implication that all God's world-actualization actions, and indeed, all God's actions at all, involve intentions that are equally unsurpassably good and rational; but P1 would be false.

No Prime World, and Unsurpassable Being 2005

So P1 cannot be supported as a specific case of a principle about action generally, and it can't be a requirement of unsurpassability.

Archive 2005-02-01 2005

But unsurpassability seems to throw a wrench in the works here, too; if we take unsurpassability seriously, then Aquinas's response to the contrariety argument seems plausible; and if it does, world-actualizing action is a kind of action of which it is false to say that surpassability in its product precludes unsurpassability in the action itself, because again this would actually depend on what was actually intended in the action.

No Prime World, and Unsurpassable Being 2005

This action, of course, would also be unsurpassable; unsurpassability, understood in this way, has the implication that all God's world-actualization actions, and indeed, all God's actions at all, involve intentions that are equally unsurpassably good and rational; but P1 would be false.

Archive 2005-02-01 2005