Goodness by participation

Sometimes, in natural theology, the following strong argument pattern is used (where F is a predicate):

Divine infinity (DI):
It’s purely good to be F
∴ God is infinitely F

Sometimes, this weaker pattern is used instead:

Creator outranking (CO):
It’s purely good to be F
Some creature, C, is F
∴ God is F (God is at least as F as C is F)

In the Discourse on the Method, CO is justified by appeal to these general principles:

D1. More perfect things cannot be caused by less perfect things.
D2. More perfect things cannot depend on less perfect things.

Both D1 and D2 seem to be implausible. D1 seems to have a counterexample in evolution. D2 seems to have a counterexample in various cases of wholes depending on their parts.

But it seems we can support a more localized version of CO with what I’ll call a “giving-perfections account” of creation. This says simply that, if there is a creator of the world, then this creator creates the world by giving creatures a limited version of some of his own perfections. This seems defensible and lets you use CO without having to defend DI.

This may also be called, seemingly equivalently, a “participation account” of creaturely goodness. This is to say that, when a creature has some perfection or goodness, it has this goodness by participation in its creator.

Aside from the Discourse on the Method, here is a different example of implicit application of CO: Paul Weingartner argues in his Omniscience: From a Logical Point of View, p. 6, that if angels are logically and deductively infallible (they cannot commit logical errors) as Thomas Aquinas says that they are (ST I.58.3), then it is also impossible that God, “who has created them”, could commit an error in matters of logic. In the part in quotation marks, CO is implicitly relied upon.

Appendix (2025-10-30)

This appendix is to point out a possible parallel between the giving-perfections account and Plato’s views. The SEP’s article on properties, written by Francesco Orilia, says:

Plato appears to hold that all properties exemplify themselves, when he claims that forms participate in themselves. This claim is crucially involved in his so-called third man argument, which led him to worry that his theory of forms is incoherent (Parmenides, 132 ff.). As we see matters now, it is not clear why we should hold that all properties exemplify themselves (Armstrong 1978a: 71); for instance, people are honest, but honesty itself is not honest (see, however, the entry on Plato’s Parmenides, and Marmodoro forthcoming).

The SEP does not explain why Plato thought this, and maybe Plato’s texts are not clear on the matter. I conjecture, however, that Plato thought this because of a view parallel to the giving-perfections account: the idea is that “you can’t give what you don’t have”, so if the forms are responsible for why particular things instantiate properties, then the forms must themselves instantiate the properties that they impart to things. For instance, if honesty is not itself honest, then it can’t make other things honest.

This idea is exactly parallel to the giving-perfections account if we assume that the Platonic forms are always forms of things that it is purely good to be, e.g., that there is a form of Justice and a form of Courage, but there is no form of Burglary. This is to construe the doctrine of Platonic forms as adhering to the privation theory of evil, so that evil always consists in falling short of a form, not in instantiating an evil form. Certainly many Platonists believed this, although the Platonic texts that support it might not be so clear.

The Platonic linguistic convention about property self-exemplification also falls naturally out of Donald Williams’s trope theory. Williams understands the concept of predication or inherence in terms of trope parthood via the following definition:

a is F ≝ an f-trope is part of a

If we use the classical mereological parthood relation, which is reflexive, then every f-trope is part of itself and, therefore, every f-trope is F. If we think of the property F as the sum of all f-tropes, then similarly F itself instantiates F, and therefore exemplifies itself. Of course, it is possible to define both the property and its predication differently, e.g., someone could use the CEM proper parthood relation instead, which is irreflexive. But the point is that in trope theories like Williams’s, property instantiation by ordinary concrete objects is derivative from primitive abstract objects that themselves instantiate the properties which they impart, just as in the herein conjectured interpretation of Platonism, and just as in the giving-perfections account of creation.