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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Degrees of Perfection

Form

The fourth of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways (Summa Theologica, I, q.2, a.3):

  1. Things are found to be more or less good, true, noble, and so on.
  2. "More" and "less" are predicated of things according to how closely they resemble something that is the maximum: things are hotter as they approach what is hottest.
  3. There is therefore something that is truest, best, noblest, and consequently most fully in being.
  4. The maximum in any genus is the cause of everything in that genus, as fire, the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things.
  5. Therefore there is something that is the cause of the being, goodness, and every perfection of all things, and this we call God.

Plato's Form of the Good stands behind it; C. S. Lewis and Peter Kreeft give popular versions in which our sense that some things are better than others implies a standard of perfect goodness.

My Positions

  1. Comparatives do not need an instantiated maximum. "Taller" does not require a tallest possible man, and "later" does not require a last moment. Premise 2 is true only of properties with a built-in maximum, and even then the maximum is a limit, not a thing: the hottest possible temperature is not a hot object that heats the others.
  2. Premise 4 is Aristotelian physics, and false. Fire is not the cause of all heat; the Sun is not hot because it participates in a hottest thing. Heat is molecular motion. Strip out the medieval example and the step from "there is a maximum" to "the maximum causes the rest" has no support at all.
  3. Goodness, truth, and nobility are not quantities that objects contain. They are judgements made by people about things, relative to purposes (Morality, Moral claims are incomplete assertions). A knife is good for cutting and bad for spreading butter. There is no amount of goodness-stuff in it to be measured against a reservoir of the pure substance (Reification).
  4. The argument proves a maximally evil being by the same route. Things are more or less bad, so there must be a worst, which is the cause of all badness. Aquinas blocks this by saying evil is a privation, which is a doctrine imported to save the argument, and in any case the same move could be made about goodness.
  5. It requires Platonic realism about perfections to be assumed first. If goodness is a Form in which things participate, then the Form of the Good exists, but that was the point at issue. To someone who rejects objective moral values, the argument never starts (Moral Argument - Argument from Objective moral values).
  6. A standard is not a person. Even if there were a maximum of goodness, nothing makes it conscious, creative, or interested. The Form of the Good was not a god for Plato, and it is only Aquinas's "this we call God" that makes it one here.

This is, by common consent, the weakest of the Five Ways, and most Thomists spend their effort on the first three. I include it because the popular version ("you can't call anything better without a perfect standard") is still heard.

Sources

  • Aquinas, T., Summa Theologica (c. 1270), I, q.2, a.3
  • Kenny, A., The Five Ways (1969), ch. 5
  • Feser, E., Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (2009), ch. 3, for the defence
  • Kreeft, P. and Tacelli, R., Handbook of Christian Apologetics (1994), for the popular form

Also see