God is Not Best-Acting
Richard Swinburne argues that God is a ‘best-acting’ agent, relying upon the thesis that an all-knowing, all-powerful being will be fully motivated to act in accordance with the norms of morality. In God’s Own Ethics, I reject the view that such norms apply to God, offering an alternative account of the norms of divine action. Swinburne offers multiple criticisms of that alternative account: (a) that its claims about divine intention of evil are inconsistent; (b) that it makes obviously false claims about the motivations of a perfect being; (c) that it undermines the prospects of probabilistic arguments for God’s existence; and (d) that it fits poorly with the view that creaturely perfection is analogous to divine perfection. Swinburne’s criticisms are, however, unconvincing: (a) Swinburne does not notice the importance of my appeal to the distinction between intending an evil and making use of an evil; (b) Swinburne’s appeals to intuition about the motivations of a perfect being are out of place in this dialectical context; (c) it does not itself call into question a certain account of the divine nature that such an account rules out a class of arguments for God’s existence; and (d) Swinburne’s appeal to Thomistic analogy does not reckon with the crucial distinction between those features that are ascribed to God literally (if analogically) and those that are ascribed to God metaphorically. Swinburne’s criticisms of my view are thus unconvincing, though some of them do call our attention to issues that require closer examination.