Tuesday, August 24, 2021

An argument for nominalism

Assume theism. Then, there is nothing in existence that is intrinsically bad. For everything that exists is either God or created by God, and neither God nor anything created by God is intrinsically bad.

On radical nominalism, all that exist are substances: there are no relations, properties, tropes, accidents, essences, etc. And it is very plausible that no substance is intrinsically bad. The most plausible candidates for intrinsically bad things are non-substances, like properties (being in pain) or relations (being mistaken about something). Thus, radical nominalism has a neat and elegant way of preserving the theistic commitment to there not being anything in existence that is intrinsically bad.

This seems to me to be a significant advantage of radical nominalism over other theories.

Of course, this is not a decisive argument for radical nominalism: there are other ways of preserving the commitment to there not existing intrinsically bad entities, such as Augustine’s privation theory.

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