Let’s assume for the sake of argument:
Aquinas’ Principle of Proportionate Causality: Anything that causes something to have a perfection F must either have F or some more perfect perfection G.
And let’s think about what follows.
The Compatibility Thesis: If F is a perfection, then F is compatible with every perfection.
Argument: If F is incompatible with a perfection G, then having F rules out having perfection G. And that’s limitive rather than perfect. Perhaps the case where G = F needs to be argued separately. But we can do that. If F is incompatible with F, then F rules out all other perfections as well, and as long as there is more than one perfection (as is plausible) that violates the first part of the argument.
The Entailment Thesis: If F and G are perfections, and G is more perfect than F, then G entails F.
Argument: If F and G are perfections, and it is both possible to have F without having G and to have F while having G, it is better to have both F and G than to have just G. But if it is better to have both F and G than to have just G, then F contributes something good that G does not, and hence we cannot say that G is more perfect than F—rather, in one respect F is more perfect and in another G is more perfect.
From the Entailment Thesis and Aquinas’ Principle of Proportionate Causality, we get:
The Strong Principle of Proportionate Causality: Anything that causes something to have a perfection F must have F.
Interesting.
6 comments:
We could edit the Compatibility Thesis to look more like the PC Thesis, by saying that two perfections F and G are either compatible, or else there are some more perfect perfections F' and/or G' such that one of the pairs (F', G), (F, G') or (F', G') are compatible. In that case your conclusion would not follow in the same form. Argument against your original principle: if there is some F' that is more perfect than F, it is not a contradiction for F to imply a limitation, as by stipulation it is not as perfect as F' is.
Here's the intuition I am going with. Having an IQ of 170 is not a perfection. Why? Because it is equivalent to the conjunction of IQ <= 170 and IQ >= 170. And "IQ <= 170" is a pure limitation. So, "IQ >= 170" is a perfection, but "IQ = 170" is not.
Maybe, though, one can object as follows. There are perfections simpliciter and perfections for a particular kind of entity. And the Compatibility Thesis is false for perfections for a particular kind of entity. For instance, it's a perfection for humans to have legs and for snakes not to.
Would that track the distinction between pure and mixed perfections?
I don't know. I worry, though, that perfections for a particular kind of entity will clearly violate the principle of proportionate causality. It's a perfection for humans to have hair, but two bald people can have a child that has hair.
Mixed perfections also aren’t going to satisfy the compatibility thesis.
I’ve always assumed that mixed perfections were ultimately nested inside pure perfections. Being a quick learner or being good at discursive reasoning are both ways of being intelligent, but they are ways of being intelligent proper to finite modes of existence. Having hair for humans is a perfection in relation to health, and health is an aspect of living well proper to organisms. Maybe the pure perfection here is blessedness, but health is a purer mixed perfection than having hair, which still stands in a partial ordering with having hair? Parents can only cause a child to have hair if they have a certain sort of health?
I admit I’ve never been especially comfortable trying to reason very far with these principles.
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