## 1. Perfect goodness as perfection in general versus perfect goodness as a specific perfection



There is a potential ambiguity in the expression 'perfect
goodness' that needs to be resolved. One might think that the
investigation of the character of perfect goodness is nothing more or
less than the investigation of the character of absolute perfection.
One might think, that is, that what one means when one applies the
expression 'perfectly good' to some being is the same as
what one means when one applies the expression 'absolutely
perfect' to some being; to say that a being is perfectly good is
just to say that it instantiates perfectly those features that make a
being intrinsically good. Here 'perfect goodness' just is
perfection in general, and to call a being perfectly good is just to
say that it qualifies as an absolutely perfect being (Reichenbach
1982, p. 138; Morris 1989d, p. 43; and Wierenga 1989, p. 202.)
'Perfect goodness' in that sense, though, is not what is
under investigation here; that sort of 'perfect goodness'
is the subject of perfect being theology generally. By contrast,
sometimes the expression 'perfect goodness' is used to
pick out a *particular* perfection, a particular way in which a
thing can be great, and to refer to the upper limit of greatness of
that sort. Thus we see that perfect goodness is often included in
lists of the perfections exhibited by an absolutely perfect being:
that being would not only be omniscient and omnipotent, but would also
be *perfectly good*. 



What is this perfect goodness, a particular perfection exhibited by
any absolutely perfect being? In recent work in philosophical theology
- understandably, primarily in contexts in which the problem of
evil is at issue - perfect goodness is understood as a
*practical* excellence, an excellence concerned with desire,
character traits, and action. A perfectly good being has the best
desires that a being can have, and exhibits the best traits of
character, and acts in an unsurpassably excellent way. This practical
excellence is, furthermore, typically understood as *moral*
excellence (Morris 1989b, p. 26; Wierenga 1989, p. 202). So when one
says that any being who counts as God must be perfectly good, the
claim is that any such being would have desires and traits of
character and perform actions that are those of a being that exhibits
*moral* perfection. The idea, then, is this. We may call all of
these practically-oriented features of a being - that
being's desires, character traits, actions, etc. - its
'agency'. A being's agency might be morally better
or morally worse. A morally perfect being, though, has *morally
unsurpassable* agency. 



The perfect being theologian who appeals to moral perfection as part
of the nature of the absolutely perfect being inherits all of the
uncertainty in metaethics about the proper formal characterization and
demarcation of the moral and all of the uncertainty in normative
ethics about the proper criteria for assessing moral goodness. In this
article we will not attempt a comprehensive account of such disputes,
but will simply take for granted a few widely-made assumptions. First,
we will assume that there are truths of the matter about the extent to
which a being's agency exhibits moral goodness. Second, while
the considerations that are relevant in assessing moral goodness are
disputable, and it is even disputable whether the criteria for moral
goodness are relative to the kind of being in question, it seems clear
that the sort of moral goodness that is typically ascribed to the
perfect being is moral goodness of a familiar, welfare-oriented kind.
In particular, it is assumed that morally good beings treat the
welfare of humans and at least some other sentient beings as
practically relevant considerations, so that, other things equal,
morally good beings favor the promotion of well-being and disfavor
setbacks to it. So it is taken for granted that perfect moral goodness
cannot involve opposition or indifference to the flourishing of
sentient beings; the claim that perfect moral goodness might be so
different for God than for humans that God's perfect moral
goodness might involve God's being indifferent to the suffering
of creatures would be taken as a rejection of the claim that God must
be perfectly morally good, not a gloss on it. As Mill writes,



> 
> If in ascribing goodness to God I do not mean what I mean by goodness;
> if I do not mean the goodness of which I have some knowledge, but an
> incomprehensible attribute of an incomprehensible substance, which for
> aught I know may be a totally different quality from that which I love
> and venerate ... what do I mean in calling it goodness? ...
> To say that God's goodness may be different in kind from
> man's goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of
> phraseology, that God may possibly be not good? (Mill 1865, pp.
> 42-43)
> 


## 2. Perfect goodness as a necessary or contingent feature of the absolutely perfect being



What is the modality with which perfect goodness is exhibited by an
absolutely perfect being? Is any absolutely perfect being
*necessarily* perfectly good, or is such a being only
*contingently* perfectly morally good? (The necessity in
question here is *de re*; it is far less controversial that it
is a *de dicto* necessary truth that an absolutely perfect
being is perfectly good.) One might think that an absolutely perfect
being must be essentially perfectly good, for a being who is perfectly
good in all possible worlds is better than a being who is perfectly
good in only some worlds. This is the standard thinking behind the
idea that the divine perfections are exhibited by God not only
contingently, but necessarily: a perfect being is not only omniscient,
but necessarily omniscient; a perfect being is not only omnipotent,
but necessarily omnipotent; and so forth. As it is better to have a
perfection necessarily rather than only contingently, if having some
feature is a perfection, then having that feature necessarily is a
perfection as well. 



But this argument is not decisive. It works only if having the
perfection in question necessarily is itself a coherent notion, and it
may be that there is some sort of incoherence involved in the notion
of necessary perfect goodness that is not involved in the notion of
perfect goodness *simpliciter*. (For an endorsement of this
line of argument, with a recognition of the needed qualification, see
Morris 1989d, p. 63-65.) Some arguments to this conclusion are
considered below. One might, then, argue that the best that a being
could possibly exhibit with respect to perfect goodness would be to
actually, though only contingently, exhibit it. 



Some defenders of perfect being theology have suggested that it is
antithetical to the very idea of perfect being theology that there be
perfections that could be exemplified only contingently. It is true
that certain ambitions that some perfect being theologians have
harbored - for example, to provide an *a priori*
argument, in the style of Anselm's ontological argument, for the
existence of an absolutely perfect being - would have to be
abandoned if any divine perfection is exhibited at most contingently
(Guleserian 1985). (Even if there are some sound *a priori*
arguments for contingent truths, this sort of proof of God's
existence is not a case in which this is a live possibility.) An
absolutely perfect being might exist, and even exist necessarily, but
it would not be essential to it that it is an absolutely perfect
being. (That is, if *A* is an absolutely perfect being, then
*A* might exist necessarily, but it would not be necessary both
that *A* exists and is absolutely perfect.)



Some defenders of perfect being theology have ridiculed the idea that
an absolutely perfect being might be only contingently perfectly good,
for even if a being were to exhibit all of the marks of perfect
goodness up to a certain time, we would have no basis to think that
the absolutely perfect being would not break bad at some point in the
future (Rogers 2000, p. 122). But it is not clear why the contingency
of the fact's (*the being's being perfectly good*)
holding precludes our knowing that it holds; and it is very plausible
that perfect goodness is, for God at least, what Morris calls a
"stable" property, such that if God has it at some time in
a world, then God has it at all times in that world (Morris 1989e, pp.
92-97).



If we were to become convinced that necessary perfect goodness is
incoherent, it is unclear why we should take that to be any more
problematic for the notion that God is perfectly good than our
becoming convinced that water is necessarily identical to
H2O would be for the notion that God's perfection
includes omnipotence. Just as we do not take God's omnipotence
to be threatened by God's not being able to make water that is
not H2O, we need not take God's perfect goodness
to be threatened by the fact that God cannot exhibit that feature
necessarily. If the upper limit of perfect goodness is to have it
contingently, then it is not as if a being who is actually morally
perfect is surpassable in moral goodness merely by having its perfect
moral goodness only contingently. (Though see Carter 1982 and Garcia
1987 for attempts to show that God cannot be contingently morally
perfect; on these views, God is either essentially morally perfect or
essentially morally defective.)


## 3. Is perfect goodness, whether necessary or contingent, actually exemplified?



We are investigating perfect goodness in the context of its
exemplification in an absolutely perfect being. Whether we should
think perfect goodness is actually exemplified in an absolutely
perfect being will depend not only on whether we think that some being
exemplifies perfect goodness but also on whether we think that being
exemplifies the other perfections, say, omniscience and omnipotence.
(One might think that perfect goodness presupposes omniscience and
omnipotence - that perfect goodness requires complete knowledge,
perfect freedom, and full effectiveness.) That task would require
consideration of the various arguments within philosophical theology
for the existence of an absolutely perfect being - the
*ontological*, *cosmological*, *teleological*,
and *moral arguments*, among others - as well as various
arguments that no such arguments are required for such belief to be
rational and perhaps even warranted. (See the entries on
 ontological arguments,
 the
 cosmological argument,
 moral arguments, and
 teleological arguments
 for God's existence.)



It is worth noting, though, that there is a crucial argument that
typically relies on perfect goodness (understood as perfect moral
goodness) as a perfection in order to argue that there is no
absolutely perfect being. This is the argument from evil, which holds
that because the world contains evil (or evil of some specific type,
or of some amount, or distributed in some way), then this world is not
under the control of an absolutely perfect - at least,
omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect - being. There is a
massive classical and contemporary literature on the problem of evil;
consideration of formulations of the argument from evil and of
attempts to reconcile the existence of evil and the existence of an
absolutely perfect being is beyond the scope of this article. (But see
entry on
 the problem of evil.)



The argument from evil typically employs a lemma that an omniscient,
omnipotent being is not justified in allowing the sorts of evil that
we find in the world. But one might make an even stronger claim, and
hold that even if an omniscient, omnipotent being were fully justified
in creating the world as it is, that being is nevertheless not morally
perfect, just because that being's agency is marred by being the
active or permissive cause of that which is intrinsically disvaluable
(Graves 2012). It is a controverted question whether one's
agency can be judged to be in any way morally worse simply because it
brings about something bad, even something very bad. No one should
doubt that one can judge *facts* involving agency to be in some
way bad if the agency brings about something bad; one might
*regret* that the bad was brought about, or that the world was
such that the bad's being brought about was the best of the
options available. What is doubtful is that this is any basis for
judging the *agency* in question to be in any way morally bad.




Consider an analogy. We look at the career of an executive and we see
that her career includes an occasion on which she laid off a dozen
workers, costing them their jobs with the company but offering them an
extensive severance package. Does that fact *all by itself*
show that she was in any way less than a perfect executive? Does it
mar her career? It is hard to see how; if she was brought on board to
deal with a company in severe trouble, and laying off that dozen
workers while offering them an extensive severance package really was
the best possible response that the executive could have made to a
problem not of her own making, it is hard to see how this event counts
against her perfection as an executive. What marks one as a good
executive is how one deals with the opportunities and challenges that
one has available to one; it is not affected by the range of
opportunities and challenges themselves (except, of course, insofar as
that range is up to one's one making). 



Similarly, what makes agency morally good, one might say, is its
responsiveness to what is valuable; it is in no way made worse simply
because the options available each contain some regrettable features.
But the idea that God's agency is marred simply because the
world contains bad presupposes that God's agency is in some way
marred on account of features of the options of choice rather than on
account of God's orientation to what is valuable. (We will
consider issues related to this one in the next section in the context
of the possibility that there is no intrinsic maximum of moral
goodness of agency.) 


## 4. Is perfect goodness possibly exemplified?



The argument from evil, noted in the previous section, appeals to
contingent facts about the world in order to call into question the
existence of a being of perfect goodness (who exhibits perfect
knowledge and power as well). But one might call into question the
existence of such a being without appeal to supplementary premises
about contingent facts concerning the existence of evil. One might say
that perfect goodness is not even a real possibility.



Is perfect goodness a possibility? One might think that it is obvious
that it is. After all, whatever standard of moral goodness that one
puts forward as the ideal, it must be a standard that is possible for
agents to meet, for 'ought' - at least, the moral
'ought' - implies 'can.' But one might
claim that the standard for moral goodness is not really like that.
Instead of putting forward an ideal, the standard of moral goodness is
a *comparative* standard: with respect to cases of appropriate
comparison, the standard of moral goodness tells one how the two items
being compared - whether desires, traits of character, actions
- are ordered with respect to one another. So the standard of
moral goodness declares one set of desires morally better than
another, or declares them equally good; or declares one set of
character traits better than another, or declares them equally good;
or declares one career of actions better than another, or declares
them equally good. (Put to the side the possibility that some such
items are simply incommensurable.) Understood in this comparative way,
the standard of moral goodness could still honor 'ought implies
can': perhaps if *A*'s performing action *X* is
morally better than *A*'s performing action *Y*, this
comparison presupposes that performing *X* is possible for
*A* and performing *Y* is possible for *A*. But the key
point is that, understood in this comparative way, it is not at all
obvious that *perfect* moral goodness is possible. For it may
be that the facts about what it is possible for *A* to do and the
comparative moral standard together entail that for every action that
*A* might perform, there is a morally better action that it is
possible for *A* to perform.



This possibility has been most intensively discussed with respect to
'no best world' scenarios. Say that God 'actualizes
a world' when some maximal state of affairs obtains as a result
of God's choosing to create or choosing to refrain from
creating. (Whether God actualizes a world is thus not an open
question; God actualizes some world, and the only questions are
whether it will include items other than God and if so, which ones.)
Suppose that there are infinitely many possible worlds, each of which
is within God's power to actualize. For each of these worlds,
there is another that is better from a moral perspective, i.e. for
each world, one who takes the moral point of view will prefer some
other world's being actual to its being actual. Since a possible
world is a maximal state of affairs, God cannot actualize more than
one of these. So whichever world God chooses to actualize, it will be
true that God could have actualized a morally better one. One might
think that it is clear that an action of actualizing a world that is
better from a moral point of view is morally better than an action of
actualizing a world that is worse from a moral point of view. It
follows that in a 'no best world' scenario, there is no
agency that God could exhibit that is unsurpassable. Since God is
perfectly good only if God's agency is unsurpassable,
necessarily, God is not perfectly good.



The argument is as follows:


1. Necessarily, God actualizes some world
2. Necessarily, for each actualizable world *w*1,
there is an actualizable world *w*2 such that from the
moral point of view one would prefer *w*2 to
*w*1
3. Necessarily, for whatever world that God actualizes, there is a
morally better world that God does not actualize yet could have (from
(2))
4. Necessarily, for whatever world that God actualizes, God's
act of actualizing that world is not as morally good as some other act
that God does not perform but could have (from (3))
5. Necessarily, for whatever world that God actualizes, God's
agency is not as morally good as it could have been (from (4))
6. Necessarily, God's agency is not perfectly good (from (1),
(5))



Some have found the reasoning from no-best-world to
no-perfect-goodness persuasive, while drawing different morals from
that entailment. Leibniz concludes that, because there is a God, there
is a best world ("Essays on the Justice of God," SS8);
Rowe and Wielenberg, by contrast, conclude that this entailment can
serve as part of an argument against God's existence (Rowe 2004,
pp. 88-150; Wielenberg 2004). Others have been unmoved.



The main sticking point in this argument is the move from (3) to (4).
(For a denial of (2) based on the possibility and moral
unsurpassability of an infinitely valuable world, see Climenhaga
2018.) Detractors of this argument wonder whether it follows from the
fact that any world actualized by God is morally surpassable that any
act of actualizing a world is morally surpassable. It is easy to be
tempted by the following line of thought. If we think of an action as
a state of affairs to be evaluated in terms of moral goodness in the
same way that any other state of affairs is to be evaluated, then
there is a pretty straightforward argument for the view that any act
of actualizing a world will be surpassable. For if one prefers from a
moral point of view the obtaining of possible world
*w*2 to the obtaining of possible world
*w*1, then it seems very plausible that one would,
from the moral point of view, prefer God's actualizing
*w*2 to God's actualizing
*w*1.



This line of thought requires the assumption that the standard of
moral goodness that applies to actions, in virtue of which a
being's agency counts as morally good, is the same as the
standard that applies to states of affairs generally. But this is not
obvious. One might think that while the standard of moral goodness
applying to states of affairs is third-personal in character -
one considers various items, and asks what one would prefer from a
particular perspective, the moral point of view - the standard
of moral goodness applying to actions is first-personal in character,
more closely tied to the quality of the agent's deliberation in
deciding what to do. We can put things in a slightly different way. We
can consider an agent's action as simply an event in the world,
and evaluate whether we prefer the agent's having performed it
to the agent's having performed some other action. Or we can
consider an agent's action as the outcome of deliberation, as a
decision of what the agent is to do as a result of considering the
various *reasons* in play. It may be that even though,
considered as an event, God's actualizing a world is necessarily
surpassable, considered as an action, as a choice to carry out a plan,
God's actualizing that world is unsurpassable.



If we think that the evaluation of worlds is distinct from the
evaluation of actions, then there is room to resist the move from (3)
to (4), and this is indeed the standard point at which to resist. One
might object that this resistance is bound to come to nothing. A world
is a maximal state of affairs; everything that is morally relevant,
and thus can give God reason to choose to actualize one world over
another, is included in its value. So it of course follows that, from
the deliberative perspective, God must have more reason to realize a
world with more value, and given the no-best-world scenario, it will
follow that God never does what God has most reason to do, and thus
God's action is never supremely morally good. But again, there
is plenty of room for resistance. It does not follow from the fact
that all of the value to be realized in God's acting is included
in the world actualized that these are the only reasons that bear on
God's choice. For there may be, in addition to these first-order
reasons, second-order reasons (Raz 1999, p. 39). A second-order reason
is a reason to act for, or not to act for, a reason; and that there
are such reasons makes a difference in assessing actions in terms of
their moral worth. 



Engage in a bit of picture-thinking. Suppose we imagine God trying to
choose which world to actualize in a no-best-world scenario. We
imagine God trying to do so on the basis of first-order reasons of the
value of various worlds that might be actualized. But God of course
would know that this would be to no avail. God cannot treat the fact
that one world realizes more value than another world as a
difference-making consideration, for if it were, that would render God
unable to make any choice. The fact that relying on some consideration
would undermine the possibility of reaching a decision is itself a
consideration relevant to deliberation; if one has good reason to
reach a decision, and relying on some consideration precludes one from
reaching a decision, that very fact constitutes a reason relevant to
one's deliberation. It is a second-order reason, a reason of a
sort that Joseph Raz calls "exclusionary": an exclusionary
reason is a reason that directs one not to treat a first-order reason
as relevant in one's deliberation (Raz 1999, p. 39). 



If this account is right, then the reasons relevant to God's
decision about which world to actualize are not exhausted by the
first-order reasons constituted by the value of the worlds actualized;
these reasons also include second-order reasons, reasons that direct
God not to make the choice by comparing worlds' first-order
value. God's decision to actualize a world might then be morally
unsurpassable, in that it correctly responds to the reasons relevant
to the choice in precisely the way that those reasons call for, even
if the world that is thereby created is surpassable (Howard-Snyder and
Howard-Snyder 1994; Langtry 2008, pp. 74-78). God might make this
decision on the basis of some personal, non-morally-objectionable
considerations rather than on the basis of considerations salient from
the moral point of view, or God might just pick, in Ullman-Margalit
and Morgenbesser's sense (Ullman-Margalit and Morgenbesser
1977).


## 5. Is necessary perfect goodness possible?



Suppose that it is allowed that there is no obstacle to the coherence
of the notion that God is perfectly good. Whatever the morally
relevant reasons that bear on divine agency, that agency is perfectly
responsive to those reasons. As we saw above, it is standard within
perfect being theology to conclude from the fact that exhibiting some
feature is a great-making feature that necessarily exhibiting that
feature is a great-making feature as well. As we also saw, an
impediment to this reasoning would be the incoherence of exhibiting
that feature necessarily. So we might ask whether there is any such
impediment to holding that God is necessarily perfectly morally
good.


### 5.1 The applicability of moral norms



One potential obstacle, which received extensive discussion in
response to some worries raised by William Alston (1990), is that
there might be thought to be a tension between the theses that God is
necessarily perfectly good (again, understood *de re*) and the
thesis that the sort of goodness that God exhibits is moral goodness.
For it might be thought that to be morally good is to act in
accordance with the true set of moral norms that applies to one, but
one might think that a set of moral norms can apply to one only if it
is possible that one fail to perform an action that that set of norms
requires (Alston 1990, pp. 310-315). Such an argument, if
successful, would show not only that an account of moral goodness that
characterized it entirely in terms of compliance with some set of
moral norms could not be a correct standard in terms of which to
understand God's perfect goodness; it would also show that an
account of moral goodness that took adherence to some set of moral
norms to be an irreducible *part* of moral goodness to be an
improper standard as well.



The idea that moral norms apply only to beings that can fail to act in
accordance with them has a Kantian provenance, but the Kantian
argument applies only to moral norms understood in a very specific
way, as *imperatives* of a certain sort; Kant's view
allows that moral norms can play a role in the lives of agents who are
perfectly good, agents whom Kant calls "holy wills" (Kant,
*Groundwork*, 4: 414.) That holy wills invariably perform the
actions that the moral norms call for does not show that these moral
norms do not apply to them. Far from it: that they apply
*explains* why the holy will acts in accordance with them, for
if (*per impossibile*) those norms did not apply, the holy will
might well not act in accordance with them. There seems to be little
justification for thinking that God's goodness could not be
moral goodness simply from the fact that God is necessarily perfectly
good. (See Stump 1992 and Leftow 1989 and 2013.)


### 5.2 Divine freedom



Another frequently-raised objection to the prospect of necessary
perfect goodness concerns the relationship between freedom and moral
goodness (see, for example, Pike 1969, p. 215; Reichenbach 1982, pp.
133-134). Not all beings are subject to moral assessment; we do
not judge rocks to be dutiful because they never violate a moral duty.
It is plausibly thought that one of the features that a being must
exhibit in order to be subject to moral assessment is freedom. We
frequently take as an excuse for morally bad behavior that the agent
was not really free not to act badly; such excuses function by
claiming that the conditions under which the agent acted preclude the
agent's behavior from being used as a basis for morally
assessing the agent. Generalizing from thoughts such as these, it is
plausible to hold that God is subject to moral assessment -
including the assessment 'perfectly good' - only if
God acts freely. And even apart from the connection between being free
and being subject to moral assessment, it seems to be a great-making
feature of a being that its agency is free agency. (See the entry on
 divine freedom.)



It seems, then, that we must think that God is free. There seems to be
no conflict between holding that God is free and that God is perfectly
good. A free being may have a perfectly good set of desires, slate of
character traits, and career of actions. It may even be true that
every counterfactual about what that agent would freely do were
circumstances somewhat different involves that agent's agency
being perfectly good. But there may be a conflict between holding that
the agent is free with respect to issues of moral relevance -
what has been called being "significantly" free (Plantinga
1979, p. 166) - and being *necessarily* perfectly good.
For many hold the view that freedom of action involves a capacity to
act otherwise - that if an agent is free with respect to
ph-ing, then it is possible that A phs and it is possible that A
refrains from ph-ing. But if freedom involves the possibility of
acting either way with respect to matters of moral relevance, then a
free being cannot be necessarily perfectly good. For there is no
possible world in which a necessarily perfectly good being acts
wrongly; but for every significantly free being there is a possible
world in which that being acts wrongly.



There are various ways to resist this argument. Many
*compatibilists* about free will deny that this sort of ability
to do otherwise is a requirement on freedom; even if they insist on
there being some possibility of the agent's acting otherwise
given some alternative possible set of desires, they do not hold that
at the point of action, with all held constant, it must be possible
for the agent to act otherwise. (See the entry on
 compatibilism.)
 So given compatibilism, we cannot object that God is unfree simply
because at the point of divine choice the only real possibility is
that God declines to choose to do wrong. Furthermore, God's
willing is not constrained by anything other than the constraints of
logical possibility, and there is nothing that can (efficiently) cause
God to choose one way rather than other; God is the ultimate source of
God's action, such that nothing is causally explanatorily prior
to God's choice. If compatibilism is the true view about the
relationship between freedom and the capacity to act otherwise, then
it seems that the fact that there is no possible world in which God
acts in any but the best way does not call into question that
action's being free and thus subject to moral assessment.



*Incompatibilists* about free will - those who hold that
free will is incompatible with determinism - have not been of
one mind about whether the ability to act otherwise is a condition of
free will, and if so, in what sense, or whether there is some other
requirement on free action in the vicinity. (See the entry on
 arguments for incompatibilism.)
 Those who hold to a strong version of the incompatibilist view might
claim that for an action to be free, then at the very point of
decision to perform the action, holding everything else constant, it
must be possible for the agent to choose to act one way or the other.
Such a view would indeed be incompatible with necessary moral goodness
on the assumption that only free action is creditable to the agent.
But other incompatibilists have held that even given a strong
libertarian account of free will, it is possible for there to be
beings whose orientation toward the good and vivid awareness of it is
such that acting wrongly is not a real possibility for them. On such
views, it is possible for an agent to ph or not to ph only if
the agent judges there to be good reason to ph and good reason not
to ph or there is some feature of that agent that is interfering
with that agent's orientation to act on what that agent judges
there to be good reason to do. So on Aquinas's view, while
humans in their natural state are capable of freely acting wrongly
because they see some good in acting that way, in their glorified
state in heaven they are unable to sin, for they see no point in
sinning and they are not such that their agency can be interfered with
by external factors. It would be misleading to say that the glorified
in heaven act rightly, but unwillingly; rather, they are hyper-willing
to act rightly, and sinning is simply unthinkable, off the table, not
a serious deliberative possibility for them (Stump 1990; Kretzmann
1991; see also Swinburne 1993, p. 202).



This condition of free perfect agency is realized to the greatest
extent in God, it may be argued: nothing external to God can interfere
with God's willing, and God sees immediately and completely what
is worth doing and why. On this view, God's choices against evil
are free, even though doing wrong is not a serious deliberative
possibility for God, and so there is no possible world in which God
acts wrongly.



If one insists upon a libertarian account of free will in which to be
free with respect to an action requires the possibility of acting
otherwise, then the connection between freedom and moral assessability
entails that God's lack of freedom to do evil precludes
God's being perfectly morally good. It is unclear how damaging
that outcome would be. If one is convinced that moral goodness is a
great-making feature that God must exhibit, then there is a deep
problem for perfect being theology, as it seems that God must be free
and God must be perfectly morally good, yet these cannot be
co-realized. On the other hand, one might take this as occasion to
reconsider whether divine perfection requires moral goodness: perhaps
while moral goodness in the human case requires freedom, special
features of the divine case make that sort of freedom unnecessary
(see, for example, Bergmann and Cover 2006); or perhaps the perfection
of God's agency need not be moral perfection. (We will consider
some suggestions toward this latter possibility below.)


### 5.3 Divine freedom and divine rationality



Suppose that we allow that God cannot act wrongly, and that this does
not threaten divine freedom, given the best account of divine freedom.
One might nevertheless think that there is a difficulty concerning how
to reconcile God's necessary moral goodness with God's
being both perfectly free and perfectly rational. It seems that we
must ascribe to God perfect rationality: God is a rational agent, and
it seems obvious that if we hold that God is in any way suboptimal,
rationally speaking, then that would count as a defect in God.



To be perfectly rational is to have one's agency shaped by the
reasons that bear on one's agency in the way that those reasons
dictate. It is not assumed by this characterization of perfect
rationality that reasons are the only thing that shape one's
agency; the only requirement here is that one's agency does not
flout what the relevant reasons require. 



Do God's perfect rationality and God's perfect moral
goodness cohere? Can one be perfectly rational and perfectly morally
good? If the requirements of rationality can require an action that is
ruled out by the requirements of morality, or vice versa, then we have
a problem: the absolutely perfect being cannot be both perfectly
rational and perfectly morally good. So anyone who wishes to defend
perfect moral goodness as a feature of the absolutely perfect being
must hold that what moral goodness requires is at least compatible
with the requirements of rationality. 



The compatibility of the requirements of rationality with the
requirements of moral goodness is a relatively weak constraint, one
that could be satisfied by holding merely that what rationality
requires is thin compared to what morality requires: perhaps
rationality leaves a lot of open space within which agents are not
rationally constrained to choose one way or the other, and one of the
ways that they might choose is the way required by morality. But one
might argue that this weak constraint is not enough, given that God is
morally good *necessarily*. For what is to explain why God
*necessarily* acts in accordance with the requirements of moral
goodness, if God is perfectly free? Perhaps a perfectly free being
will conform to the reasons that are relevant in the situation of
choice; but is it compatible with perfect freedom to hold that God
must act in a certain way, even though there are (*ex
hypothesi*) entirely adequate reasons to act some other,
incompatible way?



The tension being discussed here could be resolved if we were to
accept a certain sort of internalist thesis about moral norms, a
thesis that Michael Smith calls "rationalism" (Smith 1994,
p. 62), though it would need to be affirmed in a somewhat stronger
form than that which Smith affirms. The rationalist thesis as Smith
describes it holds no more than that the fact that an act is morally
right for an agent to perform entails that the agent has a good reason
for performing it. The strengthened rationalist thesis holds that the
fact that an action is the morally best action for an agent to perform
entails that it is the action that the agent has most reason to
perform. What is being supposed here is that rationality, vis-a-vis
morality, is very demanding: moral requirements just are rational
requirements, so that a failure to act morally is a failure to act
rationally.



This strengthened rationalist thesis is of course a controversial
metaethical view: some would deny that there must be any reason at all
for an agent to do what morality requires, much less that there is
decisive reason to do so. But it is one route to the reconciliation of
divine rationality and freedom with perfect moral goodness.



Those who incline toward a compatibilist account of divine freedom
might think that there is less of a problem here. Why must we try to
preserve divine freedom by holding that God's adherence to the
norms of morality is a matter of God taking the route most supported
by reasons? Why not just say that the structure of divine character
- God's virtues - is that of a morally perfect
being? Since divine action proceeds from the divine nature itself, one
might say, it counts as free; and since that nature is morally
perfect, the action that proceeds from it will be perfectly good as
well. We do not need to advert to any controversial metaethical
thesis, then, to explain how divine freedom and rationality fit with
perfect moral goodness.



While this is an open strategy, there are some worries that can be
raised with respect to it. The first is that it is unclear whether
divine freedom is really being adequately respected. One might wonder
how it could be that God's agency counts as free if God is
unable to take seriously in choice options that God nevertheless
recognizes that there are adequate reasons to perform. But that is an
implication of the view as described: because rationality does not
rule out immoral options, yet the structure of God's desires
precludes God from taking those options, God is unable to take
seriously options that there are entirely sufficient reasons to carry
out. This has an appearance of a lack of freedom, not the perfection
of it.



The second is about how we should think about the perfection of moral
goodness on this view. One of the key issues within the methodology of
perfect being theology is how the presence of certain items on the
list of perfections is to be justified. There are some uncontroversial
ways of ruling items off the list - if the perfection
presupposes an imperfection, for example - but whether some
feature that passes these negative tests counts as an intrinsically
good-making feature is a more difficult question. If moral goodness is
a requirement of rationality, it seems much easier to make a case that
moral goodness is a divine perfection. For it seems undeniable that
rationality counts as a perfection for God, as it must for any agent.
And so if moral goodness is itself a matter of responding
appropriately to reasons, as it is on the strong rationalist thesis
described above, then moral goodness must count as a perfection as
well. But if moral goodness is not a requirement of reason, is it so
clear that moral goodness is a divine perfection? What considerations
might one forward for the view that moral goodness is a perfection, if
God has adequate reasons not to act in the morally best way?



In order to square perfect moral goodness with perfect rationality and
perfect freedom, one must either (a) affirm a strong account of the
reason-giving character of moral norms or (b) explain both why
God's freedom is not compromised by not being able to make a
choice fully supported by reasons and why moral goodness counts as a
divine perfection (Murphy 2017).


## 6. Is moral goodness a pure perfection?



We have seen that there are resources to defend the coherence of the
notion of perfect goodness and even necessary perfect goodness, though
making use of those resources requires one to take on further
controversial commitments. It is worth asking, in light of these
further commitments that one would have to make, how strong the
reasons are to ascribe perfect goodness, understood as perfect
*moral* goodness, to the absolutely perfect being in the first
place.



Isn't it obvious that perfect moral goodness is to be ascribed
to God? After all, we would think of a human being who fails to live
up to the standards of moral goodness as being imperfect in some way;
surely, *a fortiori*, we ought to think of an omniscient and
omnipotent being as imperfect if that being fails to be perfectly
morally good. But even if it is obviously true that an absolutely
perfect being must be morally perfect, this is a bad argument for that
thesis. For the fact that a perfect *X* must exhibit feature
*F* does not show that *F* is among the perfections of an
absolutely perfect being. A perfect frog has webbed toes, but the
absolutely perfect being need not have any toes at all, much less
webbed ones.



It is now traditional within perfect being theology to distinguish,
following John Duns Scotus, between pure perfections and impure, or
mixed, perfections (*Ordinatio* 1.3.1, found in
*Philosophical Writings*, p. 24). Pure perfections are those
that do not presuppose limitation of some sort, while impure
perfections do so presuppose. Only pure perfections are features that
it is simply better to have rather than not to have. Impure
perfections presuppose some limiting factor that sets the perfection
in question - for example, membership in some natural kind. So
*being a frog* is a relevant sort of limitation, and sets a
range of features that count as perfections for instances of that
kind. But it is not true of these impure perfections that it is simply
better to have them than not to have them; it is not simply better to
have webbed toes, a tongue attached at the front of the mouth, and so
forth, though a frog in good shape will have those features.



So a key question is whether perfect moral goodness is a pure or
impure perfection. Recall that the moral goodness with which we are
concerned is familiar welfare-oriented moral goodness, so that while
it is consistent with moral goodness's being a pure perfection
that what counts as moral goodness may in some way vary from one being
to another - the particular content of moral norms may differ
between God and human beings - it must not vary *too*
much: the content of moral goodness must involve a positive agential
orientation to human well-being as well as to that of other sentient
beings.



There is a good deal of confidence expressed, particularly in the
discussion of the argument from evil, that moral goodness is a pure
perfection, but it is not clear whether that confidence is
well-placed. 



Against the notion that it is obvious that moral goodness is a pure
perfection, it is worth noting that many accounts by which moral norms
are allegedly explained in a non-debunking way make reference to
features specific to *human* life, or at least the life of
beings similar to humans in important ways. Humeans, for example,
appeal to the structure of human sentiments; Hobbesians, to rough
equality and mutual vulnerability; Aristotelians, to the conditions
for the flourishing specific to our kind. None of these accounts is
designed at all to explain why moral norms of the familiar
welfare-oriented sort would be applicable to the absolutely perfect
being, and thus give some reason to think that moral goodness is a
pure perfection. This is not to deny that there are some views that
would make a better case for moral goodness as pure perfection. If the
value to which agents morally respond is intrinsic value, good in
itself and giving reasons for action to all agents capable of
recognizing and being motivated by it (see, for example, Davison 2012,
p. 12), then we could see why moral goodness would be a pure
perfection. This would require the working out, defense, and
commitment to that particular conception of intrinsic value, one that
some theists would take to be in tension with theism itself.
(Anselm's own view denies that anything could be good in itself
other than God (Anselm, *Monologion*, I, 14); see also Murphy
2011, pp. 61-68.) Kant's view was that moral norms would
have to apply to all rational beings (*Groundwork* 4: 408), but
this thesis is more announced than argued for. At any rate, the key
point is that actual theories of moral norms on the ground are not of
one voice about whether moral norms appropriately apply to even the
absolutely perfect being, and this gives support to the view that it
is an open question whether moral goodness is a pure perfection
(Murphy 2017, 2019a, 2019b).



Some writers have argued that the idea that the goodness of
God's agency is not the moral goodness to which human agents
ought to aspire is a familiar one in the history of philosophy. Davies
argues that it is a mistake to think that in Aquinas's view, God
is "well-behaved" according to the system of moral law
that binds humans (Davies 2011, p. 72); and McCord Adams makes similar
claims regarding Scotus's views (Adams 1987). So here the
disagreement is not simply by implication; arguably, there is explicit
rejection in these major figures of the notion that moral goodness of
a familiar sort is a pure perfection.



If moral goodness is rejected as a pure perfection, it does not follow
that there is no sense in which perfect goodness is a specific
perfection. After all, we might understand perfect goodness as the
specific perfection of divine agency without taking the relevant
standards to be the familiar welfare-oriented moral standards.
God's being perfectly good might involve God's responding
perfectly to value in a way appropriate for an absolutely perfect
being to do so. It was a common notion in the medieval period to hold
that God must love Godself but that God is not necessitated to act by
the prospect of the well-being of humans or other sentient creatures.
Thus God did not have to create at all, and needs no reason not to
promote the well-being of creatures more than God in fact does. (This
position is defended in Murphy 2017, 2019a, and 2019b, and in a very
different way in Rubio 2017.) This position is compatible with the
notion that God might place Godself under certain norms contingently,
by promises, for example. But it would reject the notion that God is
by nature subject to the same system of norms to which we humans are
subject.