Abstract
Robert Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods is one of the most important and innovative contributions to Christian ethics in recent memory. This article identifies two major flaws at the heart of Adams’s theory: his notion of intrinsic value and his claim that ‘excellence’ or finite goodness is constituted by resemblance to God. I first elucidate Adams’s complex, frequently misunderstood claims concerning intrinsic value and Godlikeness. I then contend that Adams’s notion of intrinsic value cannot explain what it could mean for countless finite goods to be intrinsically valuable. Next, I articulate a criticism of his Godlikeness thesis altogether unlike those he has previously addressed: I show that, on Adams’s own account of Godlikeness, a diverse myriad of excellences could not possibly count as resembling God. His theory thus fails to account for a whole world of finite goods. I defend my two criticisms against objections and briefly sketch a more Aristotelian and Christian way forward.
If you believe in God, the idea that some things are excellent because they resemble God is not so implausible. It is something that Jews and Christians implicitly affirm whenever they suggest that bearing God’s image plays a role in giving humans special or sacred value. Quite different is the notion that goodness or excellence as such is constituted by resemblance to God and thus that everything that is excellent is so only in virtue and because of those ways in which it resembles God. This latter claim is at the heart of Robert Adams’s ethical theory in Finite and Infinite Goods (FI). For Adams in FI, the claim that resemblance to God is what constitutes finite excellence not only explains what the metaphysical ‘property’ of finite excellence is, telling us what it means for something finite to be excellent; more than that, it clearly and obviously links human moral experience to God, placing God at the center of moral philosophy and moral life. If there is a problem with Adams’s claim that resemblance constitutes excellence, there is a problem at the core of his ethical theory. One of my primary contentions in this article is that there is just such a problem—a problem not with the notion of finite things, even of unlikely finite things, resembling God, but with his claim that excellence is constituted by such resemblance, that every instance of genuine excellence is an instance of resemblance to God.
While this issue creates trouble enough for FI, there is a second, unrelated problem with FI that I raise in what follows—a problem that is at least as significant as the first. This problem has to do with the subjective, contingent, and interested character of many of our ascriptions of excellence to finite things. Most people believe, or at least act as if, things have value independently of how any (real or idealized) human individual or community thinks about or treats those things and regardless of whether any human individual or community values them. So, I think that and live as if my spouse and the mountain where I grew up do not depend for their value on whether or how I, or any human person or community, happen to value them, or how I or others think about, treat, or relate to them. If nobody values my spouse or the mountain for their own sakes, then that is a failure of valuing: an error and a shame. As appealing and natural as this way of thinking is and as much as it is implicit in the way most of us live, it is extremely difficult philosophically to give an account of this sort of value and valuing—what this value consists in, what it is for something to have it, and what it means to value certain things ‘for their own sake’. For Adams, ‘excellence’ is the central concept of value in FI, and the excellent and that which is excellent are intrinsically and objectively valuable. If Adams does not elucidate and theorize his concept of intrinsic value in a way that renders it clear and overcomes objections and confusions associated with its conceptualization, then there are problems with his very notion of excellence and with his theory as a whole. In what follows, I identify such a problem in Adams’s treatment of intrinsic value.
This paper thus explores two independent problems with FI, beginning with this issue related to intrinsic value and then moving on to the problem related to resemblance while, in both cases, articulating and responding to anticipated objections. While these problems are distinct and do not depend on one another, I suspect they may both ultimately stem from Adams’s appropriation of Platonism to the near exclusion of Aristotelian contributions, and in concluding I briefly suggest how openness to some Aristotelian and Scriptural insights might enrich Adams’s ethical theory and alleviate some of its difficulties. I begin, however, by recounting those facets of Adams’s theory that are necessary to make my two criticisms intelligible.
Adams’s Account: Excellence and Resemblance
Excellence
For Adams the goodness or value centrally at issue in his theory ‘is not usefulness, or merely instrumental goodness…[nor] well-being, what is good for a person’ (FI, p. 13). 1 His claims about goodness and resemblance are not to be understood as concerning just any or ‘every sort of goodness’. 2 Rather, he is concerned with ‘the goodness of that which is worthy of love or admiration’ for its own sake, a goodness that he calls ‘excellence’—the property which an ideally knowledgeable judge would regard as best satisfying our pursuit of the good (pp. 13-14, 22). This excellence belongs to objects independently of human judgment, wish, or desire. ‘Something’s seeming good’, he explains, ‘is not what makes it good…not what its goodness consists in’ (p. 20, emphasis mine). Excellence is thus an objective property of things and is not dependent for its existence on humans (pp. 18-23). While encompassing narrowly ‘moral’ goodness that has to do with action or obligation, excellence extends beyond those matters to include beauty, majesty, and any other dimension or kind of excellence we or God might recognize and have reason to prize for its own sake rather than merely as a means to some end (p. 14).
‘The claim that x is excellent’, Adams explains, implies not only that it is good to value x, but also that this goodness of valuing x is grounded in the excellence of x and independent of ulterior values that may be served by the valuing (p. 22, emphasis mine).
Adams implicitly distinguishes here between intrinsically valuing something (i.e. ‘independent of ulterior values that may be served by the valuing’), and something’s having intrinsic value (i.e. ‘[the] goodness of valuing x is grounded in the excellence of x’). 3 The former is a way of characterizing an agent’s behavior, the way an agent values something; the latter describes a kind of value—for Adams, an ontological property that belongs to things or states in virtue of one or more of their particular features. Specifically, for Adams, valuing or regarding something as intrinsically valuable requires an agent (a) to consider something appropriately taken as an end in itself for a rational agent’s action, attention, care, and/or love, irrespective of what else an agent might value and not just as a means to some other end. 4 Importantly, for Adams intrinsically valuing something or regarding it as intrinsically valuable also entails that the agent, whether she would concede this or not, (b) treats (and in at least this minimal sense regards) it as possessing objective value in its own right, as possessing an ontological property or feature independently of any human’s interests, as possessing intrinsic value in his sense (pp. 18, 20-28). 5 Affirming (b) and/or affirming that (a) entails or is ultimately indistinguishable from (b) is what is implied in Adams’s claim that viewing x as excellent ‘implies…that [the] goodness of valuing x is grounded in the excellence of x’. While it is not entirely clear whether Adams would finally admit a distinction between (a) and (b), it is clear that he rejects the possibility of explaining intrinsic valuing apart from reference to (b) (or some close approximation), for he repeatedly claims that intrinsically valuing something involves ‘prizing’ or regarding it as possessing intrinsic value as an objective property (pp. 18-20, 22). 6
For Adams, ‘intrinsic value’ or excellence is an ontological property—something an object (person, etc.) possesses independently of human practices of valuing. 7 While intrinsic value is partly explicable for Adams in terms of God’s valuing, his finding in something a reason to love it, quite importantly intrinsic value involves more than that: it is constituted by those particular features of an object that resemble God and that are such that he has reason to love them (pp. 23-26, 36). 8 We must keep in mind that Adams’s claims about excellence are claims about intrinsic value so understood.
Many would reject the claim that (b) follows from (a) and/or the very notion of intrinsic value as Adams understands it. On this view, intrinsically valuing something is (or is sufficiently explained in terms of) (a) or some similar formulation, and does not imply (b). This view distinguishes between judging something as properly valued independently of one’s other values and valuings, on the one hand, and judging it to have an objective property of excellence independent of human existence, on the other. Others might worry that Adams does not adequately differentiate between, on the one hand, distinctions relating to ways of valuing (e.g. valuing things as final ends in contrast to valuing them instrumentally, in other derivative ways, or in mixed ways), and, on the other hand, distinctions related to the sources from which a thing may have its value (e.g. intrinsic to itself or independently of practices of valuing, extrinsic to itself, etc.). 9 Some may also be skeptical of Adams’s notion of intrinsic value as something not entirely dependent on human practices of intrinsic valuing. 10 In any case, complexities and controversy abound here and one cannot tell from FI how Adams would resolve these issues. I have, nonetheless, tried to make explicit much that is implicit and, perhaps, underdeveloped in his account, in order to explicate his position charitably and in sufficient detail for our purposes.
Resemblance
For Adams, the excellence of a finite thing consists in its Godlikeness or resemblance to God, provided the resemblance is such that it could give God—the transcendent Good and ‘supreme degree of excellence’—reason to love it (p. 14). There is a relation of identity between a thing’s excellence and its resemblance to God such that a thing’s excellence is constituted by its resemblance to God: ‘Being excellent in the way that a finite thing can be
Adams also details various ways in which a thing’s sharing a property or feature with God would fail to make it excellent by virtue of the property-sharing failing to count as a true resemblance, its failing to satisfy (1). 13 For example, ‘thinking that one is God’ is a way in which a human could share a property with God, but Adams thinks that this kind of property-sharing does not constitute resemblance and thus could not constitute excellence (p. 32). The kind of property-sharing essential for a thing’s resembling God and thus being a candidate for being excellent has to be capable of being appreciated by God as being ‘important’ (pp. 31-32). So, if we imagine with Adams that the three-in-oneness of a three-leafed clover is a property it shares with the three-in-oneness of the Trinity, nonetheless, because that property-sharing is not important enough, he says, it does not constitute resemblance and thus cannot be an excellence (p. 32). Clearly then, for Adams some things and features do not resemble God. In addition to the sorts mentioned above, these include things and features that are horrible, bad, only instrumentally good, or simply not excellent. 14
While resemblance to God is always a matter of fragmentary imperfection, Adams is clear that it cannot be a matter of vague indeterminacy, formal emptiness, or sheer triviality. Because he claims that excellence ‘is a property that things have in some respect and by virtue of other features they have’, we know that the excellence of some thing is not generic and indeterminate but specific and tied to its particularities (p. 29). ‘If something resembles God’, he explains, ‘it does so in some respect and by virtue of other features’ (p. 29, emphasis mine; see also p. 40). 15 Resemblance to God thus consists in particular ‘features’ being shared with God in the right way—it is ‘features [that] constitute excellence’ (pp. 29, 36, emphasis mine). A thing is excellent just in virtue of those features that are its excellence(s), and those features of a thing that are its excellence(s) are just those that resemble God and are such that he has reason to love them. Thus, the features themselves are excellent and are the thing’s excellence just because and only insofar as they resemble God in the right way, insofar as they are shared in the right sense. 16 Indeed, a feature or thing has no excellence apart from that which it has in this sense; this entirely constitutes its excellence. As Adams puts it, ‘a resemblance to God that [could] give God a reason for loving, and a reason for God’s love that is found in a resemblance to God, must constitute an excellence’ (pp. 36-37, emphasis mine). 17
It is important to be clear that a thing is not excellent by virtue of having some property of excellence or goodness that resembles the excellence or goodness of God: it is not in virtue of excellence that something resembles God. Rather, any excellence a thing has is comprised by its resembling God in some particular way, which it does in virtue of its particular features—‘features [that resemble God and give him a reason to love] constitute excellence’ (p. 37, emphasis mine). 18
Illusions and Confusions of Intrinsic Goodness
Recall that for a finite thing to be excellent it must be intrinsically valuable; it must possess value intrinsically and objectively. Its value (or which features make it valuable) must not be relative to or dependent on human activity. Because our evaluation of many finite things as excellent is inextricably context-dependent and rests for its coherence and validity on distinctly human purposes and ends that are themselves not intrinsic to the thing itself, often it is not clear what it could mean in Adams’s sense for us to value something intrinsically—much less what it could mean for something to have intrinsic value in his sense. Indeed, for countless finite things, including most if not all vegetable life, inanimate things, states of affairs or happenings in the natural world or universe, non-human animal life, and other things of these sorts, what it would concretely mean for them to be excellent in Adams’s sense is inscrutable. 19
In articulating my argument, I face a bit of a challenge and being explicit about it seems the best path. On the one hand, for my criticism to be maximally clear, I need to take as an example something relatively simple and something the good-making features of which seem—at least at first blush—non-controversial and easy to identify. Anything about which we cannot at least have some ready, initial consensus concerning what (at least ostensibly) makes it excellent, and the argument could end up mired in controversy and misplaced objections concerning details that are not essential to my point. On the other hand, the kind of example that foots the bill runs the risk of misleading us about the character and scope of my criticism. In particular, because the example needs to be relatively straightforward and concerns something that does not play a major feature in most people’s lives, someone might wrongly think that my criticism itself concerns a rather trivial feature of Adams’s argument or that it only applies to a very narrow, limited, and ultimately unimportant class of goods. Someone might then think that Adams could, with little real loss to his theory, concede my point—he could essentially write off such ‘trivial’ goods and preserve his theory unscathed.
It is important to recognize that this is not the case. On the contrary, strange as my example may seem, if my point holds in relation to it, then, quite literally, a whole world of finite goods disappears from Adams’s theory: for the features of my example that create trouble for Adams’s theory of intrinsic value are, on his view, held in common by pretty much every finite thing in the universe other than, perhaps, humans (or at least some facets of humans) and things made by them. 20 If I am right about the difficulty Adams’s theory has in relation to my example, then his theory fails to account for much of the excellence in the universe and, indeed, much of the excellence that helps make life worth living. My argument includes in its scope most of the planet: from Mont Blanc, coral snakes, wild orchids, and snow leopards to cave bears, California redwoods, and the Amazon river.
An excellent strawberry is plump, juicy, sweet, unblemished, bright red, and neither too soft nor too firm. I find it hard to imagine that Adams or anyone would, in casual conversation, disagree with this assessment. Yet, if I found a stockpile of strawberries in the midst of a food fight, my criteria for what would count as an excellent strawberry would dramatically shift. What had in a different context made a strawberry count as excellent (e.g. sweetness, redness, etc.) would in this one make it shoddy. Handing my friend a moldy, mushy strawberry I would say and truly mean, ‘This one is excellent!’ and then watch gleefully as he took aim.
The obvious objection to this example contends that my considering a strawberry excellent in this context is a clear example of my valuing the strawberry instrumentally, my not recognizing its intrinsic value. My grounds for valuing it depend on an ulterior or extrinsic value—it is winning or participating in the food fight that I value for its own sake and the strawberry is only ‘excellent’ as a means to that end. The features I value are thus not those in virtue of which it is intrinsically valuable. In the non-food fight case, the objection runs, I recognize the intrinsic value of the strawberry—those features in virtue of which it is excellent, intrinsically valuable.
The objection rests on the assumption that in the initial, non-food fight case, I was not valuing the strawberry instrumentally while in the food fight I was. But matters are not so simple. In some other food fight, I might not care much about what strawberry or even what food I am throwing. In such circumstances, any piece of food would do and would simply serve as a means to winning or participating in the food fight. The analogous case at the level of eating, for example, would be one in which all I really cared about was sating my hunger and as long as I thought something would contribute to that end—tasty strawberry, rotten strawberry, or no strawberry at all—it would do just fine. In both of these ‘any-old-thing-will-do’ cases my valuing of the strawberry is obviously instrumental, but these are not the cases we had in mind.
The case we had implicitly in mind, I think, when we initially identified what made a strawberry excellent had to do with eating—we were evaluating the strawberry with implicit reference to the end of our eating it. Further, we implicitly had in mind a case in which a strawberry in particular, and not just food in general, was craved and would be savored: all the particularities of this especially appealing, juicy, aromatic strawberry were what we cared about. Likewise, in this food fight, I am valuing this strawberry for its unique contribution: its firm-yet-gushy feel in my hand, its nauseating odor, its speckled mold, and forthcoming ‘splat’. I value this strawberry (let us imagine) in such a way that virtually no other strawberry or piece of food will do. While my so valuing the strawberry is not obviously instrumental in the way it would be if I did not care whether I threw this strawberry or some other or only cared about winning or participating in the food fight, nonetheless, my recognition of the strawberry’s excellence is obviously my recognition of its excellence for or in the context of the food fight, and my recognition is dependent on food fight-related criteria. My criteria for an excellent strawberry in this case have everything to do with my being in a food fight, with my purposes for the strawberry.
Importantly, in the relevant sense, the eating case is identical: the end I have in sight of ‘enjoying eating a strawberry’ dictates the criteria for what will count as an excellent strawberry. Obviously, in both the eating and food fight instances, these purposes are not ‘intrinsic to’ or ‘inscribed in’ the strawberry (if that notion is even coherent), but are dependent on my particular context and choices. In both cases, my valuing of the strawberry is non-intrinsic in the vital sense that the ends that produce the scales of value that determine the judgments of excellence and determine which features constitute it as excellent are not the strawberry’s but my own and depend on my varying purposes and interests: ‘ulterior values [are] served by the valuing’ (p. 22). Even in both these cases where the valuing is not obviously instrumental, values not intrinsic to the strawberry determine the strawberry’s value and make the valuing possible. Our judgment of the strawberry’s excellence is relative to its excellence for some end of ours and, as Adams sets things up, the strawberry cannot reveal the true criteria for our judging or accessing its intrinsic value. 21 Thus the valuing and the excellence of the strawberry in the eating instance, when it was sweet, juicy, and red, is no less instrumental and no more intrinsic than the excellence of the strawberry in the food fight. Because, however, we usually eat rather than throw strawberries, we tend to judge them, as we did in the initial example, with implicit reference to eating-related criteria, and easily mistake so valuing them with intrinsically valuing them and mistake their value so understood with their intrinsic value. However, considering a strawberry excellent for eating is, of course, not relevantly different from considering it excellent because of food fight-related criteria. 22
It is difficult, then, in the case of things like strawberries to know what it concretely means to value them intrinsically—at least where doing so is understood in Adams’s sense, as valuing them without reference to ulterior values or to human purposes or ends and, moreover, as recognizing and responding to their intrinsic value understood (again in Adams’s way) as a value they have independently from and without reference to human activity. Yet, if we can hardly make sense of intrinsically valuing a strawberry in Adams’s sense, it is even more difficult to make sense of what it concretely means for a strawberry to have intrinsic value in Adams’s sense. How is that notion, so understood, coherent in relation to strawberries and other similar finite things? Which particular features are those in virtue of which such things are intrinsically valuable? How could we know? Take, for example, the antithetical criteria of excellence that the diverse practices of eating and food-fighting yield. Almost every feature that would makes us consider the strawberry excellent in the one case would lead us to consider it poor in the other and vice-versa. Are we to suppose that strawberries are both excellent and not excellent in virtue of the same features and varying in relation to our interests in them at the moment? Or recall that a single strawberry may, at different points in time, manifest each of these sets of features. Shall its intrinsic value vary accordingly? What will the relations be among the temporal context, the strawberry’s features, and its excellence? Such are the problems and questions to which Adams’s conceptions of intrinsic value and intrinsic valuing lead.
Human artifacts like espressos, novels, guitars, and so on may provide an instructive contrast. Such artifacts presuppose practices in light of which they have purposes that (perhaps) can be said to belong to them, in a way that things like strawberries (apart from an account Adams does not give us) do not. Indeed, these things are produced by humans for particular purposes, and part of what makes them what they are is just their being so produced. Thus, given the practice of guitar playing, we can perhaps make sense of valuing the guitar intrinsically and of its being intrinsically valuable, even if we are, arguably, still not dealing with intrinsic valuing and intrinsic value in Adams’s sense. 23 We can point to specific features that make it an excellent member of its class (e.g. quality of wood, craftsmanship, sound, etc.) because we know what it is ‘supposed’ to be, but it is doubtful whether even this gets us to Adams-ian intrinsic value, for our activity, interests and purposes—our investment of value—have made this valuing and value possible. 24
Our attempts to recognize or identify the intrinsic value or excellence of a strawberry are bound to fail: on Adams’s grounds, we do not and cannot know what we should be looking for. So, of the two strawberries—the tasty and the nasty—which is intrinsically excellent? On Adams’s conception, I have no idea how that question could be answered or how there could be a principled difference in the excellence of the two strawberries. The excellence of the strawberry in either case is relative and context dependent, in such a way that the excellence cannot, on Adams’s account, be truly—that is, intrinsically—excellent.
For countless other finite things, analysis would proceed in a similar manner, exposing the ways in which our purposes and desires, contingent and often arbitrary in relation to the things themselves, fundamentally inform our evaluations of them as ‘intrinsically’ excellent. Does the mountain’s excellence stem from the challenge it poses to the climber or its fitness for inspiring awe or the habitat it provides or the marble that can be mined from it or some combination? Is the bobcat’s excellence rooted in the kind of coat its fur would make or its quickness and unpredictable ferocity or its capacity to become part of a Vegas show? On Adams’s grounds, these questions seem not to have answers. But, more significantly, in FI these questions remain, in the most important sense, unasked. For while Adams insists that excellence is not a function of human purposes and interests, he does not really address the question of intrinsic valuing and value in regard to cases like these. He does not ask the question posed by those countless cases where it is hardly clear what constitutes intrinsic as opposed to instrumental value or valuing, where reflection shows that what we assumed to be an obvious case of intrinsic valuing or value has no clearer claim to being so considered than the most blatantly instrumental sorts of valuing or value. In this respect, FI’s ethical theory rests on shaky ground: at least by the lights he gives us, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to see how, whether, or why a multitude of finite things are excellent in Adams’s sense.
Objections and Responses
Objection: The finite things the argument attends to are not the sorts of things Adams has in mind when he talks about finite things being excellent.
Response: Such finite things as the argument attends to are among the sorts of things that Adams considers excellent: We may regard all living things as having intrinsic value and as being distant imitations of the divine life [i.e. as being excellent]…even in plants there is beauty and some likeness to the divine life… It seems as natural to recoil from the killing of a great tree as of a chicken (p. 114, emphasis mine).
25
Other finite things Adams explicitly refers to as candidates for being excellent include: clovers (p. 32), sunlight on leaves (p. 193), a hearty breakfast and funny movie (p. 195), cooking (p. 30), the hawk’s scream and the hyena’s laugh (p. 52), the shape of a beloved’s nose (p. 188), ‘strange things that we do not begin to understand how to care about’ (p. 181), ‘a beautiful flower’ (p. 28), and other vegetative life throughout.
Objection: God created strawberries, in part, so that they could be eaten by humans and inscribed that end in strawberries. Therefore what makes a strawberry intrinsically valuable has to do with characteristics it has that make it more or less delightful for human consumption. Thus, it is only appropriate to evaluate a strawberry in light of this end and, unlike appraising it for its use in a food fight, doing so does not instrumentalize its value but recognizes its intrinsic value.
Response: I doubt Adams would be sympathetic to the account of God’s relation to the world that this objection presupposes and, if he were, there is nothing in FI to suggest how he would formulate such an account. In any case, responding fully would require the objector to say much more about what is meant by God’s ‘inscribing an end in strawberries’. If the objection were correct about the strawberry’s purpose, I concede that a strawberry’s excellence for a food fight might be of a different sort than a strawberry’s excellence for human consumption. Nonetheless, on Adams’s grounds, it is still not clear that even the presence of the strawberry’s ‘internal end’ means that the person who values it on that basis—because she still values it for eating—values it any less instrumentally than someone who cares about throwing it and no other thing. Insofar as the objection’s scenario may make the strawberry relevantly similar to human artifacts, it is not clear that their having an internal end would help make Adams-ian intrinsic value coherent: if a strawberry is made for eating and we value it for eating, then in relation to Adams’s formulations it may be an intrinsically instrumental good. It would take much argument to show that the coalescence of the features that make the strawberry excellent for human consumption are those that make it intrinsically excellent in Adams’s sense and that this particular coalescence is such that when we value it on that basis, we value it intrinsically. Furthermore, this objection is entangled in many difficult metaphysical and epistemological issues that Adams would need to work out if he were to move in the direction suggested by the objection.
Objection: Strawberries are evolutionarily constituted to maximize the spread of their seeds. One way this happens is through animal ingestion. A strawberry’s tastiness to humans is in this way related to its biological structure in a special way—in a way being thrown in a food fight is not.
Response: This may ‘explain’ why strawberries are edible, but it does not bear on the issue at hand and, again, has no basis in Adams’s account. Further, the objection does not succeed in relating a strawberry’s end to its tastiness to humans, but rather to its success in ensuring maximal seed distribution which is as readily accomplished by its being thrown or eaten by other animals as its being eaten by humans. Additionally, how would one establish this as the strawberry’s end, what would that mean, and how would one determine which criteria ensured maximal seed distribution? Even if one answered these questions, as the previous response indicates, many other problems would remain.
Objection: Michael Thompson develops a theory of Philippa Foot’s that he calls ‘Logical Footianism’, and the basic claims undermine the previous section’s criticism. First, Foot contends that when we grasp an individual instance of life, such as a particular cat or strawberry, we grasp it ‘under’ or ‘through’ a broader concept, a species or ‘life form’. Thompson puts it this way: ‘The representation [i.e. our conception] of an individual living organism as living is everywhere mediated by an implicit representation of the species or life form under which the individual is thought to fall.’
26
This species or life form under which we grasp some individual thing carries with it (and is partly constituted by) particular features, ‘a connected system of tenseless judgments’, derived from our history of interaction with the world. When it is fully developed a collection of true thoughts about a particular life form is called a ‘natural history’ of that life form. Thompson continues: The components of this system, the ‘natural history judgments’, attribute to the life form, in a logically distinctive way, predicates which can also intelligibly be attributed to individual organisms. ‘They have four legs’, we say of cats or of cat-form; ‘They bloom in spring’, we say of cherries or of cherry-form. ‘It has four legs’, we say of this cat hic et nunc; ‘It bloomed last spring’, we say of the cherry tree in the garden. The properties expressed by these predicates may be said to ‘characterize’ the life forms cat and cherry respectively; we may say, by contrast, that they ‘hold of’ the individual cat or cherry tree in question. The predicates may of course fail to hold of many individual bearers of the life forms they characterize; it may even, in suitable cases, fail to be true of most of them. Where the characterizing predicates do fail to hold—where a cat has three legs or a cherry does not bloom—we have natural defect, a failure of elementary ‘natural goodness’. Thus judgments of goodness and defect make implicit reference to the species or life form that the individual bears. Such ‘evaluative’ judgments are no more suspicious, metaphysically, than are the ‘positive’ descriptions: the materials on which we base the evaluative judgments are implicitly present in positive description.
27
So, insofar as we grasp various individuals under a concept of a species, present in our concept are experience-rooted criteria of what it means for an individual to be a good member of that species (and, more fundamentally, what it means for an individual to be a member of that species at all—that is how we grasp them as a member of a species in the first place). So, to recognize a cat as a cat or a strawberry as a strawberry is already to possess experience-rooted convictions about what constitutes a normal or ‘naturally good’ member of that species. As Thompson puts it, ‘the materials on which we base the evaluative judgments are implicitly present in positive description’. Thus, a judgment of intrinsic excellence is simply a case of a finite thing’s satisfying to a high degree the various predicates present in the life form of which it is a member, and therefore (once the argument is filled in), there is no incoherence involved in the notion of a strawberry’s intrinsic excellence.
Response: If there is a way forward for Adams, I think it is probably in this direction. However, in publically responding to my paper, Adams forcefully rejected appeal to the Foot/Thompson project—both on its own terms and as a way for him to defend or elaborate his claims in FI. 28 And he has expressed significant skepticism of Foot’s basic approach in print. 29 If the Foot/Thompson project could provide a way to address the issues I raise, it is a path that—so far—Adams rejects as unacceptable. Nonetheless, suppose life-form concepts allow us to distinguish the truly defective from the more normal. While such a concept would tell us about something aside from our own interests, I am not confident it would underwrite the sorts of judgments of excellence that Adams needs it to given his conception of intrinsic excellence. For note that the judgments Thompson credits the life-form concepts with enabling are of an extremely basic kind: a cat with three legs or a cherry tree that fails to blossom. The rough equivalent in the world of strawberries would be a strawberry that had no seeds at all or one that tasted like an onion: something recognizable as a strawberry but fundamentally flawed. Had Thompson tried to engage in more fine-tuned claims and with goals similar to Adams’s, his ‘life-form concepts’ might be open to criticisms basically similar to the one’s I have raised against Adams—criticisms that would note the contextual, interested, and non-natural character of a highly detailed life-form concept, the degree to which we get in the picture. 30 It may be that insofar as a life form or species concept is specific enough to legitimate the kinds of nuanced judgments that distinguish the excellent from the pretty good, the concept will tend to tell us more about our own interests and purposes than anything else, and, as such, will not bring us any closer to Adams-ian intrinsic excellence. Conversely, insofar as the life form or species concept is general enough to tell us about the thing itself, to keep us sufficiently ‘out of the picture’, I doubt it will underwrite the very sorts of judgments Adams would need it to make.
Objection: What about the case of the botanist? Certainly the botanist who specializes in strawberry-related research values the strawberry for its own sake, appreciating it as a unique form of botanical life with purposes of its own quite independent of human interest. The botanist teaches us what it is to value a strawberry intrinsically and what it is for a strawberry to have intrinsic value—and God is like an ideal botanist.
Response: Again, so far Adams’s has strongly rejected such approaches, but strawberry-focused botany is just the real-life study of the strawberry ‘life form’. The ideal botanist studies the strawberry in a tremendous variety of ways. Over time, she comes to appreciate the strawberry in countless respects and can give reasons for her appreciation that seem independent from human ends. Yet, as we saw above, even as she comes to appreciate the strawberry for its own sake, it seems likely that her life-form concept will remain, for Adams’s purposes, vague. Perhaps Adams is content to hold that strawberries can only obtain a general excellence that merely distinguishes the normal from the defective, or that does not admit of much distinction between various strawberries. Even so, it is still not obvious that distinguishing among the more and less normal strawberries is identical to distinguishing among the more or less excellent strawberries, or that the more normal strawberry is the more intrinsically excellent one. Moreover, it may be prima facie evidence against the truth of Adams’s formulations that: (1) devoting one’s life to the study of strawberries is required for even the possibility of a human accessing a strawberry’s intrinsic value and (2) the best defense of the coherence of Adams’s notion of intrinsic value requires us to posit an ‘ideal strawberry botanist’. 31
Godlikeness, Excellence, and an Imperfect Match
Suppose we put aside the arguments of the preceding section and take as non-problematic Adams’s notion of intrinsic value. Let us grant that any finite thing that he would want to say was excellent could be intrinsically valuable and excellent. Nonetheless, on Adams’s own grounds, the claim that a thing’s excellence is constituted by its resemblance to God is incoherent.
At the outset, it is important to distinguish my criticism here from that of the many critics who find implausible the idea that certain unlikely finite things could resemble God. Susan Wolf expresses that objection succinctly: The idea that what is good is good because it resembles or images God is totally baffling if we are to understand the idea of resemblance or imaging literally. In what sense can a good meal, a good basketball game, a good performance of the Brandenburg Concerti, a field of wildflowers, the Critique of Pure Reason and my next door neighbor all resemble or image the same thing? How, in any event, can a good meal be said to image God?
32
In response to that criticism, Adams has emphasized the transcendence of God and the fragmentary character of the resemblance in such a way as to bring the issue to an impasse: given God’s transcendence, of course it is hard to see how some things could resemble him, but certainly they could resemble him in some respect. In response to a subsequent charge that this emphasis on God’s transcendence succeeds only at the price of emptying his initial claim of its explanatory content, he might reply that even if it is unclear particularly what it is in God in virtue of which something resembles him, given the accessibility of finite goods and their apparent excellences coupled with the knowledge of God we form through induction from these excellences, the resemblance claim still serves to explain what it was meant to explain: what constitutes finite excellence as excellent. 33 As will become clear in what follows, my criticism is wholly distinct from the strand of criticism that Wolf represents.
Additionally, while my argument against Adams here is entirely different from the one I raised in the preceding section, there are similar challenges and risks when it comes to my example. So I want to echo my earlier point about the expansive scope of my criticism—even as I think there is less danger in this case of missing how countless and radically diverse are the finite goods that this criticism shows Adams’s theory unable to account for.
For us to recognize a strawberry as excellent would require that it be plump, red, and juicy, but perhaps more basically that it have a good number and distribution of seeds; a fresh looking, correctly proportioned stem; and a good strawberry-ish shape (things we probably take for granted in imagining it as plump, red, and juicy). 34 Many of the reasons we might have for thinking a particular strawberry ‘excellent’, including those detailed above, have to do with its being an excellent instance of the species ‘strawberry’. And its being an excellent example of the type ‘strawberry’ will, for the most part, have to do with its possessing in a uniquely strawberry-like way, certain characteristics, many of which are peculiar to strawberries and by which, in comparison to other strawberries that possess the same features in less ideal ways, it distinguishes itself as excellent. At least some of these features essential to its excellence are such that according to Adams’s own strictures on what counts as resemblance there is no way that they could resemble (or even share a property with) God: a certain redness, a good number and distribution of seeds, or a good strawberry-ish shape, just to name a few.
These are three features, among many, without which a strawberry could not possibly be excellent (or even normal), and which, under any accurate description, cannot resemble God. God is neither strawberry-shaped nor does he have the formal characteristic of ‘being the right shape’. Nor does ‘being aesthetically appealing’ or ‘being beautiful’ sufficiently or accurately describe or characterize ‘strawberry-shape’, which is, of course, the feature we prize in prizing a strawberry’s shape—a feature that is excellent and is necessary for the strawberry’s excellence. 35 The same sorts of things hold at least as obviously for seeds or the strawberry’s redness. Yet, for the excellence of the strawberry truly to consist in its Godlikeness as Adams claims, the properties that account for us identifying the strawberry as good (and as giving God a reason for loving the strawberry) would have to be the sort that could resemble him and thus cause the strawberry to resemble him. Obviously many such properties—properties that are essential to our recognizing some finite thing as excellent and their being so—are not and cannot be the sort to resemble God themselves or make a thing of which they are part resemble God.
Indeed, while one would think that the strawberry’s brilliant redness or unique shape would each be a chief reason for God and our loving the strawberry and our thinking it excellent, I see no way that redness or ‘strawberry-shape’ can meaningfully be said to resemble God on Adams’s theory—which is what would have to be the case if the color or shape were to (be excellent itself or) help make the strawberry resemble God and therefore be excellent. As it goes with strawberries, so it goes with countless finite goods. Indeed, the scope of this argument extends to virtually any finite good imaginable: a Richard Wilbur poem, the sound of cicadas on a summer night, Venezuelan coffee, the tiny hand of a newborn baby, a ’67 Ford Mustang, a Frank Ghery building, the smell of rain, bananas, etc.
In each of these cases, features that incline us to regard the particular thing as excellent—indeed, those without which we cannot imagine the thing in question being excellent—are those that cannot possibly, on Adams’s conception, resemble God. To take one of Adams’s own examples, a clover’s nifty three-in-oneness seems like an obvious thing that would make it excellent or be excellent about it—surely its three-in-oneness is at least among the things that would make the clover excellent. 36 Adams, however, explicitly says that a clover’s three-in-oneness is ‘not important enough to make the clover…resemble God’ (p. 32). That means, of course, that its three-in-oneness does not in any way whatsoever contribute to or have anything to do with its excellence. In trying to keep the idea of resemblance from seeming silly, Adams is led to the equally or even more untenable denial of the excellence of the particularities that are so central to making life beautiful. Precisely the features that Adams acknowledges could not possibly resemble God are often essential to some thing’s being excellent (or even being the thing it is): the pink of the sunset or the salmon, the distinctive oakiness of the fire and the cigar, the zebra’s stripes or the dog’s tail. Or consider all the cases in which color or shape or smell or flavor is either essential to our regarding something as excellent—or is itself something we regard as excellent—yet, on Adams’s account, there is no sense in which any of these, qua particular features that they are, could resemble God. And so they cannot count as excellent or as constituting something as excellent. 37
Note well that unlike other critics, I have not built my argument around the denial that there may be certain ways in which unlikely things like strawberries, meals, concerts, and so on can plausibly be said to resemble God. My dispute with Adams is with his claim that Godlikeness constitutes a thing’s goodness. There is just not the perfect overlap between what about something could resemble God and what about it makes it excellent that there would need to be for Adams’s argument to work. In cases where we can find some resemblance, it is far from clear and often clearly not the case that the features by virtue of which the thing might resemble God are those and/or those alone by virtue of which it is excellent. Perhaps some of the former coincide with the latter—some of the features by which it resembles God are among those by which it is excellent. However, ‘some’ is not good enough. Thus, even if honey’s sweetness, for example, genuinely resembles God, it is still the case, as anyone who has tasted honey knows, that there is more to the excellence or even taste of honey than its ‘sweetness’—its unique color, texture, and taste are each excellent and features in respect to which it is excellent, but, as Adams must concede, they are simply not the sorts of things that could possibly resemble God. And to reduce honey’s excellence to ‘sweetness’ is to constrict and flatten out its excellence in just the way Adams (as I understand the spirit of his work) wants to avoid.
Or, more profoundly, take a newborn infant. There are countless things about an infant that we regard as excellent, admire, and prize, and which help constitute it as excellent. Surely some of these—like tenderness or purity—are (perhaps) the sorts of things that might resemble God. But countless others—the softness and hue of the skin, the sheer tininess of the hand and fingernails, the pudginess of the cheeks, the wrinkliness of the sole of the foot, the downy fuzziness of the hair, the smell of its breath, and so on—each of these is among the many things we prize in a newborn as excellent and which help contribute to the baby’s excellence (and to more complicated properties). 38 A thing’s Godlikeness constitutes its excellence, claims Adams. Insofar as a thing’s excellence is constituted, in any part or respect, by features such as these that cannot resemble God, Adams’s claim about resemblance constituting excellence is shown false.
To rescue the Godlikeness thesis would require sacrificing a whole brilliant world of excellence and beauty, reducing the complexity, diversity, and particularity of countless finite goods to generic properties that might be thought to resemble God—tenderness, purity, sweetness, filling-ness, and so on. Try selling that to a sommelier, filmmaker, basketball fan, woodworker, golfer, lover, or parent. Neither they—nor we—can accept such an account, for part of what sets them apart from those of us less familiar with the things they love, part of what makes them who they are and makes them judge life wonderful, is precisely their recognition and love of a host of particular excellences that some of us are blind to or only vaguely aware of. Part of becoming an excellent lover is awakening to such particularities, beholding the rich diversity and individuality of goods that less-skilled lovers are prone to miss or conflate or reduce. And surely we cannot suppose that God, as the greatest lover of all, instead, like the greenest novice, finds excellent and loves only the generic, the vague, the abstract. If, as Adams says, it is excellent to love the excellent, we can hardly suppose that God’s excellence would be deficient in that way, less even than our own.
Objections and Responses
Objection: It is mistaken to claim that a thing’s excellence is at all constituted by its individual features. It is only considered as a whole that some thing is excellent. Thus, when Adams talks about a thing’s resembling God, he means that the thing as a whole or in virtue of abstract properties resembles God rather than that its various parts do. Besides, Adams says, ‘No excellence of creatures can be regarded as a detailed copy of something in God’ (p. 31).
Response: It is not true for Adams that a finite thing can only be excellent or resemble God when considered as a whole or in virtue of abstract properties. Recall that in claiming that finite things can be excellent in some respects and not others, he acknowledges that finite things can resemble God in virtue of some particular features and not others and thus that it is not only considered as wholes that finite things resemble God. No feature-sharing, no resemblance—whatever may be true of the object as a whole. Additionally, we have seen that he explains resemblance in terms of property-sharing, explicitly argues that particular shared features—not just complex properties—must resemble God to make that which possesses them resemble God, and he adduces all sorts of examples of excellence and property-sharing that do not depend on abstract properties. 39 Most significantly, if only abstract properties could resemble God that would, by Adams’s own lights, radically and unacceptably limit the variety of things that could count as excellent, excluding innumerable goods that we—and Adams himself—care about and regard as excellent.
The context of the objection’s citation is Adams’s discussion of human virtues and the problems they pose for resemblance to God. His solution is to emphasize the fragmentary character of any resemblance and this sentence addresses the character of the resemblance—that it is not a ‘detailed copy’. I have not characterized Adams as saying that excellent features need to be ‘detailed copies’ of something in God. I have claimed that for things like redness, strawberry-shape, right number of seeds, or, as Adams notes, three-in-oneness, no amount of ‘fragmentation’ makes sense of how such things could resemble or (excepting three-in-oneness) even share properties with God. 40
Objection: While I concede that feature F, which almost everyone thinks is excellent and is part of Y’s excellence does not resemble God, I deny that F is excellent and is part of Y’s excellence.
Response: If every competent judge of Y thinks that F is excellent and contributes to Y’s excellence, then Adams would surely agree. It is central to his theory that there be a close connection between what we, at our best, think is excellent and what actually is: ‘We cannot always or even usually be totally mistaken about goodness’; ‘If we do not place some trust in our own recognition of the good we will lose our grip on the concept of good, and our cognitive contact with the Good itself’ (p. 20). Denying that F is excellent and part of Y’s excellence is a step toward ‘losing our grip’. The fact that F cannot resemble God is not a good reason to think that F is not excellent or part of Y’s being excellent; it is, however, a good reason to think Adams’s thesis false.
Objection: Feature Z (redness, right number of seeds, etc.) which is excellent and contributes to thing W’s excellence actually does resemble God after all, notwithstanding the apparent absurdity of the claim. After all, Nelson Goodman says, ‘anything is in some way like anything else’ and ‘every two things have some property in common’. 41
Response: First, recall that sharing a property with God is not, for Adams, sufficient to constitute resemblance. Goodman seems to have ‘sharing a property’ in mind here rather than Adams’s conception of resemblance. Also, Adams notes Goodman’s claims but insists that some things do not resemble God (p. 32). If, however, you continue to insist that Z resembles God or makes W resemble God, then surely, almost every feature and finite thing resembles God in almost every respect. If so, then for Adams either basically everything is excellent in every respect—which he explicitly rejects—or the only remaining criterion for a thing’s excellence is its being something God could love, in which case the theory has become a divine desire/love theory of excellence—which Adams also explicitly rejects (pp. 35-36). 42 Additionally, if Z resembles God then ‘resemblance’ and the Godlikeness theory have been emptied of their content. No amount of emphasis on fragmentariness or transcendence can make sense of Z’s resembling God. Besides, the text is clear that Z, like the three-in-oneness of a clover, is the sort of thing Adams says does not resemble God (p. 32).
Objection: A strawberry’s excellence consists in its possessing to the highest degree and in the best way possible all the features it is supposed to have as a strawberry. In that respect it resembles God! Granted it is a formal resemblance, but God is the one who is exactly who he is supposed to be, and the strawberry’s excellence consists in its being like God in the sense of its being what it is supposed to be.
Response: This objection is viciously circular. Claiming that a particular strawberry is excellent because it has the formal property, ‘being close to (the ideal version of) what it is supposed to be’, requires the notion of an ‘ideal strawberry’ in relation to which the particular strawberry can be judged to have the formal property. However, positing an ideally excellent strawberry begs the question for we are left wondering what makes the ideally excellent strawberry excellent. According to Adams what constitutes the excellence of any finite thing is its Godlikeness. So, we are left trying to show that the excellence of the ideally excellent strawberry is constituted by its Godlikeness—which is, in fact, exactly where we began.
Conclusion
In closing, I can see at least two ways for Adams to move forward, both requiring abandonment or major revision of the current version of his Godlikeness thesis—a thesis which, despite its central role in his theory, he admits at the outset he has ‘rather less confidence’ in (p. 28). I sketch these options only in the broadest and simplest terms.
One way forward is rooted in Aquinas’s theology of participation and esse or existence. Roughly speaking, on this view everything and every perfection (whether accidents, currently existing individuals, intentional objects, or whatever) is some form of existence or esse, and everything that exists is excellent in so far as it exists. Esse and goodness are here identical ‘or one and the same in reality (in rem) and are different only conceptually (secundum rationem)’ [my emphasis]. 43 (In Adams’s vocabulary, existence and goodness are metaphysically identical but semantically distinct.) In knowing himself perfectly, God, who is esse as such, understands all the various ways in which his perfection or esse could be shared in or manifested by anything else—all that could exist. 44 That is, he knows all the fragmented, limited, qualified ways in which his perfection can in some way be represented or resembled or ‘participated’—for whatever exists (including accidents, intentional objects, and so on) will, by virtue of existing and to the extent that it exists, distantly resemble him. 45 These ideas or exemplars, each representing some way of existing, serve as determinate, authoritative standards of perfection against which some creature’s particular perfection can be measured—a kind of absolutely authoritative, exhaustively detailed, and perfectly determinate Thompsonian life form, we might say. 46 For Thomas, these exemplars are not distinct from Godself: they are facets of God’s singular, eternal act of self-knowledge which act is not distinct from Godself, God’s essence. Creatures, then, are more or less excellent in virtue of what they are as resemblances of God. That is, they are particular participations of God, and the more they resemble or participate God—the more they have of existence—the more excellent they are. 47
There is obvious resonance with Adams’s theory here—indeed, early on Adams nods toward classical conceptions of participation and exemplars (only to develop his theory without giving them much attention)—but the problems of his proposal are averted, or at least diminished (FI, pp. 13-14). The vocabulary of exemplars provides a way of drawing fine-grained distinctions among types and degrees of excellence and probably also gives us a better handle on intrinsic value and valuing, and the identification of esse with excellence (or at least goodness) means that strictly every feature—qua some form of existence—can non-problematically be thought to resemble the God who is esse as such and who necessarily prepossesses every perfection and type of existence in himself. One is tempted to say that the addition of Aristotelian insights here allows Thomas to avoid some of the traps that a more exclusively Platonist theory—like Adams’s—seems bound to fall into.
Some have criticized FI for being generically theistic, and I think this criticism is relevant to this key issue of resemblance. As I noted earlier, Jews and Christians (at least) believe that humans are created in the image of God and that this resemblance to God gives humans unique value. While the rest of the universe has great value and, in the Psalmist’s words, ‘declares the glory of God’, Scripture is not usually interpreted as saying that all creation images God—at least not in the way that humans do or that Adams claims it does. Thus, another way forward for Adams which may, for Thomists, or may not, for most Barthians, be paired with the first, centers on the unique status of human beings—and, above all, Jesus Christ—as God’s image-bearers. In other words, it reserves the categories of resemblance or imaging to humanity (and perhaps angels) alone, allowing (on the Thomist version, at least) participation to name the broader relation of creation as such to God. On such a view, non-human finite things are not thereby rendered less excellent. Instead, bearing God’s image marks a special way of being excellent and constitutes a unique sort of excellence befitting the qualitatively different relationship of image-bearing in distinction from mere participation.
Many Christians understand the claim that humans are created in God’s image to mean, in part, that human beings are created in the image of Jesus, God-incarnate, the second person of the Trinity. 48 On at least two levels this would give coherence to the notion that bearing God’s image helps constitute human beings as uniquely excellent. First, since Jesus is fully human it is not hard to see how all of us share in his humanity—and in so doing are of sacred value. Problems that worry Adams related to human virtue evaporate when resembling God involves resembling a human who suffered, loved, and died. At another level, many Christians understand Jesus’s excellence to be (at least partly) rooted in his perfect fidelity to God’s vocation on his life and his self-giving love and service to God and neighbor. At this level, to be excellent as a human is to imitate Jesus by manifesting a similarly faithful devotion to one’s own vocation, whatever it might be, and a similar self-giving love for God and one’s neighbors. It is also, similarly, to be, as Jesus is but in our limited way, through him, the object and subject of divine love, a participant in intra-Trinitarian love. If there is sense to be made for Christians of the claim that resemblance to God constitutes humans as excellent and has tremendous ethical significance, it is to be made, I suspect, not so much in Adams’s way, but through Thomistic notions of participation and by locating human resemblance to God primarily in our resemblance to the one whom Christians believe is, somehow, the perfect ϵικoν of the God who is community-in-love (Col. 1:15). 49
Footnotes
1
Unless otherwise noted, all parenthetical references are to Robert Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (FI) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2
Robert Adams, ‘Précis of Finite and Infinite Goods’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64.2 (March 2002), pp. 439-44, at p. 442. It is important to note that ‘no…claim[s about resemblance/Godlikeness are] made’ with respect to instrumental value or the goodness of things as means (p. 442).
3
On intrinsic value: ‘Excellence…is a form of…“intrinsic value”’ (p. 21); ‘There is a single property…such that an ideally competent judge would say that it is clearly what would best satisfy the pursuit [of excellence], in the sense that it would most closely fit the criteria indicated by the character of the pursuit’ (p. 22, emphasis mine).
4
The word ‘just’ indicates that an agent may appropriately value something both instrumentally, as a means to an end, and, intrinsically, as valuable in itself (e.g. Aristotle on virtue).
5
At play here is Adams’s distinction between semantics or meanings and metaphysics or natures (pp. 15-18). On this view, a nature (such as being H2O) can answer to a given role that is indicated by practices and language (such as those surrounding ‘water’), and such is the case whether or not we have identified that nature or even think there is any such nature to identify. As Adams has it, whatever one’s ethical theory or lack thereof, ethical practices and vocabulary, especially practices of valuing some things independently of whatever else we value, point to a kind of value inhering as an ontological property in certain things. See also note 3.
6
He comes closest to addressing the possibility of a distinction between (a) and (b) in his treatment of Elizabeth Anderson’s conception of intrinsic value, but, while his treatment culminates in the formulation that emphasizes (b), his concern with her work is not precisely centered on this issue (pp. 21-22). Regarding his insistence on (b), e.g.: ‘The way we speak about [excellence]…treats it as a property, and as one that objects of evaluation possess (or lack) independently of whether we now think they do’ (p. 18).
7
Whether Adams thinks that all intrinsic value is excellence is unclear and irrelevant to my argument. It is clear that all excellence is a form of intrinsic value, and since the problems I raise are proper to his conception of intrinsic value, they are problems with his conception of excellence (e.g. pp. 21-22).
8
Thus, ‘the excellence of x [has] its grounds not…in God’s attitude, but in something in x itself’ (p. 35). Also, as we will see at note 17, it is in virtue of the actual features an object shares in the right way with God that it is excellent and not in virtue of some independent property called ‘resemblance’.
9
Some philosophers use the term ‘intrinsic value’ differently than Adams, as excluding a value depending on a relation to God or anything else. I follow Adams’s usage throughout.
10
They might claim that ‘something’s being [intrinsically valuable] is to be explained [entirely] in terms…of someone’s [properly] valuing something as [intrinsically valuable in the sense of]…need[ing] to value it as intrinsically good and [being able on the basis of those needs] to make sense of…doing so’. Bernard Williams, ‘Intrinsic Goodness’, in Myles Burnyeat (eds.), The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 135-36; see also 121-24, pp. 134-37.
11
As we will see in note 17, to be most precise here I might say ‘…is constituted by the shared features that constitute its resemblance to God’, but that would complicate the matter unnecessarily at this point.
12
Adams speaks alternately both of the resemblance giving God a reason to love (a) the resemblance itself and (b) the thing that possesses the relevant resembling feature(s) (pp. 33-36). Adams himself does not elucidate this distinction, and, for our purposes, it is irrelevant. My use of one phrase rather than the other is only for variety.
13
What Adams means by ‘resemblance’ as distinct from ‘property-sharing’ never becomes fully clear. Matters are further complicated by his discussion of importance and faithfulness. The two are often closely intertwined (e.g. ‘[faithfulness] depends on what is most important about the way in which the original has the features shared’), but need to be kept distinct insofar as he introduces faithfulness to clarify what distinguishes mere property-sharing from resemblance (i.e. criterion (1)) and introduces importance to help explain what sort of resemblance God could have reason to love (i.e. criterion (2)) (pp. 31-38). It is clear, however, that Adams does mean to keep criteria (1) and (2) distinct and requires that both be satisfied to constitute excellence (pp. 36-37). My criticism does not depend on whether or how these matters are resolved.
14
Also, things can resemble God in some ways but not in others, as is the case, according to Adams, with Hitler (pp. 31, 33).
15
Adams’s use of the conditional ‘if’ here underlines his explicit claim that not everything resembles God.
16
Henceforth, I use ‘resemblance’ to refer exclusively to genuine, Adams-ian resemblance, not mere property-sharing. By ‘right sort’ of resemblance, I mean the ‘giving-God-reason-to-love’ sort. For concision, future references to ‘resemblance’, even without the qualifier ‘right sort’, refer to resemblances that meet the criterion of being the sort that could give God reason to love them.
17
When Adams says that a thing’s resemblance to God constitutes its excellence there is potential ambiguity about whether excellence is constituted by the shared features or the resemblance. There is potential ambiguity, that is, about the relationship between the resemblance and the shared features that constitute it—namely, whether the resemblance is an independent property somehow distinct from the shared features and, if so, whether excellence consists in the resemblance or in the resembling features themselves. Adams does not directly address this issue, but it is clear that for Adams (a) resemblance is not something other than the right kind of property-sharing (i.e. a thing’s having the right kind of features that God has as well) and that (b) resemblance does not reside elsewhere than in the shared features. Excellence is thus constituted by features that are shared in the right way, and it is in the shared features that excellence is located, not something in addition to the features called ‘resemblance’: ‘goodness…is a property…things have in some respect and by virtue of other features they have’ (p. 29, emphasis mine). Put differently, the right kind of shared-ness does not add an independent property to the features—rather, the shared feature is the excellence because it is shared in the resemblance-constituting way and is the right sort of feature. It further confirms this interpretation that, in responding to Susan Wolf and others who understand him as I do here, he registers no objection.
18
This point is easy to miss or misstate. See, e.g., James Wetzel, ‘God in the Cave: A Look Back at Robert Merrihew Adams’s Finite and Infininite Goods’, Journal of Religious Ethics 34.3 (2006), pp. 487-89.
19
My criticism may be applicable to human artifacts as well, but I do not argue that here.
20
And angels too, if they exist.
21
More on Adams’s refusal of this path shortly.
22
It seems equally implausible to claim, for example, that aesthetic appeal or ‘attractiveness to the human eye’ gives us reliable access to intrinsic excellence here.
23
It is doubtful whether the value is intrinsic in Adams’s sense because it is a function of our having purposes for the thing, practices that situate it and give it its value: we ‘discover’ the value, but, in the relevant sense, we also create it.
24
Even if farmed strawberries are like other human artifacts, this still doesn’t seem to bring us any closer to rescuing Adams-authorized intrinsic valuing or value, and, even if it did, there are enough non-human-produced finite goods that my criticism remains important even if somehow it did not hold in the case of manufactured or farmed finite goods.
25
Note that Adams’s claim that all living things have some intrinsic value is distinct from the claim that all their properties are shared with God or that their properties or they themselves, beyond the bare fact of their existence, resemble God. Recall that he thinks that not everything resembles God and that in many respects many finite things do not resemble God.
26
27
Thompson, ‘Three Degrees of Natural Goodness’, p. 2.
28
Special session of the Religion and Critical Thought Workshop at Princeton University, 6 December 2007. In referring to the ‘Foot/Thompson project’, I do not mean to suggest that there are not important differences between their respective perspectives. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
29
Robert Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 49-53.
30
Along these lines, a reader has suggested to me that a given thing like a strawberry could be variously described so that it counts variously as a projectile, a life form, a snack, and so on with its excellence-making features varying accordingly. Thus we fix what counts as an X but, once fixed, not what counts as a good X for that is a matter of its being an X. While the fundamental issue is Adams’s sure rejection of this as merely another Neo-Aristotelian epicycle, even putting that aside, I suspect this is still no solution from his standpoint—for so long as something’s being constituted as what it is or under some description is a matter of our interests and purposes for it (so, eating, throwing, doing botany, and so on, as opposed, say, to our ‘discovering’ its identity), our fingerprints remain on the values so generated. They are not intrinsic in Adams’s sense for in the relevant sense they still depend—albeit at one remove—on us.
31
Even if God is an ‘ideal strawberry botanist’, for us to be able to value a strawberry intrinsically or access its intrinsic value, we would have to become such botanists too.
32
Susan Wolf, ‘A World of Goods’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64.2 (March 2002), pp. 467-74, at p. 472. Wolf’s objection has at least two components: (1) suspicion about the possibility of so many different excellent things resembling a single thing, albeit an infinite God; (2) doubt that certain finite things (e.g. good meals) could resemble God. Neither component, as we will see, touches on my objection.
33
Adams claims that Godlikeness makes things excellent and can play something like a causal role in bringing it about that we correctly identify them as such (something like the role H2O plays in constituting water) (p. 15). Accordingly, as he sees it, our ability to identify or appreciate excellence does not depend on our understanding that there is an instance of resemblance or in what, generally or particularly, it consists. The Godlikeness thesis is meant to explain why feature s is excellent in the sense of explaining what constitutes s as excellent. By invoking transcendence Adams does put one pole of the resemblance relation beyond our grasp: we are not sure how feature s resembles posited Divine feature S*, since all we know about S* is that it somehow resembles s and is a feature of God, who is maximally transcendent but whose character satisfies our pursuit of excellence and is concordant with our experience of excellence. The objection, pointing to the obscurity of S*, contends that the claim of resemblance between s and S* does nothing to explain excellence, to render it more intelligible. What Adams actually leaves unexplained, however, is what S* is—and, in that sense, how s and some s-possessing X resemble S* and God. But Adams does not think this is a problem: the bare fact that there is resemblance, not the details of what constitute it, explains excellence to the degree he intends—s is excellent because it resembles God. While we don’t know how s resembles God, as Adams sees it, it does not follow that he has failed to explain excellence in the way he intended. Imagine we could specify how something resembled God: so, Sarah is excellent because her wisdom resembles God’s wisdom. In terms of what constitutes excellence as excellence, here, excellence is not more fully explained than in those instances in which we cannot specify what feature in God the finite feature resembles: excellence is equally explained (or, perhaps, unexplained) as being constituted by resemblance. Even the concept of resemblance is not better explained in the one case than the other. What is better explained in this case is the material character of the resemblance. So, a relation of resemblance to something maximally transcendent renders something more intelligible to us, he thinks, when we are trying to understand what makes finite excellence excellent.
34
Recall, per the first objection/response pair, that strawberries are indeed among the finite goods he regards as (potentially) excellent.
35
While we may also prize the shape as beautiful or aesthetically appealing, the shape is still the feature in virtue of which it counts (and we prize it) as such. Illustrative of the distinction between beauty or aesthetic appeal, on the one hand, and strawberry-shape on the other, consider that a strawberry shaped like a perfect cube, while perhaps aesthetically appealing in its shape, would not thereby be an excellent strawberry. On this point, Adams is less clear than one might like (see especially FI, pp. 40-41 and the objections and responses below).
36
It is fascinating to hike with someone who is able to identify the unique features of trees and plants that distinguish them from other species. Such features seem obviously essential to any excellence that they might manifest (e.g. as bothersome as poison ivy is, how delightful to see its ‘thumb’ for the first time).
37
A reader has wondered whether Adams could distinguish between features that count as resemblances of God and those that realize resemblances, where something may not count as a resemblance but, together with other things and in a certain context, realize a resemblance. So, a pixel doesn’t count as a resemblance but helps realize one in a certain context. There’s some murkiness to the distinction, but putting that aside two fundamental problems remain: 1. This renders unclear (or perhaps violates) the identity between Godlikeness and excellence insofar as it raises major questions about the status of a given feature as excellent in relation to its various roles as alternately counting as and realizing resemblance; 2. Much more basically, it remains the case that things we regard as excellent in virtue of what they are (such as a particular color, a texture, a flavor, and so on) are not such as to resemble God. A counting/realizing distinction does nothing to change this. Thus, taking the case of a digital portrait, even if a given pixel alone, say, does not count as a resemblance but helps realize one, it remains that what it realizes may be something like a color or a shape and so on. What gets ‘realized’, in other words, and is regarded as excellent are still things that cannot possibly resemble God. What the distinction may track is the fact that some things that help realize excellence or resemblance (a pixel, say) do not count as excellent or a resemblance. But this is no help to the Godlikeness thesis since there is not perfect identity between what we prize as excellent, the taste of coffee, for instance (which may or may not be ‘realized’ by features like molecules that do not ‘count’ as excellent) and what could possibly resemble God. Among excellent features—realized or not—are things that cannot resemble God.
38
Obviously, these features do not exhaust the infant’s excellence nor are they its most important facets, but they are certainly among the things that we value as excellent and that contribute to our so valuing the infant.
39
See, for instance, the response to the first objection in the preceding section.
40
Adams notes at one point that ‘perhaps qualities do not themselves image God, but an excellent quality is one by virtue of which a substance images God’ (p. 40, emphasis mine). The point—which is out of step with what he says everywhere else about resemblance and Godlikeness—remains unexplained: If Godlikeness constitutes excellence, how can a quality which does not itself resemble God be excellent? How can a quality that does not itself resemble God be a feature by which a substance does? A property by which a thing resembles God, Adams insists, must be shared—but this requires that the property itself, not just the substance (granting that this undeveloped distinction amounts to something), resembles God. See also notes 13 and 17 above.
41
Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1972), pp. 440, 443.
42
The possibility of arguing here for some features resembling God more and some less and thereby distinguishing between the more and the less excellent is a dead end: if it is possible for Z to resemble God and one has no idea how, how can one begin in a principled way to distinguish between greater and lesser degrees of resemblance?
43
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter, ST) prima pars 5.1 (Editio Leonina). All references to ST are to the prima pars. Translations are my own. This strongly links reality and excellence—which is something that Adams likes about his own account (FI, p. 29).
44
ST 14.6; 15.2. To be clear, esse is not univocally predicated between creatures and God nor is it some substance shared between them—there is not a ‘great chain of esse’ and the unlikeness between creaturely and divine existence is far greater than any likeness. (Indeed, for Aquinas, we do not even know what esse is.) But there is a distant analogical relation between creaturely and divine existence.
45
ST 14.6 and ad 1; 15.2; 22.3; 47.1; 84.2 and ad 2.
46
ST 14.8 ad 3; 15.3; 44.3. The reference to Thompsonian life forms is apropos insofar as (1) Thompson and Foot are developing Aristotelian themes that Thomas himself appropriated and (2) epistemologically or in the ordo cognoscendi, for Thomas too, these exemplars are only ‘known’ through inference and extrapolation from this-worldly, quotidian interaction with creatures. For a recent defense of the Thompson/Foot perspective (and behind that Thomas) against objections rooted in claims about evolutionary biology, see Micah Lott, ‘Have Elephant Seals Refuted Aristotle: Nature, Function, and Moral Goodness’, Journal of Moral Philosophy, forthcoming, 2012.
47
‘Whatever perfection exists in whatever creature in whatever way, wholly preexists in and is possessed by and contained in God in a more excellent mode’ (ST 14.6). See also ST 4.6; 14.2, 11, and 14. Thomas does distinguish between different varieties of goodness; see, for instance, ST 5.6.
48
For Aquinas, see, e.g., ST 93.1 (esp. ad 2), 2 and 6. Of course, in Aquinas’s case, it is not necessarily clear that humans are best thought of as image-bearers primarily in respect to Christ’s humanity. But it is also not clear that such a path is closed to Thomists. For Barth, see, e.g., Church Dogmatics III.1 (New York: T&T Clark, 1958), pp. 202-204.
49
I am grateful to Jeffrey Stout, John Bowlin, Robert Adams, Eric Gregory, G. Scott Davis, Princeton University’s ‘Religion and Critical Thought Workshop’ and the two anonymous readers for their thoughtful and helpful responses to previous drafts of this article.