Abstract
Several recent arguments purport to show that omnipotence is incompatible with the possession of various necessary properties. These arguments appeal to one of two plausible but false principles about the nature of power: (1) that if it is metaphysically impossible for a being to actualize a state of affairs, then that being does not have the power to actualize that state of affairs, or (2) that if it is impossible given some contingent facts about the world that a being actualize a state of affairs, then that being does not have the power to actualize that state of affairs. I pose several problems for both principles, thereby undermining the plausibility of these arguments. I then consider the implications of rejecting these principles for related principles in the free will debate. These implications suggest important differences between having the power to bring about a state of affairs, having a choice about whether it obtains, and being able to bring it about.
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Notes
(Morriston 2001): “…[O]ne necessary condition of P’s having the power to do A at t is that it is possible that P does A at t. In the language of possible worlds, there must be at least one possible world in which P does A at t.” (144).
(Metcalf 2004): “If S is capable of T, then there is a possible world in which S performs T.” (291).
As far as I know, the first mention of this possibility in a discussion of omnipotence is in Conee (1991).
(PP) leads to similarly counterintuitive results when comparing the powers of two beings. Imagine two beings that are equal in power, except for their ability to actualize a particular state of affairs S. While one being is necessarily indifferent to whether S obtains, and thus in no world actualizes S, the other necessarily lacks the power to actualize S. It seems clear that the former being may have the power to actualize S, while the latter certainly does not, but (PP) denies this possibility.
Wielenberg (2000) gives several examples of this, though not all are problems for (PP). Many of his examples are only problems for (PP′), considered below.
An anonymous referee has suggested that (PP) may fare better if the variable ‘A’ is restricted to accept only contingent states of affairs. If Ted does not actualize A in any possible world, but other people do, it might seem especially odd to say that Ted has the power to actualize A. After all, A can be brought about, but it is impossible for Ted to bring A about. Similar cases can be generated using contingent states of affairs, however. Suppose that a necessary omnipotent being necessarily wants to prevent Ted (and only Ted) from killing any ordinary, four-legged deer. So, in any possible world in which Ted attempts to kill a deer, this being intervenes and thwarts him. Others kill many deer in many possible worlds, but Ted does not. Does Ted still have the power to kill a deer? It seems to me that he does, since if he did not, the omnipotent being would not need to intervene to prevent him from doing so.
There is further support for this conclusion about Ted if we think of the powers of persons as just a certain sort of disposition. Jenkins and Nolan (2012) have argued convincingly that there are some non-trivially true sentences of the form ‘X is disposed to φ in C’ where C is some metaphysically impossible condition, such as ‘Jane is disposed to be surprised when there is a detectable round square object in front of her’. If powers are just dispositions, then Ted’s case is not unlike Jane’s. He is disposed to succeed in killing a three-and-four-legged deer upon attempting it, for example, and if this sort of disposition is all a power is, then Ted has the power to kill a three-and-four-legged deer.
It is reasonable to wonder whether any three beings can possibly be related to each other in the way that A, B, and C are described to be. Here is a seemingly possible story about how A, B, and C could satisfy these relations: suppose that A and C are necessarily descended from B, but B necessarily has only one offspring in any world. B would thus exist at every possible world where either A or C exist, but A and C would co-exist at no possible worlds.
To make it even clearer that B has the power to overpower C in w1, we can add to the case that C is more powerful in w2 than in any other world.
Two concerns are worth noting here. First, one might doubt that ‘has the power to overpower’ is strictly transitive. Suppose A has more overall power than B, and C more overall power than either A or B, but B has the power to exploit some peculiar weakness of C’s. Then we might think that A has the power to overpower B, and B the power to overpower C, but A does not have the power to overpower C. However, this case relies on misinterpreting ‘overpower’. I may be able to win an arm-wrestling contest by poking my opponent in the eye, but I will not thereby have overpowered him. Similarly, if B overcomes C by any method other than exerting greater overall power, then B will not have overpowered C. With this in mind, it remains plausible that the relation is transitive. A second concern is that ‘has the power to overpower C’ is ambiguous between possessing the abstract object or property which is the power to overpower C and having sufficient power to overpower C. So, one might claim that A has the right amount of power, but not the specific power in question. It seems plausible to me, however, that having sufficient power to do something entails having the specific power to do it, as it is hard to see what else could be required.
It would be enough for some, of course. There really are no possible worlds in which a necessarily existent being ceases to exist.
The idea that a morally perfect being would never allow a particular evil, either because no subsequent good could be good enough and no avoided evil bad enough to justify it, or because the moral status of permitting an evil is not always determined by its consequences, is not without merit. However, on the assumption that the consequences of an action matter somewhat in determining its moral status, there will be some evils that a morally perfect being will not actualize because of their bad (contingent) consequences.
The addition of the variable ‘S’ makes (PP′) schematic for a much wider variety of principles than (PP), as there is disagreement about exactly which contingent facts are relevant to a being’s power at a time. Candidates include all facts included in w’s initial segment (Wierenga 1983), and all facts included in w’s history as well as all counterfactuals of freedom which are true in w (Flint and Freddoso 1983). In order to make the case that God does not have the power in the actual world to bring about some particular evil, we would likely also need to include some contingent facts about the future.
Morriston explicitly acknowledges this feature of his incompatibility argument: “If a person P possesses this two-way power with regard to an act A at a time t, then as things are at t, it must be possible for P to exercise this power by doing, or by refraining from doing, A at t.” (144, original emphasis).
Note that the decrease in power need not be an overall decrease in power. x’s power may decrease in some respects and increase in many others, resulting in greater overall power at t2. (DP) requires only that there be some gross decrease in x’s power.
It does not give an infallible reason, however. It may be, for example, that at the nearest worlds where God attempts to actualize A, he is assisted by some other being and succeeds, despite not having the power on his own. Considerations of this sort give good reason to reject simple counterfactual accounts of power, such as Morriston’s (CP): “A person P has the power to actualize a state of affairs S = df if P were to choose to actualize S, she would succeed in actualizing S.” (154).
The ‘nearness’ appealed to here is intended to be roughly the same as the nearness of worlds used in evaluating counterfactuals, meaning that it has something to do with overall similarity of worlds in the relevant respects. How exactly this similarity should be calculated is a complex issue, especially when impossible worlds are among those being evaluated. I rely here only on intuitive judgments of overall similarity for evaluating nearness.
The argument, very roughly, is that, given Determinism, it is a necessary truth that the distant past and the laws of nature materially imply any true proposition about the future. So, by α, no one has the power/choice/ability to make it true or false that the laws of nature materially imply any true proposition about the present. Since no one has the power/choice/ability to change the past or the laws of nature, by two applications of β, no one has the power/choice/ability to make any propositions about the future true or false. For extended discussion see van Inwagen (1983).
Thanks to Andrew M Bailey for suggesting to me the connection between (PP) and rule α.
Note that this requires us to assume that the dull master does not have the (presumably intellectual) power to wish for U, and that no one else has the power to make him wish for U.
Another interesting consequence of this case is that a person may have the power to actualize a state of affairs without thereby having the power to actualize a state of affairs that “includes” it. The genie seems to have the power to actualize U, but does not have the power to actualize ‘the genie actualizes U against its master’s wishes’. While the genie has what it takes to actualize U, it does not have what it takes to disobey its master.
Spencer (manuscript) argues for reasons different from those discussed here that at least some sentences of the form ‘S is able to φ’ are true even when it is metaphysically impossible for S to φ. If this is right, then α is invalid when ‘Np’ is read as (A).
Whether any of these kinds of predetermination is compatible with having a choice in the first place is another question. The point is that they all seem compatible with having the power to perform other actions.
References
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the participants in sessions at the 2011 Pacific APA and the 2015 Young Philosophers Lecture Series, in particular Andrew M Bailey and Andrew Cullison, for suggestions that improved this paper. I am especially grateful to Earl Conee and Ed Wierenga for helpful comments on earlier drafts.
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Carey, B. The Power to Do the Impossible. Topoi 36, 623–630 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9382-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9382-3