Abstract
It is argued that God cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The first premise is that if someone cannot be benefited, then they cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The second premise is that God cannot be benefited. Concerning the first premise, it is argued that a necessary component of prepositional gratitude is the desire to benefit one’s benefactor. Then it is argued that such a desire is fitting only if one’s benefactor can in fact be benefited. Concerning the second premise, it is noted that classical theism widely attributes blessedness to God. It is argued that if God is blessed then God necessarily has as much well-being as it is possible for God to have, and hence God cannot be benefited. Also noted are some ways in which God’s blessedness is compatible with less orthodox ideas about God’s passibility. The argument is then defended against eight objections.
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Notes
There remains much more to say against prepositional gratitude to the person of the Son—for instance, the “human nature in Christ is more blessed than all other creatures” (Aquinas 1947, ST III 58.3 co.) existing as it does outside our temporal sequence in one of the persons of the Godhead, and further even regarding the time of the Incarnation there are questions about what things affected the well-being of the Son’s human nature (Aquinas 2009, sec. 232).
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Acknowledgements
For their conversation on this topic, thanks to Nicholas Allmaier, Nathan Biebel, Bruce Brower, Eric Brown, Drew Chastain, Daniel Dzah, Trevor Griffith, Jesse Hill, Corey Horn, Eli Landau, Matti Mortimore, Payten Parfait, Nicholas Sars, David Shoemaker, Daniel Tigard, Alyssa Walker, Geoffrey Weiss. Thanks to Beau Branson for his correspondence concerning Chalcedonian Christian views of the Son. Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the 2020 New Mexico-Texas Philosophical Society Meeting.
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Hunt, M.W. Fitting prepositional gratitude to god is metaphysically impossible. Int J Philos Relig 89, 153–170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-020-09772-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-020-09772-w