Two Flawed Frameworks for Divine Action

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to downgrade the plausibility of the two standard frameworks for understanding divine action: the morality framework and the love framework. The morality framework holds that God necessarily acts in accordance with a set of universal moral standards. The love framework holds that God necessarily exhibits to their maximum the desires constitutive of love. Against the morality framework, there is very strong basis to think that God does not necessarily have reasons to adhere to the norms of morality that bind us, and only if God were to have such reasons could such norms necessarily apply to God. Against the love framework, the view of God as necessarily maximally loving is at odds with the norms for perfection in love, relies on a false view about the way that our desires give us reasons, and founders when confronted with the difficulty of specifying an intrinsic maximum for being loving.