Divine goodness is not merely that God is good but that God cannot be otherwise: benevolent, loving, incapable of evil. The key observation is grammatical: words like "benevolently" or "justly" describe a *way of acting*, so they need an act to attach to, and acting needs time, a recipient, and an agent. A being defined without those cannot act in the relevant sense, and so cannot be good or bad in the sense the praise intends.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine goodness assembles several reinforcing claims. God is *summum bonum*: the highest good, the good itself rather than a good among goods (Augustine, *De Trinitate* VIII.3; Aquinas, *ST* I.6.2; Anselm, *Monologion* 1–4). God is *bonitas ipsa*, goodness itself, identical with the divine nature on classical simplicity (*ST* I.6.3). God wills the good of creation: *bonum diffusivum sui*, the good is self-diffusive, and God's creative act is the overflow of divine goodness toward what is not God (Pseudo-Dionysius, *Divine Names* IV; Aquinas, *ST* I.19; *ST* I.44.4). God is essentially benevolent toward creation: *amor benevolentiae*, the love of willing-good-toward Aquinas, *ST* I.20; (Stump, Eleonore, 2010). God is impeccable: incapable of sinning, of doing moral evil *ST* I.25.3 ad 2; (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Timothy Pawl, 2016) on Christological impeccability. The same cluster includes divine justice (*ST* I.21; Anselm, *Cur Deus Homo* I.12), divine mercy (*ST* I.21.3; the mercy–justice relation is worked at [§6.9.2](<6.9.2 Righteousness.md>), Q1), and divine love construed as more than benevolence: *amor amicitiae*, friendship-love Aquinas, *ST* I.20.2; (Stump, Eleonore, 2010) develops the contemporary form. The Islamic tradition develops parallel claims: *al-Rahman* and *al-Rahim* (the Compassionate and the Merciful) among the divine names (Q1:1, 1:3); God's mercy as *wajib* (obligatory) in the Mu'tazilite reading, as gracious-overflow in the Ash'arite (Richard M. Frank, 1992). The doctrine, at its most ambitious, names a being whose moral character is essential to its being (whose goodness is not a property had alongside other properties but constitutive of what the being is) and whose every act toward creation is therefore necessarily good.

*What cannot be answered.* Seven questions catch the doctrine of divine goodness short of what its moral predicates, pared down to the form structural reasoning can handle, are able to answer. What runs beneath them is grammatical before it is metaphysical. *Benevolent*, *just*, *merciful*, *loving*, *patient*, *faithful*, *gracious* (the moral predicates the tradition applies to God) are *manner-of-acting* predicates. They are adverbial in form, attached to a verb: to act *benevolently*, to act *justly*, to act *mercifully*. Adverbial predicates require the verb. The conditions of acting are what makes the verb available for the adverb to modify: succession from not-acting to acting (T), a target distinct from the actor (S), a substantive agent who acts (Φ). The doctrine has defined the being whose actions the predicates describe as without T, S, or Φ. The seven pressures run at the level of what such a being can bear in the way of moral predication at all. A methodological note is owed before they begin. Stump's narrative theodicy (*Wandering in Darkness* (Stump, Eleonore, 2010)) presses that abstract goodness-talk misses what the doctrine of divine goodness is for; the argument here does not compete with that project but runs prior to it. The claim is not that the classical God's goodness fails to console but that the moral predicates cannot attach to a being stripped of T, S, and Φ at all, and a manner-of-acting predicate needs an acting before any narrative about the acting can begin. The preclusion therefore holds however the narrative theodicy fares.

**Q1.** *How does God do good, if doing means acting in time upon something other than oneself?* Before the question can be answered, the question of what *do* means for the being the doctrine names has to be settled. To do is to act, and to act is to transition from a state in which the action does not obtain to one in which it does (T), to bear on something distinct from oneself (S), through a substantive being that performs the action (Φ). [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) works the doing-question for the predicate *power*; the present pressure returns the worked result. The Thomistic resolution distinguishes God's act from creaturely acts and applies the verb *do* analogically rather than univocally Aquinas, *ST* I.45; (David B. Burrell, 1986). The analogical reply preserves the verbal predicate by registering that what *do* names in God is not what *do* names in creatures. What it does not preserve is the contentful relation between the doing and any manner-of-doing descriptor. If *do* applies analogically rather than univocally, then *do well* and *do badly* apply analogically rather than univocally, and the contrast that gives the manner-of-acting predicates their content has been displaced by the analogical move. The question *Can God do good things?* dissolves into the question *What does 'do' mean for God?*, and the analogical answer to the second leaves the first without a univocal sense to apply. The moral predicates depend on the doing-predicate's univocity for their differential content; the doctrine's analogical resolution preserves the predicate's name at the cost of the contrast that makes the predicate's modification informative.

**Q2.** *How is one timeless act good, if it sustains the world's evil no less than its good?* The classical doctrine holds God as *actus purus*: pure act, without potency, without unrealized capacity (*ST* I.3.1–2; I.9.1). The most thoroughgoing reading takes God's act as one eternal, all-encompassing, all-sustaining act in which the distinction between creating, conserving, and concurring collapses into a single divine doing (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 1991). The concern here is what this does to moral differentiation. Goodness, in the contentful sense the doctrine wants, requires the differential preference of one outcome over an alternative: an act is benevolent because it prefers the good of its target over the not-good. Pure act, taken strictly, has no alternatives to prefer among, since alternatives are differentiations within the modal field the doctrine has placed beyond the divine being ([§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>)). The pressure sharpens at the consequence side. One eternal act that sustains all things sustains them indiscriminately; what is sustained includes what the doctrine elsewhere calls evil: the suffering of creatures, the disorder of the natural world, the moral failures of finite agents. If divine sustaining is one pure act, the same act sustains the good things and the bad things, and the doctrine has no resource for differentiating the act's relation to the good consequences from its relation to the bad. The classical reply distinguishes God's permitting evil from God's directly willing evil Aquinas, *ST* I.19.9; (Eleonore Stump, 1985); (Stump, Eleonore, 2010) on the theodicy literature. The reply preserves God from authorship of evil at the cost of partitioning the single pure act into a willing-part (the good) and a permitting-part (the evil). Strict simplicity disallows the partition; loose simplicity surrenders the unity of the act on which the impeccability claim rested. The doctrine wants pure-act unity *and* moral differentiation *and* impeccability simultaneously, and these are three commitments joined only by the term *one act*. The ordinary-morality form of this pressure — that our duty to intervene in preventable suffering does not lapse when the sufferer's greater good is invoked — is run against divine non-intervention at [§6.9.2](<6.9.2 Righteousness.md>) (Q7).

**Q3.** *How can a being do every possible thing, yet not the evil that creatures plainly can?* The modest apologetic position takes omnipotence to mean *can do all possible things* and treats *cannot do evil* as a separate impeccability claim. The two commitments conflict directly. Doing evil is possible — humans do evil constantly, so the possibility is empirically demonstrated and modally uncontroversial. If God can do all possible things, God can do evil. The classical replies fork.

The privation-of-evil reply (Augustine, *Enchiridion* III–IV; Aquinas, *De Malo* I) holds that evil is not a positive capacity but a defect of right action, and God's incapacity for evil is the absence of a defect rather than the absence of a capacity. The reply faces three independent pressures, each at a different theoretical level, and each forcing a concession the doctrine elsewhere refuses.

*The modal-priority pressure.* The privation account, examined modally, admits subset structure on the possibility-field. If doing-evil is a defect-region of the modal field that God's nature excludes, the field has good-regions and defect-regions, and the doctrine's being is restricted to the good-region. The pressure sharpens via the only contingent act the doctrine attributes to God: creation. If God can only do possible things and God creates the universe, then universe-creation is possible, and universe-creation's being possible is prior to its happening, since the possible must be in place for the doing of the possible to be done. The possibility-space pre-exists the universe whose creation it permits. Possibility is not what the universe brings about; possibility is what creation-of-the-universe presupposes. The [§4.1.10](<4.1.10 The Source of Possibility.md>) result is reached through Commitment B alone, without the stronger source-of-possibility argument [§5.1.8](<5.1.8 Modal-Grounding Argument.md>) contests. The proper-subset claim follows from the empirical anchor. Humans actually do evil (destruction, deceit, cruelty, betrayal) and what humans actually do is, by minimal modal principle, possible. If God cannot do evil and humans can, the set of possible things God can do is a *proper subset* of the set of possible things. Contingent beings populate regions of the possibility-space the doctrine's God cannot enter. The doctrine has conceded that possibility is *both* prior to creation *and* more inclusive than divine action, and the conjunction is what externality of the modal field looks like when read at full strength.

*The doctrinal-interlock pressure.* The privation account, examined against other classical attributes, contradicts the conjunction of simplicity and omnipresence. The doctrine holds (i) God is goodness itself: *bonitas ipsa*, identical with the divine nature on simplicity (*ST* I.6.3); (ii) evil is the privation of due-good (the present reply); (iii) God is omnipresent: present whole in every place (*ST* I.8). From (i) and (ii): evil is the privation of God-himself, since God is goodness. Wherever there is evil there is an absence of God. From (iii): God is not absent anywhere. Conjunction: there is no privation of God anywhere, hence no evil anywhere. But evil exists. The doctrine has to give up one of the three. Giving up (i) loses simplicity in its strong sense: [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>) has already inverted that, and the give-up here would be a doctrinal retreat the [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>) inversion forecloses. Giving up (ii) abandons the privation theory itself and forces a positive account of evil whose either arm (evil is being God sustains, or evil is being God does not sustain) is exactly the externality concession the modal-priority pressure already extracted. Giving up (iii) qualifies omnipresence by stratifying presence into modes (present-by-essence, present-by-power, present-by-grace, on the Thomistic distinction) and admits there are dimensions of divine presence that fail somewhere, which is what omnipresence-in-the-strong-sense denies. [§6.8.1](<6.8.1 Presence.md>) develops the inversion of omnipresence at the structural level; the present pressure works the converse direction, using omnipresence-as-asserted-by-the-doctrine to destroy the privation defense the doctrine elsewhere needs.

*The internal-structural pressure.* The privation account, examined as a representation of the moral domain, is structurally binary: it divides acts into *good* (positive instantiation of due-being) and *not-good* (privation, deficiency, the absence of due-being read as evil). The moral domain, as it actually shows up, is at least ternary. There is *maintenance*: acts that positively contribute to other subjects' subsistence-conditions (the contentful good). There is *non-engagement*: acts that bear on no other subject's subsistence-conditions, neither contributing nor violating (the vast bulk of human action, and the morally neutral region). There is *violation*: acts that positively interfere with other subjects' subsistence-conditions (the contentful evil, structurally distinct from neutral non-engagement). The privation account can represent maintenance and the absence of maintenance, but cannot distinguish non-engagement from violation. Both look like *not-(maintenance)* on the binary scheme. The forks the account takes to recover the distinction each cost a load-bearing commitment.

*Fork A.* Treat all *not-(maintenance)* as evil. Then every act that fails to maintain another subject's subsistence is evil, most of life becomes evil, and the absurdity is one the doctrine elsewhere refuses. *Fork B.* Appeal to *due-good* — privation is the absence of *due-good*, where some goods are due and others are not. The fork relocates the explanatory work to the *due* structure, but the *due* structure is a positive moral fact (it says *X is owed to Y in conditions Z*) and the privation theory was supposed to make evil parasitic on good without admitting positive moral facts beyond goodness. The reduction has failed. *Fork C.* Distinguish non-engagement from violation by appealing to *positive intent* or *positive willing-toward-harm*. This is the most direct contradiction. The theory's purpose was to deny that evil has positive ontological status; distinguishing violation from neutrality by *the positive presence of harm-directed willing* concedes exactly the positive ontological status the theory was built to refuse. The internal-structural pressure compounds with a related relocation. Privation theory locates evil in the *victim's deficiency* rather than in the *agent's positive act and intent*. The moral phenomenology runs the other way: moral attribution puts evil in the agent's willing-toward-violation, with the victim's resulting deficiency as the consequence rather than the evil. Privation theory either accepts the inversion (against the phenomenology) or rejects it (and loses its theoretical character).

The three pressures converge. The privation account admits modal externality with subset structure (modal-priority pressure), contradicts simplicity-plus-omnipresence (doctrinal-interlock pressure), and cannot represent the categorical distinction between non-engagement and violation without surrendering its own ontological commitment (internal-structural pressure). Each pressure is independent (works at a different theoretical level, uses different doctrinal commitments, exposes a different structural feature of the reply) and each forces a concession the doctrine elsewhere refuses.

The essentially-good reply (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Plantinga, A., 1980) on God's nature holds that *possible-for-God* is indexed to God's nature, so what is possible-for-creatures-but-not-for-God is not really possible-for-God despite being possible-simpliciter. The fork sharpens. Either *possible-for-God* differs from *possible-simpliciter* (in which case the modal field has nature-relative subsets and the being occupies the subset compatible with the being's nature: the externality concession returns with a region-structure on the field, in the vocabulary of nature-indexed modality rather than defect-region modality, but with the same structural content), or *possible-for-God* coincides with *possible-simpliciter* (in which case God can do evil and impeccability fails). Each escape preserves a commitment at the cost of concession the doctrine elsewhere refuses. Swinburne's theistic personalism *The Coherence of Theism*, -(Richard Swinburne, 1977), ch. 11 takes a different line to impeccability than either the privation or the essentially-good account. On Swinburne's analysis, divine goodness is a simple, non-relational property of the divine person's nature: not a complex formed from a privation of evil, nor a restricted modal profile over the possibility-space, but a basic feature of a perfectly rational personal agent, analogous to the way an ideally rational agent's character is simply good without that goodness requiring a contrastive range of evil alternatives. The concern for Swinburne's simple-property line is that a *basic property* of a person that explains why the person acts well without ranging over alternatives is either a disposition (a structure of tendencies to act certain ways in certain situations, which imports the directed-transition structure T, S, and Φ supply) or a categorical property with no dispositional content (in which case it is unclear how it generates the moral differentiation the believer's confession requires). Swinburne's reply is that personal simplicity (the absence of physical constraints on the will) is what makes the property basic rather than compositional; the structural concern is whether personal simplicity, on the chapter's analysis, escapes the conditions its exercise of will presupposes.

**Q4.** *Whom does God will good toward, if the one willed exists only by being willed?* Benevolence, in the classical formulation, is *amor benevolentiae*: the love of willing-good-toward (*ST* I.20). To will *toward* requires a target distinct from the willer; willing-toward-nothing-distinct is not willing-toward at all. The doctrine places God as the only being whose existence is necessary in itself; creatures are dependent products of divine willing rather than antecedently distinct beings the divine will reaches toward *ST* I.44; (Pruss, A. R., 2011). The concern here is the order of dependence. If the target of divine willing-toward is itself a product of divine willing, then *willing-toward* names a relation whose target the willing constitutes, and the *toward* is doing different work from what the predicate ordinarily picks out. In the creaturely case the willer encounters an antecedently distinct target and bears willing-toward it. In the divine case the willer constitutes the target in the willing, and the toward-relation is internal to the willing-act rather than reaching across an interval to something antecedently other. The reply that divine love is more than the willing-toward of *amor benevolentiae* (that it is *amor amicitiae*, friendship-love *ST* I.20.2; (Stump, Eleonore, 2010)) does not relieve the pressure. Friendship-love presupposes two distinct loci who bear the friendship; the structural concern at *amor benevolentiae* is the one at *amor amicitiae* in stronger form, since friendship has tighter relational requirements than mere willing-toward. Hartshorne's dual-transcendence account presses here from the concrete side: the concrete pole's love is *amor benevolentiae* and, in its fuller form, *amor amicitiae* borne toward creatures the divine encounters as antecedently distinct rather than constitutes in the willing: genuinely responsive love, growing with what the world contributes *The Divine Relativity*, -(Charles Hartshorne, 1948). The dipolar engine offers exactly the antecedently-distinct target Q4 finds the classical willing-toward to lack; the concern is that the offer concedes the structure it was meant to save. A willing that reaches across an interval to a distinct creaturely target (S), borne by a substantive concrete actuality (Φ) genuinely moved by what it encounters (T), is the manner-of-acting relation the chapter's grammar requires, and a concrete pole bearing it instantiates the structural conditions of a subject among subjects rather than standing beyond them. The engine is pressed in full at Q6, and the pole-relation routed to [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>).

**Q5.** *How is God just or merciful, if there is no act for the justice or mercy to shape?* The seven classical moral predicates (*benevolent*, *just*, *merciful*, *loving*, *patient*, *faithful*, *gracious*) are grammatically adverbial. Each modifies a verb: to act *justly*, to deal *mercifully*, to love *faithfully*, to bear *patiently*. The adverb requires the verb; without the verb there is no act for the manner to characterize. The classical doctrine treats these predicates as features of the divine being rather than as modifiers of divine action: *God is benevolent* as a statement about what God is, not about how God acts Aquinas, *ST* I.20–21; (Stump, Eleonore, 2010). The reframing preserves the predicate by relocating it from adverbial to substantive position. The concern here is what the relocation costs. If *benevolent* names a feature of the divine being independent of any acting, the predicate has been emptied of the contrast that makes it informative — to be benevolent rather than malevolent, indifferent, or cruel requires acts whose manner the predicate characterizes, and there is no manner-of-acting where there is no acting. The classical reply that divine manner-of-acting predicates apply *eminenter* (in a higher mode than the creaturely, Aquinas, *ST* I.13.5) is the analogical move Q1 already engages. The grammatical pressure returns: the *eminent* mode of a manner-of-acting predicate is still a manner-of-acting predicate, and the conditions of acting are still required for the predicate to bear content.

**Q6.** *What does calling God good rule out, if God could not have been otherwise?* Goodness, on the classical reading, is what God is: *bonitas ipsa*, goodness itself, identical with the divine nature on simplicity (*ST* I.6.3). The concern here is what *good* picks out absent the contrastive structure of alternative goods. Good is good-rather-than-evil and good-rather-than-not-good and good-of-this-kind-rather-than-good-of-that-kind. Without alternatives the predicate can range over, *good* loses the contrast that gives it differential content. The classical reply on simplicity grants the result and reframes: God *is* the standard against which goods are measured, not a being who instantiates the standard among other instantiations (Stump, Eleonore, 2010); (Robert Merrihew Adams, 1999) on the divine command tradition. The reframing relocates the predicate to the function of standard-bearing rather than of attribute-instantiation. The concern returns at the relocation. A standard against which alternatives are measured is a structure that presupposes the range of alternatives the measurement applies to, and a being identical with the standard has been identified with that range-relative structure rather than placed outside it. The necessity-cannot-transfer-to-a-being result of [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) applies here in moral form: the modal status of being the standard belongs to the range within which standardhood is exercised, not to a being beyond that range. The relocation has a consequence for the speech act the predicate performs. If *good* is identified with the divine being rather than instantiated by it, then *God is good* no longer ascribes a property the being could fail to have; it reports that the being is identical with itself. The sentence keeps the surface grammar of a moral predication — subject, copula, evaluative predicate — while its content collapses into the tautology *God is God*, or, where goodness is read through the commands the being issues, *God commands what God commands*. What is left for the sentence to do, once its descriptive content is spent, is not to evaluate but to avow: *God is good* functions as a declaration of allegiance to the being so named, a loyalty-claim in the costume of a moral claim. The shift is detectable by a test the moral predicate ordinarily passes and this one cannot: that one can specify, in advance and independently, what would count against it. *This act is good* is a moral claim when there is a manner-of-acting it could have failed to exhibit; *God is good*, on the standard-bearing reading, admits no such failure-condition, because the standard cannot diverge from itself. A predicate that cannot in principle be withheld is not being applied but pledged. The *Euthyphro dilemma* (is an act good because God commands it, or commanded because it is already good?) marks the same fork from the command side; the present point is its predication-side form: what the affirmation *is doing* once goodness has been identified with its own measure. Adams's resemblance account (Robert Merrihew Adams, 1999) is the reply built precisely to keep *God is good* contentful without a contrastive range, and it must be met rather than passed over. On Adams's theistic Platonism, *good* names resemblance to God, the transcendent Good in which finite goods participate, so that *God is good* is not the tautology *God is God* but the substantive claim that God is the paradigm the resemblance-relation is fixed to: a claim with content, on Adams's telling, because the respects in which finite things count as resembling are drawn from our independent grasp of the goods we already recognize. The reply turns on what fixes those respects, and the fork is the section's. Either the resemblance-base is the determinate features our paradigm goods actually exhibit — kindness shown, debts rendered, mercy borne — in which case the respects are manner-of-acting features, and a paradigm that exemplifies them is a being that acts well: one that does good, borne by a substantive agent (Φ) toward a distinct recipient (S) across the vector from not-done to done (T), which is a subject acting within Nature rather than a being beyond it. Or the resemblance-base is left formal — resemblance to God in whatever respects the divine goodness consists in, respects not specifiable in advance from the finite side — in which case *resembles God* supplies no failure-condition after all: nothing determinate is fixed that a candidate good could be found to match or fail to match, and the contentful predication the account promised slides back into the avowal the tautology charge identified. The resemblance account does not escape the fork between manner-of-acting content and empty self-identity; it restates the fork in the idiom of participation. Swinburne's cumulative-case framework *The Existence of God*, -(Richard Swinburne, 1979); -(Richard Swinburne, 2004) challenges Q6's modal analysis directly. On Swinburne's account, divine goodness need not be grounded in a contrastive range; it is a probability-raiser for theism: the fact that God is perfectly good makes the existence of a morally ordered universe more probable than it would be on any naturalistic hypothesis, and the goodness of the God who explains the universe is assessed by its explanatory power rather than against a contrastive range of bad-alternatives. The concern for the Swinburnian reframing is whether the probability-raising relation is itself a structural relation: for the hypothesis *God is perfectly good* to make the existence of a morally ordered universe more probable than its rival, the hypothesis must have content (it must specify what a good God would produce) and specifying what a good God would produce requires ranging over the alternatives the modal field provides, which is the contrastive range Q6 identified as the condition of the predicate's informativeness. Hartshorne's dual-transcendence engine challenges Q6's analysis at its root, denying that divine goodness must be grounded in the way the Anselmian engine grounds it. Where the classical engine generates perfection as *actus purus* (the good a being *is*, complete and unsurpassable), dual transcendence redefines perfection as surpassing all others while remaining surpassable only by oneself *Man's Vision of God*, -(Charles Hartshorne, 1941); *Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes*, -(Hartshorne, Charles, 1984): the abstract pole is the invariant standard of value, and the concrete pole is good by *responsively* willing the richest integration of what the world has actually contributed, surpassing every other and surpassable only by the divine self at a later, fuller moment. The engine is built precisely to restore the failure-condition the standard-bearing reading loses: the concrete pole *could* love less responsively than it does, and is good rather than merely self-identical because it does not. The concern is that the restoration concedes the chapter's result in the idiom of process. A goodness that ranges over alternatives, prefers the richer integration to the poorer, and grows in responsive love is a manner of acting borne by a substantive concrete actuality (Φ), reaching toward antecedently distinct creaturely targets (S), across the temporal vector from not-yet-responded to responded (T); the concrete pole is good in exactly the sense the manner-of-acting grammar requires, and in being so instantiates the structural conditions of a subject acting on subjects, not those of a being beyond them. The abstract pole, meanwhile, inherits Q6's standard-bearing verdict unchanged: an invariant standard of value presupposes the range of alternatives the measurement applies to, and the necessity-cannot-transfer-to-a-being result of [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) holds here in moral form; the modal status of being the standard belongs to the range within which standardhood is exercised, not to an abstract pole that bears no responsive acting and is therefore no candidate for a manner-of-acting predicate at all. Binding the unsurpassable standard to the responsive lover into one good God is the pole-relation [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) examines: a directed crossing that obtains only within T, S, and Φ. The dual-transcendence engine does not relocate divine goodness beyond Nature; it describes, in the idiom of process, what goodness is when subjects responsively maintain one another within Nature.

**Q7.** *How is God incapable of evil, if evil is never a possibility for God to begin with?* Impeccability is the doctrine that God cannot sin *ST* I.25.3 ad 2; (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Timothy Pawl, 2016). The concern here follows from Q3's fork. If impeccability means *God's nature excludes the evil-region of the modal field*, then the modal field has structure that includes evil as a region, and the doctrine has admitted modal externality with extra structure (Q3 fork option 1). If impeccability means *evil is not possible-for-God in the sense relevant to omnipotence*, then either evil is not really possible (which is empirically false, since humans do evil constantly) or *possible-for-God* is distinct from *possible-simpliciter*, which is the same fork in different vocabulary. Beyond Q3's structural concession, impeccability faces an internal-coherence problem at the conditions of the predicate. To be incapable of evil is to be in a structured relation to evil — namely, the relation of incapacity. The relation requires that evil be a candidate the incapacity-relation could in principle hold of; a being to whom evil is in no sense a candidate is not *incapable* of evil but simply *outside the range within which evil is a candidate*. Impeccability either names the structured relation of nature-restricted incapacity (admitting the externality of the modal field's evil-region) or names the absence of the range within which evil could be a candidate (in which case the being is amoral rather than impeccable, and the doctrine has changed register without admitting the change).

*What is required.* The seven pressures, read together, lay bare what the moral predicates the tradition applies to God commit to. *Benevolent*, *just*, *merciful*, *loving*: these are manner-of-acting predicates. They are adverbial in grammar and adverbial in content. They require an acting they modify, and an acting requires the conditions of action: a substantive being who acts (Φ), a target distinct from the actor (S), a temporal direction from not-acting to acting (T). The doctrine of God-as-without-the-structural-conditions has removed precisely what the moral predicates' grammar requires for their content. The reframings that preserve the predicates' names (relocating them from adverbial to substantive position, applying them analogically, indexing their possibility to divine nature, identifying the being with the standard against which alternatives are measured) preserve the verbal predicates at the cost of the structure their content runs on. What goodness picks out, properly read, is the modal status of properly-maintained-mutual-subsistence: the structural feature of subjects acting on subjects to keep each other in being under the symmetry-of-extraction commitment (the Modal Convergence Theorem; the Subsistence definition; Chapter 9 develops the political form). Goodness is what Nature does when subsistence runs at all. The moral predicates apply to the structural feature of subject-on-subject action, not to a being from which the conditions of acting have been stripped.

*What is inverted.* The English *benevolent* renders the Latin *bene volens*: *well-willing*. The compound names a manner of willing (*bene*, well) plus the act of willing (*volens*, the present participle of *velle*, to will). Set back into the structure that hosts it, *benevolent* is doubly conditioned: *bene* requires the contrastive range of good-rather-than-not-good for the manner to be informative, and *volens* requires the substantive willer (Φ), the target distinct from the willer (S), and the temporal vector from not-willing to willing (T) for the act to be performed. The compound predicate that names the maximum of moral character in classical theism is etymologically a compressed description of T, S, and Φ acting under the symmetry-of-extraction commitment. The Greek parallel runs the same way: *agathos* (good) in its Homeric sense names the quality of an agent in action; *kalon kagathon* names the unity of fine action and good action; the noun *aretē* names the excellence-in-doing of which the moral predicates are differential modes. The vocabulary of moral character, in both linguistic traditions the doctrine draws on, is built from the conditions of action. The classical predicate has been pointing, across its formulations, at the structural feature of subjects acting on subjects to keep each other in being while the doctrine has located that feature in a being from which the conditions that constitute it have been removed. Nature has the moral status; the being beyond Nature is not a candidate for it. The structural result is this: the doctrine's God is not malevolent, not benevolent, not indifferent in any positive sense; the being is outside the range in which moral predicates have purchase, and what those predicates actually pick out is what Nature is when subjects mutually maintain one another.


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← [6.9 Moral Act](<6.9 Moral Act.md>) | [6.9.2 Righteousness](<6.9.2 Righteousness.md>) →
