Blackburn's Blunder

“Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”
—Treebeard, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Dear Reader,

While some of the arguments in this post probably seem like they are hair-splitting, I think it is worth pursuing such details in the pursuit of truth. As Treebeard might say, we do not say anything in philosophy unless it is worth taking a long time to say. To keep the flow of my argument from being bogged down, I have included several footnotes to support the more abstract points.

Sincerely, Chris

In his book Think, the philosopher Simon Blackburn argues that Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence fails because it is susceptible to refutation by a parody argument. I will argue that Blackburn’s parody argument is unsuccessful.

The Greatest Conceivable Being

Blackburn presents Anselm’s ontological argument as follows.^[1]

1. The concept of God is understood. Whatever is understood exists in the understanding. So God exists in the understanding.
2. Suppose God only exists in the understanding, and not in reality. Then a greater being than God can be conceived: one that exists in reality. But God is defined as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. So no greater being can be conceived, by definition. But now we have a contradiction. So our original supposition was false.

As Blackburn and others note, the argument takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to the absurd”).^[2] It supposes something (God only exists in the understanding), and then shows that this leads to a contradiction, allowing us to infer that the supposition is false.

It is interesting that Blackburn never denies that the concept of God is understood. So, Blackburn evidently agrees with the first stage of Anselm’s argument that the concept of God is coherent; this will be important later on.

A Parody Argument

Blackburn then offers the following parody argument for the existence of “Dreamboat,” a very attractive human lover than which none greater can be conceived.^[3]

1. The concept of Dreamboat is understood. Whatever is understood, exists in the understanding. So Dreamboat exists in the understanding.
2. Suppose Dreamboat only exists in the understanding, and not in reality. Then a greater lover than Dreamboat can be conceived: one that exists in reality. But Dreamboat is defined as that lover than which no greater can be conceived. So no greater lover than Dreamboat can be conceived, by definition. But now we have a contradiction. So our original supposition was false.

Note that in Anselm’s argument the subject we are considering is a being, period. While, in Blackburn’s argument, the subject is a human being. This will also be important later on. Is Blackburn’s parody argument similar enough to Anselm’s argument to refute it? Let us see.

Great-making Properties

First of all, what does it mean for one being to be “greater” than another being? In the context of Scholastic metaphysics in which Anselm is articulating his argument, all beings can be ordered in terms of their greatness.4 A human is greater than a dog, which is greater than a rock, and so on. (In this way of speaking, a being is essentially any noun; so a rock is a being in this sense.) What makes a certain being greater than others is that it has great-making properties in greater proportion. A great-making property is any positive property with an intrinsic maximal value, the having of which makes a being greater.

As a good example of a great-making property, consider knowledge. To test whether knowledge is a great-making property, we first ask, is knowledge something positive? Yes indeed: having some knowledge is good, having more knowledge is greater, and having all knowledge is the greatest. Having answered this, we then ask, is there an intrinsic maximal value to knowledge? Again the answer is yes: the intrinsic maximum to knowledge is knowing all things, or knowing everything that can be known. Thus, knowledge is a great-making property because it satisfies these two criteria.

The notion of a great-making property is certainly interesting, and to some it may even seem archaic. Indeed, in the last century, some philosophers have since reformulated Anselm’s argument in terms of modern modal logic, and thus proven it to be valid, and arguably sound, within that logical system. Nevertheless, since Blackburn does not engage with any modern formulations of the argument, let us limit ourselves to considering Anselm’s argument within its original context. While we might disagree with Anselm’s Scholastic framework, we must at least attempt to understand his argument in its most charitable form.

With the metaphysical background of Anselm’s argument in mind, therefore, let us briefly consider the merits of his argument, before then considering Blackburn’s parody argument in that same context.^[4]

The Merits of Anselm’s Argument

Consider the first stage of Anselm’s argument. Is the concept of God, or the greatest conceivable being, understood? Well, what is such a being like? It seems that, at a minimum, the greatest conceivable being would have all of the obvious great-making properties traditionally ascribed to God by the monotheistic faiths: it would be all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful. No one disputes that these are positive properties. And since these properties all have intrinsic maximums, so far, so good.

But is this a coherent concept? To use Anselm’s language, does this being exist in the understanding? I think the answer has to be an overwhelming yes. Billions of people around the world believe in this very concept and understand it. Indeed, as we have already seen, Blackburn himself takes no issue with the fact that the concept of the greatest conceivable being exists in the understanding. So, it seems that the first stage of Anselm’s argument is reasonable and on good footing.

What about the second stage of Anselm’s argument? The key issue here is whether it makes sense to say that it would be greater for God to exist in reality than only in the understanding. As Blackburn notes, Kant famously objected to Anselm’s argument by saying that it assumes that existence is a real property of things. Kant argued that existence is not a real property of things because to say about a particular thing that it also exists does not add anything significant to its description.

However, it seems to me that this is missing Anselm’s point. Contrary to Kant and Blackburn, there is clearly a nontrivial sense in which existing things are greater than things which only exist in the understanding — just try buying something with money that only exists in the understanding!^[5]

Indeed, Blackburn’s misunderstanding of Anselm is evident from the example he uses to try and poke fun at Anselm’s argument: “Real turkeys are heavier than imagined turkeys.”^[6] In this example, Blackburn compares the physical weight of a turkey that exists in reality with a turkey that exists in the understanding. However, in response to Blackburn, since things that exist in the understanding do not have physical weight (they are not physical objects), the comparison is not legitimate.

Anselm certainly never makes such a dubious move. Rather, for Anselm, a comparison that is appropriate to make between things in reality and those in the understanding is a comparison of greatness, which for him is a metaphysical comparison, not a merely physical comparison.

Since physical comparisons can only occur between two physical objects, Blackburn’s example is confused. By contrast, the metaphysical comparison that Anselm makes concerns general metaphysical greatness, which encompasses properties independent of physical attributes.^[7]

In summary, then, Anselm’s argument is reasonable within the framework of Scholastic metaphysics. The concept of God as the greatest conceivable being is coherent and understood by many people, and the great-making properties traditionally attributed to God are positive and have intrinsic maximal values. Furthermore, the comparison that Anselm makes between God’s existence in the understanding and his existence in reality is a comparison of metaphysical greatness, which is a perfectly legitimate comparison within his metaphysical system.

On the contrary, Blackburn’s objection which compares the physical weight of real and imagined turkeys is not. With Anselm’s argument thus charitably understood, let us now turn to Blackburn’s parody argument for Dreamboat, and see if it has the same merits.

Blackburn’s Dreamboat

Consider the first stage of Blackburn’s parody argument. Is the concept of Dreamboat, the greatest conceivable human lover, understood? Well, what would such a being be like? Here already, we encounter a problem, since Blackburn’s Dreamboat is a human being. This imposes a conceptual constraint that ultimately makes the concept incoherent.

For instance, is Dreamboat short or tall? Is he (or she) skinny or fat? Is Dreamboat really into sports, or does she prefer writing poetry? Upon consideration, we can see that any ostensibly positive properties Dreamboat would have cannot meet the criteria for a great-making property because they are subjective, and even conflicting. Everyone has a different idea of what they want in a lover, so what may be a positive property for one person is not guaranteed to be positive for another.

Furthermore, the potentially great-making properties of Dreamboat do not have intrinsic maximal values. Does it make sense for Dreamboat to be all-tall (or all-short)? What about all-skinny (or all-fat)? Could a human lover, which as a human must be finite, be all-loving? The answer to all of these questions is clearly no.

If Blackburn responds by saying that the greatest conceivable human lover can be all-loving and all-good and all-knowing, then he runs into a different problem: he is really just defining God after all. If Blackburn responds further that Dreamboat is not the greatest conceivable lover after all, but just an ordinary human lover (which is greater in reality than in the understanding and therefore must exist), then he escapes the logical incoherence. However, then the argument no longer works because there is no logical contradiction raised by an ordinary human lover not existing; the logic of the argument only has potential if we are dealing with a lover that is the greatest conceivable.

In short, it seems that the only way for the Dreamboat argument to work is if it uses the properties of the greatest conceivable being, in which case we are just referring to God after all, just by a different name. So, the first stage of Blackburn’s parody argument is a complete failure. The concept of Dreamboat is not understood because it is incoherent. And the only way to make it coherent is to make it into an argument for the greatest conceivable being.

Someone might ask, what about the second stage of the parody argument? By now, I hope it is clear that since Blackburn’s Dreamboat is incoherent, it does not even exist in the understanding, and so it makes no sense to compare it to a Dreamboat in reality. Thus, Blackburn’s parody argument cannot even get past the first stage. It is not parallel to Anselm’s argument, and it certainly does not refute it. Blackburn’s Dreamboat is really just Blackburn’s Blunder.

One final point. In his book, Blackburn also briefly mentions the concept of a most dangerous rival as can be imagined, or an evil being than which no worse can be conceived.^[8] I hope it is also clear to the reader by this point that these arguments would not work because the proposed great-making properties of such beings would not be positive properties, and so they would not be greater in reality than in the understanding. In short, such properties would fail to meet the criteria for a great-making property.

Furthermore, the Scholastic philosophers argued quite compellingly that evil is merely a privation of good, and so does not exist as a property in its own right. Thus, evil could not be a great-making property because it is not a property at all.

Conclusion

We have thus seen that Anselm’s argument is quite reasonable when understood in its original context, to say nothing of modern versions of it.^[9] While one may disagree with Anselm’s general metaphysical framework, this is a different question than whether his argument is reasonable within that framework. Therefore, the debate over Anselm’s ontological argument must ultimately take place at the level of metaphysical frameworks.

As it stands, however, a competing metaphysical framework has not even been offered by Blackburn. Furthermore, Blackburn’s parody argument fails to refute Anselm’s argument even within its own framework, because Dreamboat does not satisfy the criteria for great-making properties, and is not even coherent besides. It thus seems to me that Anselm’s ontological argument has not been refuted by Blackburn.^[10]