Supernatural and Natural Goodness

Some moral arguments for God begin with the phenomenon of moral goodness and argue that the most adequate explainer of this phenomenon is God. In this chapter, I put to the side such arguments and instead focus on whether a certain garden-variety theism supplies material to produce an improved theory of goodness. By layering onto an Aristotelian naturalist account of goodness a theistic account of providential creation, we can account for the continuity of our language and thought about the goodness of human and nonhuman organisms. This sort of supernaturalist theory of goodness can account for the ordinary grammar of goodness without inviting objections raised against Aristotelian naturalism and other godless theories of goodness; and in that respect, it should count as an improvement on such theories.