ABSTRACT
Eleonore Stump, in the second chapter of her magisterial book on Aquinas, makes the claim that for Aquinas, “goodness supervenes on the natural property of the actualization of a specifying potentiality; moral goodness supervenes on the actualization of rationality, which is the specifying potentiality for human beings.”1 She does not intend this as an account of Aquinas’s use of the term ‘supervenience,’ though Aquinas does use the term in other contexts.2 Rather, she is taking the term from contemporary discussion, especially from the work of Jaegwon Kim, and she thinks it is helpful in understanding the relation Aquinas has in mind between goodness and being.3 I myself am not a scholar who specializes in Aquinas, and I have for many years made a practice of avoiding attribution of beliefs to him. In the present case, I will proceed by noting two things he says about the relation between goodness and being in ST Ia.5.1, fi rst that ‘being’ and ‘goodness’ are the same in reference but differ only in sense, and second that the formula of the good consists in this, that something is desirable. I will then try to show that neither the notion of ‘weak supervenience’ nor the notion of ‘strong supervenience’ that Kim develops can capture what Aquinas apparently wants. I will then suggest an alternative notion of supervenience that does a better job of capturing the two insights, although it is not consistent with everything Stump says about Aquinas in the chapter. It is a notion that I have developed out of Duns Scotus’s use of the term, and that has affi nities with the usage by R. M. Hare (who is acknowledged by Kim as the person who reintroduced the term into philosophical discussion in the twentieth century) in the context of explaining the relation between evaluation and description. My intention is not to attribute to Aquinas a particular usage of the term, but to show that this usage could save some important things he wants to say.
