Williamson says: "There is no suggestion that normative anti-exceptionalism is obviously correct. Rather, it is the null hypothesis in the modest methodological sense that it is the default view: the burden of proof is on its opponents."
You say: "I think this presumption is correct."
I don't. First, I don't grant that there is any singular "default view." Each of us has our own views, rooted in our own experiences, thoughts, beliefs, inclinations, and so on. So I simply deny that there is ever any neutral ground on which to build theories. The assent of others must be voluntary, not proclaimed. Second, I deny the presumption that there's any fact of the matter about who has the burden of proof. I don't grant that I have any burden of proof here. There are no neutral, default views, nor does anyone shoulder any burden of proof unless they agree to do so.
I outright deny that there even is any legitimate category of "the normative." I grant that there is normative language, but I do not grant that what others proclaim to be candidate normative "properties" share the same default status as non-normative properties unless, unless I'm given some good reason to do so. As far as I can tell, proponents of the irreducibly normative can't even explain what they're talking about. I don't grant that the normative enjoys the same status as described by Williamson any more than I'd grant some made-up category a random philosopher came up with, e.g., "Schescriptive" or "schnormative" properties (which are by stipulation not descriptive or normative).
"First, I don't grant that there is any singular "default view." Each of us has our own views, rooted in our own experiences, thoughts, beliefs, inclinations, and so on. So I simply deny that there is ever any neutral ground on which to build theories. The assent of others must be voluntary, not proclaimed. Second, I deny the presumption that there's any fact of the matter about who has the burden of proof. I don't grant that I have any burden of proof here. There are no neutral, default views, nor does anyone shoulder any burden of proof unless they agree to do so."
In that case, assuming you would want to extract whatever nugget of wisdom might be behind this talk of burden of proof were there any present, isn't the thing to do to translate these claims in relativist terms? "Relative to a dialectical context where my opponent is claiming that the normative needs special treatment, and where she desires to sell me on the assumptions which she accepts but I don't, she has the burden of proof, given that her plea for special treatment is an assumption which she accepts and I don't."
I could stand in exactly the same relation and demand an explanation of why I should think there even is a category of normativity. This is an equal playing field, not one where I shoulder a unique burden of proof.
I don't grant to Williamson or to analytic philosophers more broadly that there is any presumption in favor of there being a distinct category of normative properties. Williamson, like many other philosophers, helps himself to assumptions that don't typically go challenged, and, in virtue of the atypicality of challenges like mine, us uncommon critics are typically dismissed or ignored.
Gridlocks aren't broken by dogmas and progress isn't made by presumption.
Williamson wants answers to philosophical questions. He thinks truth-conditional semantics imposes strong constraints on the range of viable answers, so a large part of his project involves arguing about what would constitute a satisfactory truth-conditional semantics for philosophical language.
His burden-of-proof talk needs to be understood in the context of that project. If we *can* find a uniform semantic analysis covering both normative and non-normative language, he's saying we should adopt that analysis. It would only make sense to develop distinct analyses for different kinds of language if the attempt to find a uniform analysis breaks down in some way.
Williamson (who loves to pretend Philosophy is Science) is also wrong to use the grammar "null hypothesis" without using a NHST framework. This metaphorical science language is like an idle gear, and shouldn't constitute a reason!
Nice post! Could the theist just be a universalist and say that universals are divine ideas (and then take on divine simplicity issues)? I’m not sure if that counts as stance-independence, but it seems like a plausible unifying explanation of why there are universals at all (if there are). The alternative theory seems weirder and more complex if you’re a theist and think there are universals.
In any case, it doesn’t seem crazy to bite the bullet and say that morality is “subjective” in a way that still gets us all of the objectivity we really care about. If God exists, the whole world is probably “subjective” in some sense. If a theist prefer something like DCT, you could also then just analogize deontic properties like wrongness to the way unlawfulness functions in legal systems. Goodness is tougher!
I agree the divine conceptualist can claim that all properties grounded in - or identical to - divine ideas, thereby rendering moral properties unexceptional. The dilemma was only for people (e.g., Craig) who don't make that claim, and treat moral properties as if they need their own separate theory. I do think divine conceptualism is ill-advised as a theory of properties though! Cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPyhE0dmMNk
I could be misunderstanding your use of the term “properties,” but do you not think that the theist could point to the necessity of “murder is wrong” against the contingency of “roses are red”?
How about the following pair of claims: 1) Ted Bundy's action was wrong, 2) This rose is organic. It seems like both are ascribing a property to something that's contingent, but which necessarily has the property once it's there
I guess I was considering the whole fact. Is there any possible world in which Ted Bundy’s action was not wrong? Versus…Is there any possible world in which a rose is not organic?
I assume you agree there's no possible world where Ted Bundy's action wasn't wrong (and I agree with that if we rephrase it as "there is no possible world where Ted Bundy's action was wrong in qualitatively identical circumstances".) As for the rose, my assumption behind the example was that some contingent objects have essential properties, such that without those properties, they would cease to exist, but become a different thing entirely. Perhaps you don't agree with the rose example, but I'm sure it won't be difficult to find a non-moral example that you do agree with; for example, you might think that there is no possible world in which a woman isn't female.
Okay, but don’t you think there being no world in which a woman isn’t female belongs in the same class of facts as Ted Bundy’s wrong action? The rose being organic and red is the outlier, I think. We know the first kind of truths a priori. We know the rose is red through empirical investigation. So I think we are talking about different kinds of universals.
"If moral realism is true, them, for example, killing postmen for sport has the property of being wrong, and wellbeing has the property of being good, regardless of what anyone believes or feels about the matter. "
Should this be "then" instead of "them"? Looks like typo!
I kept thinking about this article's core example of the redness of roses, as a paradigmatic case of a property, and how it can be understood at depth... and the more I think of it, the more convinced I am that grokking the redness of a rose is not a question of metaphysics, but a story of deep co-evolution across different branches of the tree of life, in the shared environment of this planet.
> Perhaps color vision evolved first for some non-signaling reason, such as detecting shelter, food or landmarks. But the pair hypothesized something more dynamic: that color vision evolved around the same time as a color signal, such as flashy fruit, attractive flowers, mating colors or warning signs.
I don't think that the metaphysics of morals exists in isolation from metaphysics generally. Moral properties could belong to a second order reality that is *dependent* upon a first order, but also metaphysically distinct from it, being the realm of values, conventions, and language. Moral properties aren't physically assigned to actions in the way that 'blueness' is assigned to flowers; they are objective features of the normative framework that governs our reasoning about those actions. We require different philosophical tools and categories to investigate the normative framework, not because moral properties are special metaphysical snowflakes, but because a theory of properties for a primary or first order reality isn't up for the job.
"Moral realists believe in a particular species of property: the stance-independent moral property."
Morality inhabits social interactions. Suppose the property of social interactions that makes them moral is "provides communal benefit when communally adopted." Such a property is grounded in "the way things are" (i.e., any Moral Argument falls back to the Cosmological Argument). But any sensible person willing to grant it as "the moral property" will be a moral realist. Of course, the ontological status of morality does little to help us with moral epistemology.
Similar to the modality stuff you've been thinking about -- this "problem" or properties is about how it is we can say certain words. The first job is to get clear about the questions and their legitimacy, before we're ism-ists armed with a dialogue tree of pro and con arguments!
It’s not a problem of how we can say certain words — there has never been a problem of how we can say certain words since, if we have control over our mouths, we can always say certain words
Yes or No or Complex Question (expand illegitimate ordering of question): The explananda motivating our enquiry are our use of language for terms like { "good", "bad", "right", "wrong", "should", "shouldn't" }, and questions of properties based on our use of these words?
So, are you saying Yes to my question, but those are embedded claims that one must be committed to in order for the "problem" to be well motivated?
Because, if so, I completely agree with that analysis, which is precisely my point.
i.e. -- The "problem" of moral properties is what explains our use of these moral terms
*based on the truth-corresponding use of these words
*additionally based on the possible truth-corresponding use of predicates that have yet to be coined
OR, as I put it, HOW HOW HOW can we use these words? How does the world have to be such that this is something that happens in it?
And yeah, once I got you agreeing with me that would be exactly my next move, to question why you're not challenging these presuppositions behind the "problem"?
I was wondering about something after reading this. Could it be that ‘red’ is the result of stimuli that have repeatedly converged through a unified structure of human perception, eventually passing through a shared expressive coordinate within a category? In contrast, ‘bad’ seems to rely much more on emotion or attitude, forming a kind of evaluative judgment that emerges from scattered moral responses but becomes densely clustered around affective axes like pain or survival. So while ‘red’ remains red even if I dislike it, ‘bad’ feels more like a sign whose placement can shift depending on who is judging and in what context. If that’s the case, then maybe treating both as the same kind of property—within the same metaphysical framework—carries a kind of category mistake?
Sorry for being my usual non-philosopher horsefly here, but... what I find interesting in the example of the rose's redness, is that science actually tells us a lot about what is actually going on there, and how we humans end up with the idea that "this rose is red".
To recall only a few points in a huge causal process: when the rose is hit with broad-spectrum light, it reflects a certain distribution of frequencies, which enter our eyes and hit the three types of cone cells that our particular evolutionary branch gave us, creating a certain inner stimulus. This inner stimulus is then classified, according to the individual's culturally mediated learning — if the guy belonged to a culture that doesn't have a word for pink, more roses would be "red" for him than for us. But not all is culturally mediated, the lower frequency limit of red borders with infrared, which evolution didn't allow us to see. And of course there is individual variation, as in the pedant who says "this rose is not red, it's burgundy". Finally, the ins and outs of how humans assign words to areas of concept-space are studied (probably among others) by linguistic semantics.
A dismissive scientist might say at this point that, having roughly mapped all there is to understand about the rosy matter, maybe the whole concept of properties is just not needed. But let's be generous and examine the various theories under the light of our scientific explanation:
Universalism – nope, universals are nonphysical, we don't need nonphysical entities to explain any of this.
Trope theory – maybe cyanidin-3-O-glucoside, the actual chemical that makes red roses appear red, is the literal trope there? The pigment molecules in various roses resemble each other well enough... but unfortunately there is no cyanidin-3-O-glucoside in the redness of a rose displayed on a screen, so it's not general enough. Fail.
Class nominalism – it's natural for them to be grouped together, but you can't ask why? Come on, just look at your cone cells and a bunch of stuff downstream from there!
If those don't quite do it, then what is it? Here I propose that, when you peel under the surface, the logical structure of a property like 'redness' is a conditional, or a potential. *If* you hit the rose in such a way, *and* you get an answer within such a range, *then* we call that 'redness'.
It's not a constituent element of the rose, like a branch to a tree. It's not something existing somewhere else in another realm. It's a set conditionals describing potential patterns of interaction.
What is interesting about those, is that they perfectly straddle the line between the objective and the non-objective. The rose holds its end of the bargain: if you hit it with sunlight, it reflects it *like that*. The questioner holds its own end, and subjects the rose to that kind of light (and not, say, to scorching heat), and then interprets the response according to its own peculiar ways (ex. we humans see blue+yellow and green as the same).
In other words, there's nothing about the rose that makes it natural or expected to interrogate it in terms of color as perceived by humans — that's the "subjective" aspect. But when we do, it gives a consistent response; that's the objective aspect. The conditional pattern that binds those two is what we call the property.
I'll shut up at this point, and won't get into trying to apply this to moral properties, because this comment is long enough, but the continuation almost writes itself.
Question for the philosophers in the room... am I making sense? Does anyone defend this kind of view philosophically? If not, maybe they should!
Perhaps polytheism is more comfortable with divine multiplicity entailed by having so many properties instantiated in divine nature? I'm just spitballing here, I don't think it should matter any more to a polytheist, henotheist or monotheist...I'm just at a loss as to why it seems something people avoid considering.
Yeah, I mean, you might think classical theism is at a disadvantage insofar as its committed to simplicity - crudely, if God only has/is one property, and if that's what DDS implies, then it's hard to see how God could ground multiple, distinct properties; but I'm not sure that polytheism has any advantages here over non-classical monotheism. Whatever the property-grounding X-factor is that's spread out among the different gods, it seems like the monotheist can just say it's all bundled up in one (non-simple) God.
Right...no matter how you configure it, you can always say the divine has all properties by its nature and be done with it.
I'm not convinced on DDS but maybe it can be preserved for the obstinate theist if one makes all the other properties into subordinate gods in a henotheistic system, or angels if one is committed to hard monotheism.
Williamson says: "There is no suggestion that normative anti-exceptionalism is obviously correct. Rather, it is the null hypothesis in the modest methodological sense that it is the default view: the burden of proof is on its opponents."
You say: "I think this presumption is correct."
I don't. First, I don't grant that there is any singular "default view." Each of us has our own views, rooted in our own experiences, thoughts, beliefs, inclinations, and so on. So I simply deny that there is ever any neutral ground on which to build theories. The assent of others must be voluntary, not proclaimed. Second, I deny the presumption that there's any fact of the matter about who has the burden of proof. I don't grant that I have any burden of proof here. There are no neutral, default views, nor does anyone shoulder any burden of proof unless they agree to do so.
I outright deny that there even is any legitimate category of "the normative." I grant that there is normative language, but I do not grant that what others proclaim to be candidate normative "properties" share the same default status as non-normative properties unless, unless I'm given some good reason to do so. As far as I can tell, proponents of the irreducibly normative can't even explain what they're talking about. I don't grant that the normative enjoys the same status as described by Williamson any more than I'd grant some made-up category a random philosopher came up with, e.g., "Schescriptive" or "schnormative" properties (which are by stipulation not descriptive or normative).
"First, I don't grant that there is any singular "default view." Each of us has our own views, rooted in our own experiences, thoughts, beliefs, inclinations, and so on. So I simply deny that there is ever any neutral ground on which to build theories. The assent of others must be voluntary, not proclaimed. Second, I deny the presumption that there's any fact of the matter about who has the burden of proof. I don't grant that I have any burden of proof here. There are no neutral, default views, nor does anyone shoulder any burden of proof unless they agree to do so."
In that case, assuming you would want to extract whatever nugget of wisdom might be behind this talk of burden of proof were there any present, isn't the thing to do to translate these claims in relativist terms? "Relative to a dialectical context where my opponent is claiming that the normative needs special treatment, and where she desires to sell me on the assumptions which she accepts but I don't, she has the burden of proof, given that her plea for special treatment is an assumption which she accepts and I don't."
I could stand in exactly the same relation and demand an explanation of why I should think there even is a category of normativity. This is an equal playing field, not one where I shoulder a unique burden of proof.
I don't grant to Williamson or to analytic philosophers more broadly that there is any presumption in favor of there being a distinct category of normative properties. Williamson, like many other philosophers, helps himself to assumptions that don't typically go challenged, and, in virtue of the atypicality of challenges like mine, us uncommon critics are typically dismissed or ignored.
Gridlocks aren't broken by dogmas and progress isn't made by presumption.
Williamson wants answers to philosophical questions. He thinks truth-conditional semantics imposes strong constraints on the range of viable answers, so a large part of his project involves arguing about what would constitute a satisfactory truth-conditional semantics for philosophical language.
His burden-of-proof talk needs to be understood in the context of that project. If we *can* find a uniform semantic analysis covering both normative and non-normative language, he's saying we should adopt that analysis. It would only make sense to develop distinct analyses for different kinds of language if the attempt to find a uniform analysis breaks down in some way.
Right, and how did that go with Horwich!
I don't think there was a clear winner in that debate. (unfortunately...)
I found it an interesting exercise in psychotherapy!
Williamson screaming "you can do them I've done them" is like a man facing his mortality on his death bed.
Williamson (who loves to pretend Philosophy is Science) is also wrong to use the grammar "null hypothesis" without using a NHST framework. This metaphorical science language is like an idle gear, and shouldn't constitute a reason!
Nice post! Could the theist just be a universalist and say that universals are divine ideas (and then take on divine simplicity issues)? I’m not sure if that counts as stance-independence, but it seems like a plausible unifying explanation of why there are universals at all (if there are). The alternative theory seems weirder and more complex if you’re a theist and think there are universals.
In any case, it doesn’t seem crazy to bite the bullet and say that morality is “subjective” in a way that still gets us all of the objectivity we really care about. If God exists, the whole world is probably “subjective” in some sense. If a theist prefer something like DCT, you could also then just analogize deontic properties like wrongness to the way unlawfulness functions in legal systems. Goodness is tougher!
I agree the divine conceptualist can claim that all properties grounded in - or identical to - divine ideas, thereby rendering moral properties unexceptional. The dilemma was only for people (e.g., Craig) who don't make that claim, and treat moral properties as if they need their own separate theory. I do think divine conceptualism is ill-advised as a theory of properties though! Cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPyhE0dmMNk
I could be misunderstanding your use of the term “properties,” but do you not think that the theist could point to the necessity of “murder is wrong” against the contingency of “roses are red”?
How about the following pair of claims: 1) Ted Bundy's action was wrong, 2) This rose is organic. It seems like both are ascribing a property to something that's contingent, but which necessarily has the property once it's there
Your examples 😂
I guess I was considering the whole fact. Is there any possible world in which Ted Bundy’s action was not wrong? Versus…Is there any possible world in which a rose is not organic?
I assume you agree there's no possible world where Ted Bundy's action wasn't wrong (and I agree with that if we rephrase it as "there is no possible world where Ted Bundy's action was wrong in qualitatively identical circumstances".) As for the rose, my assumption behind the example was that some contingent objects have essential properties, such that without those properties, they would cease to exist, but become a different thing entirely. Perhaps you don't agree with the rose example, but I'm sure it won't be difficult to find a non-moral example that you do agree with; for example, you might think that there is no possible world in which a woman isn't female.
Okay, but don’t you think there being no world in which a woman isn’t female belongs in the same class of facts as Ted Bundy’s wrong action? The rose being organic and red is the outlier, I think. We know the first kind of truths a priori. We know the rose is red through empirical investigation. So I think we are talking about different kinds of universals.
And just to clarify, my 😂 was because I find your quick thinking and examples delightful, not ridiculous.
"If moral realism is true, them, for example, killing postmen for sport has the property of being wrong, and wellbeing has the property of being good, regardless of what anyone believes or feels about the matter. "
Should this be "then" instead of "them"? Looks like typo!
This ignores a more significant problem...violets aren't blue, they are violet
Plenty are white too!
I kept thinking about this article's core example of the redness of roses, as a paradigmatic case of a property, and how it can be understood at depth... and the more I think of it, the more convinced I am that grokking the redness of a rose is not a question of metaphysics, but a story of deep co-evolution across different branches of the tree of life, in the shared environment of this planet.
And then I come across this great article asking the precise evolutionary question of "How did the world become colorful": https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-did-nature-burst-into-vivid-color-20250627/
Excerpt:
> Perhaps color vision evolved first for some non-signaling reason, such as detecting shelter, food or landmarks. But the pair hypothesized something more dynamic: that color vision evolved around the same time as a color signal, such as flashy fruit, attractive flowers, mating colors or warning signs.
I don't think that the metaphysics of morals exists in isolation from metaphysics generally. Moral properties could belong to a second order reality that is *dependent* upon a first order, but also metaphysically distinct from it, being the realm of values, conventions, and language. Moral properties aren't physically assigned to actions in the way that 'blueness' is assigned to flowers; they are objective features of the normative framework that governs our reasoning about those actions. We require different philosophical tools and categories to investigate the normative framework, not because moral properties are special metaphysical snowflakes, but because a theory of properties for a primary or first order reality isn't up for the job.
"Moral realists believe in a particular species of property: the stance-independent moral property."
Morality inhabits social interactions. Suppose the property of social interactions that makes them moral is "provides communal benefit when communally adopted." Such a property is grounded in "the way things are" (i.e., any Moral Argument falls back to the Cosmological Argument). But any sensible person willing to grant it as "the moral property" will be a moral realist. Of course, the ontological status of morality does little to help us with moral epistemology.
Similar to the modality stuff you've been thinking about -- this "problem" or properties is about how it is we can say certain words. The first job is to get clear about the questions and their legitimacy, before we're ism-ists armed with a dialogue tree of pro and con arguments!
It’s not a problem of how we can say certain words — there has never been a problem of how we can say certain words since, if we have control over our mouths, we can always say certain words
My mouth remained stationary as I typed!
Yes or No or Complex Question (expand illegitimate ordering of question): The explananda motivating our enquiry are our use of language for terms like { "good", "bad", "right", "wrong", "should", "shouldn't" }, and questions of properties based on our use of these words?
*based on the truth-corresponding use of these words
*additionally based on the possible truth-corresponding use of predicates that have yet to be coined
So, are you saying Yes to my question, but those are embedded claims that one must be committed to in order for the "problem" to be well motivated?
Because, if so, I completely agree with that analysis, which is precisely my point.
i.e. -- The "problem" of moral properties is what explains our use of these moral terms
*based on the truth-corresponding use of these words
*additionally based on the possible truth-corresponding use of predicates that have yet to be coined
OR, as I put it, HOW HOW HOW can we use these words? How does the world have to be such that this is something that happens in it?
And yeah, once I got you agreeing with me that would be exactly my next move, to question why you're not challenging these presuppositions behind the "problem"?
There's a typo in the last paragraph: "the metaphysics of moral properties in general" should just say, "the metaphysics of properties in general"
I was wondering about something after reading this. Could it be that ‘red’ is the result of stimuli that have repeatedly converged through a unified structure of human perception, eventually passing through a shared expressive coordinate within a category? In contrast, ‘bad’ seems to rely much more on emotion or attitude, forming a kind of evaluative judgment that emerges from scattered moral responses but becomes densely clustered around affective axes like pain or survival. So while ‘red’ remains red even if I dislike it, ‘bad’ feels more like a sign whose placement can shift depending on who is judging and in what context. If that’s the case, then maybe treating both as the same kind of property—within the same metaphysical framework—carries a kind of category mistake?
Sorry for being my usual non-philosopher horsefly here, but... what I find interesting in the example of the rose's redness, is that science actually tells us a lot about what is actually going on there, and how we humans end up with the idea that "this rose is red".
To recall only a few points in a huge causal process: when the rose is hit with broad-spectrum light, it reflects a certain distribution of frequencies, which enter our eyes and hit the three types of cone cells that our particular evolutionary branch gave us, creating a certain inner stimulus. This inner stimulus is then classified, according to the individual's culturally mediated learning — if the guy belonged to a culture that doesn't have a word for pink, more roses would be "red" for him than for us. But not all is culturally mediated, the lower frequency limit of red borders with infrared, which evolution didn't allow us to see. And of course there is individual variation, as in the pedant who says "this rose is not red, it's burgundy". Finally, the ins and outs of how humans assign words to areas of concept-space are studied (probably among others) by linguistic semantics.
A dismissive scientist might say at this point that, having roughly mapped all there is to understand about the rosy matter, maybe the whole concept of properties is just not needed. But let's be generous and examine the various theories under the light of our scientific explanation:
Universalism – nope, universals are nonphysical, we don't need nonphysical entities to explain any of this.
Trope theory – maybe cyanidin-3-O-glucoside, the actual chemical that makes red roses appear red, is the literal trope there? The pigment molecules in various roses resemble each other well enough... but unfortunately there is no cyanidin-3-O-glucoside in the redness of a rose displayed on a screen, so it's not general enough. Fail.
Class nominalism – it's natural for them to be grouped together, but you can't ask why? Come on, just look at your cone cells and a bunch of stuff downstream from there!
If those don't quite do it, then what is it? Here I propose that, when you peel under the surface, the logical structure of a property like 'redness' is a conditional, or a potential. *If* you hit the rose in such a way, *and* you get an answer within such a range, *then* we call that 'redness'.
It's not a constituent element of the rose, like a branch to a tree. It's not something existing somewhere else in another realm. It's a set conditionals describing potential patterns of interaction.
What is interesting about those, is that they perfectly straddle the line between the objective and the non-objective. The rose holds its end of the bargain: if you hit it with sunlight, it reflects it *like that*. The questioner holds its own end, and subjects the rose to that kind of light (and not, say, to scorching heat), and then interprets the response according to its own peculiar ways (ex. we humans see blue+yellow and green as the same).
In other words, there's nothing about the rose that makes it natural or expected to interrogate it in terms of color as perceived by humans — that's the "subjective" aspect. But when we do, it gives a consistent response; that's the objective aspect. The conditional pattern that binds those two is what we call the property.
I'll shut up at this point, and won't get into trying to apply this to moral properties, because this comment is long enough, but the continuation almost writes itself.
Question for the philosophers in the room... am I making sense? Does anyone defend this kind of view philosophically? If not, maybe they should!
Would grounding all properties in the nature of deity be unpalatable to classical theists for some reason? Might it be less unpalatable to polytheism?
What's the thought behind it being less unpalatable to polytheism?
Perhaps polytheism is more comfortable with divine multiplicity entailed by having so many properties instantiated in divine nature? I'm just spitballing here, I don't think it should matter any more to a polytheist, henotheist or monotheist...I'm just at a loss as to why it seems something people avoid considering.
Yeah, I mean, you might think classical theism is at a disadvantage insofar as its committed to simplicity - crudely, if God only has/is one property, and if that's what DDS implies, then it's hard to see how God could ground multiple, distinct properties; but I'm not sure that polytheism has any advantages here over non-classical monotheism. Whatever the property-grounding X-factor is that's spread out among the different gods, it seems like the monotheist can just say it's all bundled up in one (non-simple) God.
Right...no matter how you configure it, you can always say the divine has all properties by its nature and be done with it.
I'm not convinced on DDS but maybe it can be preserved for the obstinate theist if one makes all the other properties into subordinate gods in a henotheistic system, or angels if one is committed to hard monotheism.