Patrick Mayer

John Duns Scotus and other medieval authors or theologians define divine omnipotence by the principle of non-contradiction despite the obvious differences of their theologies: God can do everything that does not include a contradiction. Only a deeper enquiry into their understanding of being and the consequent conception of the principle of non-contradiction allows us to manifest the different theologies of omnipotence. Therefore, this discussion of Scotus’s doctrine of omnipotence, and of absolute and ordered power, considers especially its philosophical presuppositions. The comparison with the same doctrine in the writings of Thomas Aquinas reveals the influence of a different understanding of being on the theology of omnipotence. The conclusion tries to show that the change in the medieval understanding of being and omnipotence had great impact on our modern way of thinking.

This paper proposes that there is a kind of moral luck that hasn’t been recognized in the philosophical literature: luck in the ‘wide’ contents of one’s concepts. We will treat moral luck as occurring when an agent is morally responsible for X—when X is a matter of luck for that agent. If moral luck is possible and content externalism is true, then there is a heretofore unrecognized kind of moral luck. We call it “conceptual moral luck.” This new kind of moral luck poses significant problems for two major theories of morally responsible agency, Agent-Causal Libertarianism and the Real Self View.