 This is arguably another case where whether or not the regress is vicious by a philosopher’s lights will depend on their background theoretical commitments. If one starts out happy with the notion of succession—i.e. of one thing being the case and then ceasing to be the case as something else comes to be the case—then one may be inclined to see McTaggart’s regress as entirely benign. We start out with a set of incompatible properties that are never had by anything simultaneously but are held by things successively; in stating that those properties are had successively we make salient a new set of incompatible properties, but these are also never had by anything simultaneously, only successively; this makes salient yet another set of incompatible properties, and so on ad infinitum. There is never, at any stage, a contradiction, if the notion of succession is indeed in good standing, for we are never forced to say that a thing has incompatible properties, only that a thing successively has properties that cannot be had simultaneously. If, by contrast, one is suspicious of the very notion of succession—if one sees in it simply an attempt to paper over what is ultimately a contradiction inherent in the commitment to reality being each of two incompatible ways, the way it supposedly is now and the way it supposedly was or will be—then one will see in McTaggart’s regress an infinite sequence of contradictory accounts of how reality is, with each attempt at explaining away the contradiction simply resulting in another such contradictory account. The regress, then, looks vicious or benign depending on whether one is content to grant the legitimacy of the notion of temporal succession.