The Best Possible World
If God is omnipotent and perfectly good, must this world be the best one possible? And if so, what does that say about the world we live in?
Leibniz argued in his 1710 Theodicy that God, with full knowledge of all possible worlds, must have actualized the best one. The argument was meant to reconcile God's perfection with the existence of evil. Voltaire's response, written forty-five years later in Candide, is one of the most devastating satirical attacks in the history of philosophy.
Leibniz, G. W. (1710). Theodicy. Trans. Huggard, Open Court.
The argument
Leibniz reasoned from God's nature outward. God has complete knowledge of every possible world. God has the power to actualize any of them. God is perfectly good and therefore wants to actualize the best one. Therefore this world, the actual world, is the best possible.
Evil exists in it, Leibniz acknowledged. But evil is either logically necessary for greater goods, a consequence of the free will of creatures, or present because any world without it would be worse. A world without any suffering might also be a world without courage, compassion, or moral development. Leibniz was not denying that evil is bad. He was claiming it is the smallest amount of bad compatible with the greatest amount of good.
This is optimism in its original technical sense: not cheerfulness, but the philosophical claim that this is the optimal world among all that could have been.
Voltaire's response
On November 1, 1755, an earthquake struck Lisbon on All Saints' Day, killing between thirty and sixty thousand people while they attended Mass. The timing was theologically inconvenient. Voltaire was already skeptical of Leibniz. The Lisbon earthquake gave him a target.
Candide (1759) follows a relentlessly optimistic character taught by his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The novel subjects Candide to war, shipwreck, the Inquisition, disease, slavery, and multiple catastrophes. Pangloss maintains his thesis throughout, right up to and including his own torture. The satire is not subtle.
Voltaire's philosophical point is that Leibniz's optimism is not falsifiable. Any horror can be incorporated into the theory by positing goods it enables that we cannot see. A theodicy that can absorb the Lisbon earthquake by appealing to invisible compensating goods is a theodicy that can absorb anything, and a theory that explains everything may explain nothing.
What it would mean for a world to be the best
The philosophical puzzle underneath both Leibniz and Voltaire is whether the concept of a best possible world is even coherent.
For any good world, you might be able to specify a better one: add one more happy person, remove one more instance of suffering. If goods can always be added, there may be no maximum, and God would face a choice among infinitely improving options with no stopping point. This is sometimes called the problem of the open-endedness of value.
Some philosophers, including those following Leibniz, argue that goods trade off against each other and that there is a genuine optimum even if we cannot identify it. Others hold that the notion of a best possible world is like the notion of the largest integer: grammatically coherent but referring to nothing real.
If there is no best possible world, Leibniz's argument cannot get started. And if it cannot get started, the theodicy it was meant to support is unavailable. The challenge Voltaire pressed with satire turns out to have a technical version that remains unresolved.
Discussion questions
- If this is the best possible world, what does that say about the nature of the word 'best'?
- Would a world with less suffering but also less human achievement be better or worse than this one?
- Does the idea that God had to create this world undermine the idea of a freely choosing, all-powerful God?
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