Ep. 253: Leibniz on the Problem of Evil (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 253 is why does God allow evil to exist? We read selections from Gottlieb Leibniz's Theodicy from 1710. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, antecedently willingness to be a good pilot, but immediately willing that we should leave out the heavier theological parts, but finally willing that, all in all, it's good for us to choke it down.

0:39 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin, Evil Because I'm Imperfect.

0:44 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan trying to participate in the best of all possible podcasts.

0:50 Dylan: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey striving to be the beautiful combination of squares demonstrating Euclid's 47th proposition. In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:02 Mark: So Leibniz, we have been been overdue to come back to Leibniz for some time. It was episode six, Leibniz's Monadology, and it was Wes's favorite thing. Why haven't you made us do this earlier?

1:14 Dylan: Leibniz was your favorite thing, Wes or the theodicy?

1:17 Wes: It's one of my favorite things.

1:19 Mark: Well, that's one of us. I talked to Seth beforehand. I know this was not his favorite thing. Dylan, what did you think of this?

1:25 Dylan: For me, it was very interesting in the way other things I've read in Leibniz are, which it made me think a lot about how he thinks about mathematics. I learned as much about the way he thinks about mathematics reading this as I did about him thinking about God. In fact, I think to me, his whole way of thinking about the calculus and limits and physics is completely inflected in his way of thinking about God. Just like the Monadology, honestly.

1:55 Wes: Yeah. And as I tried to persuade you guys before the show, you really don't even have to think about this in theological terms. There's a lot of stuff in here about free will and possibility and the psychology of deliberation, whether being constrained by reasons is a form of deterministic constraint or whether it's compatible with freedom, which is a big deal because reasoned responsiveness, Leibniz's conception of freedom is grounded in the idea that we are free when we are responsive to reasons and aware of what is good in our deliberations, which of course had huge influence on everyone thereafter, including Kant. So I think listeners should understand that the theological stuff is in a way, it's secondary.

2:41 Dylan: Strangely enough, it probably wasn't secondary for him. If I read his tone, it's hard to not see that him being really earnest about it.

2:50 Wes: He is earnest about that. But also Leibniz is a systematizer.

2:54 Dylan: Exactly.

2:55 Wes: This is just him taking all of his ammunition and throwing it at this problem. And you get little bits and pieces of his entire system, but he deploys to that end. And yes, ultimately this is about the problem of evil and how it is that an all knowing and all good, perfectly powerful God would create a universe that has evil in it. The default answer is already known. Right. We already know that Leibniz has to find a way to rationalize that. And so once you've set yourself that task, then the interesting thing is to see how you can accomplish that. And to accomplish that, you have to get back into all your insights into free will and all the other relevant philosophical problems.

3:44 Dylan: Yeah. And one in particular is, I guess, for lack of a better way of saying it, how the parts can diverge from the shape of the whole and the whole remain the way it is.

3:56 Wes: In a way, a lot of this is about the concept of emergence, where the whole can be more than the parts. So the idea is that you have different levels of evaluation and you might evaluate the whole. So the goodness of the whole might require parts that are evil. So if you're trying to choose from among, we'll get into this. But from among all the best possible worlds, you're choosing based on some emergent macro level property. You're not just saying, okay, what's the total amount of evil in each part and sum that together and then find the maximum and you're doing something different. And that's a really fascinating thing.

4:36 Mark: Seth, you had an opening thought.

4:38 Seth: I was just trying to explain this problem to my wife. She's like, what's your podcast on? And I said, oh, the problem of evil. And kind of a blank stare comes over her face. And I think most modern peoples, when you say the problem of evil, when I articulated it, it started to make sense. But I told her, I said, you know, this guy, he's an amazing thinker, an amazing writer, a polymath, you know, certainly one of the top 25 philosophers of all time. I'm sorry that there are people that spend. Now that I'm rethinking it, I was like, if he lived today, you know, he would be solving different kinds of problems that would actually be. Have more material impact, I think, on us.

5:18 Wes: But you mean like inventing calculus Yeah, I was just gonna say he already did that.

5:23 Seth: He's amazing. And I just. I have this issue with brilliant people who spend a lot of time solving problems that I don't get. Why? It's not a huge problem for me.

5:33 Dylan: They're not there to gratify your soul.

5:36 Seth: I know that's exactly right. But then at the same time, everybody's got their shit in front of them and you deal with what comes to you and look at what he produced for what he was given in the time. It just. I totally get why Wes is infatuated with Leibniz. He's underappreciated.

5:52 Wes: You have to accept for the sake of argument, you know, it's like suspension of disbelief. When you're watching a movie. If you want to say, well, I don't believe in God and so this is irrelevant to me, you can do that, but you might as well just accept that premise and then get into the story.

6:06 Seth: I didn't have a problem accepting the premise and getting into the story. And I think his reasoning is subtle and interesting and his use, like Dylan said, of mathematics but also of analogy is brilliant. I really want to talk about that.

6:19 Mark: I feel like the prime argument here is very, very simple. And the reason that it's a 400 page book is because it's responses to objections. Specifically this came out of correspondence with this guy named Pierre Bayle, who is described in the book as a Cartesian, who thought that there was no good response to, you know, if you're a good theist, but you think there's no good response to the problem of evil, you just say, we just have to have faith. God's ways are mysterious. Shrug. That's not very comforting. But faith is supposed to be an emotional thing, and somebody like Leibniz is not going to accept that.

And Leibniz, like Descartes, like Spinoza, bought into the ontological argument. And like you just said, Wes, once you accept as a premise, we're just going to assume for the sake of argument here that God exists, then everything follows according to Leibniz, from the definition of God. So God by definition is, is the greatest possible thing in every sense. Greatest morally, greatest in knowledge, greatest in power. Therefore God could have created any sort of universe that he wanted. And always he's the best possible creature. He has all of the knowledge.

So not only knowledge of things that actually exist, but knowledge of things that could exist. He can scan all the possible worlds, all the possible ways things could have been. Because of his goodness, he's going to pick the one that's the best possible one, the end. So if you follow that chain of argument, it's right there in the definition of God, then no matter what you see, no matter how much suffering, and he doesn't deny. So Candide, we read before, years ago, who was responding to, you know, had Pangloss, this Leibniz like character, this was the only book apparently published during Leibniz's lifetime.

So Leibniz was known as the author of the theodicy. And it was very easy for someone like Voltaire to say, look at all the wars, you bastard. Leibniz insisting on that this is the best possible worlds. How could you be so blind? But Leibniz doesn't deny at all how gross things might appear to us, that there are wars, that there is suffering, that there is both moral evil and natural evil. He just says, we've already figured out by definition of God that this must be the best possible world.

8:28 Wes: He actually does give a little proof of the existence of God and he has a really innovative proof from the concept of possibility. So he does actually make an innovation on the ontological argument. That's the very first thing that we read in part one.

8:42 Mark: Yeah, we started about 126 pages in after this opening essay that's mostly about the relationship between faith and reason. This section is called the Essays on the justice of God and the Freedom of Man in the Origin of Evil. And we read parts that we found in a syllabus from the rest of the book. So pages 126 through 390 here and there, and we'll post those on the website.

9:04 Wes: And it's actually a variation on the cosmological argument, not the ontological.

9:08 Mark: But why don't you read it?

9:09 Wes: Let's go to number seven. I'm actually just going to summarize this because you really do have to translate this into contemporary English. He's operating implicitly on his principle sufficient reason. Right. So everything has a cause. And in this case he starts from the concept of possibility. Right. So religiously you might start from the concept of chaos or start from the concept of nothingness in your creation story, but for him it's about possibility. And in a way the existence of possibilities kind of leads to a sort of quantum like collapse that implies the existence of a God.

So if you take the infinite number of possible worlds that might have existed, then you have to say, well, there's got to be a reason why this one in particular existed. And then the argument is that that reason must be a being that is intelligent, that has consciousness, that is capable of understanding. Well, why is that? Because the thing that. That chooses from. So that kind of begs the question, but the thing which is capable of landing on one of these possibilities has to have an internal reference to. To all of the possibilities, which is to say it must be capable of deliberation.

So he's coming up almost with a theory of mind here as implicitly that which is related to possibility. And then if he has the capacity to actually actualize one of those possibilities, of course he's infinitely powerful. And the actualization is an act of will. So you kind of get the general idea. So instead of the traditional cosmological argument where you're just simply saying, look, here's the world. Why something, not nothing, there must have been a infinitely powerful God to create it. He's giving us his cool little Leibniz twist on that and arguing that the concept of possibility and possible worlds implies the existence of a God.

11:02 Mark: I'm not totally sure. So the way that it's actually stated in 7, this version of the cosmological argument, with contingency necessity, I think is in Aristotle itself, is definitely in Aquinas. And the way that it's put here, I think could be read out of one of those. This is the second sentence. One must seek the reason for the existence of the world, which is the whole assemblage of contingent things, and seek it in the subject which carries within it the reason for its existence and which in consequence is necessary and eternal.

11:29 Wes: Then the question is, why would this be an intelligent being? Why isn't that just something in science?

11:35 Mark: Yes, exactly. So I think even Spinoza might buy that part of the necessary and contingent. I'm not completely sure if he goes that far, but he definitely. His arguments for the existence of God were just as summary and like. Yes, the ontological argument. Yes, the cosmological argument, all the basic ones in history work like that. Seems to be the default position of the rationalists. But you're right. So why he's intelligent is the innovation here.

12:00 Wes: Yeah. Why we would call this sort of being God, you don't really get anywhere. The sort of argument always has two steps. One is to say that you need a necessary being. When we did our existence of God episode. Right. Some atheists will argue, well, the universe itself is the necessary being. Yeah, we need a necessary being. The ultimate problem for someone who wants to use a naturalistic framework is that we all instinctually, especially within that framework, we want to say well, everything has a cause. Everything should be scientifically explicable.

And if you have to stop at some point, and there's something irrational at the very beginning, that's unsatisfying. So a scientist like Leibniz wants the first being to have its own explanation, which within itself. But it can't just be irrational and absurd and without explanation. But once you've done that, you have to have a good reason to call it God, and you have to start with trying to get to it, having a mind. And that's the next step.

12:52 Seth: Sections, we don't have to go through it, but just for reference, for anybody who's interested. 272 to 277, he talks about Spinoza specifically and about what it is about Spinoza's conception of God, you know, the impersonal necessary being, but that doesn't have choice and deliberation and how he finds that dissatisfying. So if you're interested in following up specifically on that, those are the sections to look at.

13:18 Mark: Can we read in section 8, so just because we just had the David Lewis episode, the fact that he invents possible worlds, you know, the way that we still use it in modal logic right now. So I wanted to read a little that section 8 there. This is page 129. Now, this supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best. For as a lesser evil is a kind kind of good, even so is a lesser good is a kind of evil, if it stands in the way of a greater good. And there would be something to correct in the actions of God, if it were possible to do better, as in mathematics, when there is no maximum nor minimum, in short, nothing distinguished, everything is done equally, or when that is not possible, nothing at all is done.

So it may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any

14:02 Wes: I call world, the whole succession of the whole agglomeration of all existent things. Lest it be said that several worlds could have existed, existed in different times, in different places, for they must needs be reckoned altogether as one world, or, if you will, as one universe. And even though one should fill at all times and all places, it remains true that one might have filled them in innumerable ways, and that there's an infinitude of possible worlds among which God must needs have chosen the best, since he does nothing without acting in accordance with supreme reason.

14:32 Mark: Good to Get a flavor of his prose.

14:34 Wes: It is difficult, but in the previous section, so his first mention of possible worlds, the idea is that the cause of the world must needs have had regard or reference to all these possible worlds in order to fix upon one of them. The whole idea of contingency, right, is that things might have been otherwise. Any given fact. The cat is on the mat right now in my room. That's something that isn't necessary. It might have been otherwise. And the possibility of that sort of reasoning or this counterfactual reasoning that we do has for Leibniz these metaphysical implications.

Because what makes one thing actual versus another thing actual? Well, causality. But if you do that, and we understand that within the universe in a very practical way, the cat is there for a reason or it's not there for a reason, it either crawled onto the mat or it didn't. And then there's a whole causal sequence that goes as far back as you like. But what if you zoom out, get outside the universe and ask the same question, why this universe instead of another? So it's not just why something, not nothing, it's why this universe, not another universe.

And that's when you do the possible worlds dance. And his answer is that you need to have some being that is internally related, right? Must needs have regard or reference to all these possible worlds. You must have a being who is possibility sensitive. And to be possibility sensitive, according to Leibniz, is just what it is to have a mind. That's how he gets the mind for God.

16:03 Dylan: I like that way of summarizing that. The fact that there are possibilities effectively that have to be chosen between is the mindness of God. Though it's a funny kind of mind, because it's not a mind that wills in the kind of way we think of willing. I guess the out would be perfect willing where you're never tempted, right? The will of God in this case would never be one that would be tempted in a different direction or anything. It would always be acting perfectly. But this many worlds case, I took it to be as him starting from a universe of contingent things that somehow manifestly the world has full of contingencies.

This could have happened or that could have happened and there would have been a different result. And as you said, Wes, there's this causal chain involved to sort of figure it out what the role of necessity is. And the best of world that God manifests is somehow that necessary world that results from the playing out of all those contingencies so that all of these seemingly Contingent events would have to happen just this way. This part of it just reminds me of the monadology. It's all just cranking through all of these seemingly contingent things, or only contingent from our perspective.

And they would be, in that zoomed out way, I suppose, contingent from God's perspective in that there could have been other possibilities, but there is this sort of limit problem that's been satisfied where these contingent events are the ones that optimize to make this the best of all possible worlds. Because of the condition you've set on the character of God.

17:48 Wes: Yeah. So I think what's interesting here is when we say if we're really determinists, then there's a sense in which everything that happens is necessary and predetermined. There's no possibility of anything happening otherwise. And it seems, unless you can reason your way out of it and become a compatibilist, that there's no way that free will fits into that picture. And at the very beginning of that whole causal chain that determines everything is, you know, you could call it the Big Bang if you want. And so if you say this could have been different, I might not have gone to the store today.

Ultimately you're saying, yeah, well, the initial conditions of the Big Bang might have been different, and so the universe might have unfolded differently. And so therefore then you would have stayed home instead of going to the store. But what's interesting in the Leibniz's case is you get a new criterion for the initial singularity. Right? The initial singularity, instead of just being an inexplicable burst from nothingness into somethingness, is a rational criteria of goodness that becomes the initial spark. Because you have a whole bunch of different possibilities and they are inherently comparable in terms of value.

Some are more valuable than others. And the spark that sets everything into existence is a decision that lands down on the thing with the greatest value.

19:01 Dylan: That sounds right, but what's really important there, and it's tied back to the contingency question, is the individual parts don't all have to be maximally good. So whatever that configuration, that arrangement is initially up for grabs.

19:17 Wes: What is the nature of the evaluation? That's the really fascinating question. You say, all right, Leibniz, we're going to grant you that the initial spark for the universe is this evaluative thing that God does. And then you say, well, what are his criteria? How does he do it? And that's where you get some of the fascinating stuff in this.

19:31 Mark: It makes me uncomfortable talking about because it's the best possible world, then everything must have been this way according to God, choosing the best possible world way. That makes it sound like everything is determined. But part of his defense here is going to be a strong defense of libertarian free will, that we actually, each possibility sensitive individual, does have the free will to choose. And there were worlds in which we didn't have the ability to choose. In worlds in which we did have the ability to choose, God determined that it was better overall for us to have the ability to choose.

Even though many of us are going to choose, the worse. There's going to be sin all over the place, there's going to be moral evil all over the place. Leibniz still thinks there's actually more good than evil. That people, on the whole, you know, it's just as an empirical matter that evil is actually going to be the exception.

20:17 Wes: He's a straight up determinist though, and a straight up compatibilist to the core.

20:22 Mark: He's a determinist in that God knows in advance what we're going to choose. But I think that he has to say if we are possibility sensitive and maybe you can find something in the text that corrects this. I'm just. This was my understanding as we were going through that there really is in a sense a real possibility when you are making a choice. Right. You are not merely determined by your genes, you are not merely determined by your character. He does address that. He says, doesn't it seem unfair he's considering this objection that some people are just of stronger characters than others?

Some people have received the gift of faith and some have, you know, so it's not really true that all of us should be held strictly responsible for what we choose, because there are things in our character that make us more likely to choose than others. But, you know, for people that are wired correctly, the people that have been granted the gift of faith or whatever, to say meaningfully that we do have free will has to mean that we could have chosen something else.

21:14 Wes: Well, it just depends on what you mean could have chosen something else. There's freedom in reason, responsiveness and deliberating according to, again, one's awareness of what is good and what the reasons are. But whether or not you do that is something that's actually itself determined whether or not you're capable of doing that, whether or not you end up doing that. And determinism underwrites it. Right. So that we face this paradox. In typical free will arguments, you say, if I'm deliberating about an action and I end up deciding on something.

Someone might just say, well, that's just a deterministic function of brain activity. And then you have to say, well, did I go to the store because I deliberated and thought it was best and developed a plan of action and all that stuff? Or do I explain this in just deterministic terms, in terms of what's going on in the brain? And of course it's both. And so the compatibilism kind of pulls you back into the whole mind body problem. And it's kind of mysterious in the same way that the mind body problem is mysterious, how these deterministic explanations can actually underwrite possibility, sensitivity, reason, responsiveness, all that stuff.

22:20 Dylan: We said that this is all sort of structured. I don't want to use the word determined. There's a maximization problem that he's putting up. It's the best of all possible worlds. And as soon as you read this, you begin to realize that he's leveraging a limit argument in that character. He's making a mathematical argument about the way in which best means best is a maximum. He's got a curve, he's reaching a limit with these combinations. And the stipulation is that because of the character of God, that that's the best of all possible worlds. One thing I wanted to raise about this is that it does seem implied and I didn't see where he evaluates this, and I just might have missed it, is that there is an internal set of constraints as a result of finding this maximum.

That's one of the reasons why you have evil in the world. Right. And there's a kind of balancing act that's happening. It was hard for me not to see that as a kind of de facto set of limits that are on God.

23:23 Wes: Yes. Like what he calls the eternal verities, which are basically just a priori truths, including mathematical truths like two plus two equals four, but also everything that ends up in Kant. Right. The conditions for the possibility of experience are all eternal verity stuff. They're all like Aristotelian categories, substance and all the basic ontological structure of your universe. Unfortunately, God doesn't really have any control. He does have control, according to Leibniz, except to the extent that in his wisdom he wouldn't mess that up. He's not going to make two plus two equal five.

23:56 Mark: They are as a result of his free will. So I found a quote here that supports. I'm still not totally convinced. I feel like a lot of times when he raises free will, it is without explanation. Everybody knows what free will is, but he doesn't actually say, when human beings make choices, could they have in fact chosen something? He doesn't actually give that modern analysis. But here's definitely the picture of human beings like what freedom is for us is very comparable to what it is for God. It's just that we are finite and we don't see all the possibilities.

This is section 154, page 223. He's considering the Paulicians, in other words, St. Paul. So this is a possible objection. Free will must come from two principles, so it can turn toward good or evil. And his answer is no. Free will tends toward the good. If it meets with evil, it is by accident for the reason that this evil is concealed beneath the good and masked, as it were. So he's just stating Plato's principle, you know, that we always go toward the good, contra Augustine, who says, no, no, we actually do sin on purpose. That's just part of our perversion.

24:58 Wes: Yeah. He will argue that what free will cannot be, and this is kind of the naive conception of free will, is just random indeterminacy. Right. Someone will want to say, well, God can't be constrained by reasons. You know, you say he did it because he's wise and he's all powerful. He shouldn't be constrained by such things. And Leibniz will say, look, there's no other conception of free will that makes any sense. You can't just say free will is something I randomly did, something without even a reference to some type of rational deliberation. Why would you call that freedom? And so that prefigures a lot of contemporary compatibilist free will arguments as well.

25:34 Dylan: But that's super key, right, Is that one of the big questions regarding evil is how could there possibly be evil in the world if God is good? And you get steered down this argument that, well, either God is purposefully willing evil or God doesn't exist. The problem of why evil exists, if

25:55 Wes: God is good, essentially and all knowing and all powerful.

25:59 Dylan: Yes, all knowing, all powerful. And what you have Leibniz doing is, and he's not the only one is insisting that God acts reasonably. And that means following the rules of logic, following the rules of mathematics, all those things. And that's the only part of reasonable that we mean. We don't mean that some kind of qualitative choice or something more complicated than following sort of your most basic rules of logic, but they end up being a constraint on it.

26:24 Mark: This is one of the difficulties that I See, in Leibniz, by saying it's constraint on him, that seems to sound like metaphysically, there's a separate thing that's these laws that he is obeying the laws of the best. But Leibniz insists that no, no, he actually is those things. They are the exertions of his will. But I just think that that makes it problematic to talk about him. He's very much against anthropomorphizing God throughout this, that if you say God should be like a king that would not allow his subjects to suffer, and he's like, no, no, no, anthropomorphizing.

He's not like a king that is just exerting his power over it. His will is creating the whole landscape of perfection itself, creating the North Star to which our good free will should turn if it is clear of impediments or whatever that are all brought about by the lack of him. Right? He's not responsible for anything we do wrong for any of the things that are in the way. It's just a matter that he's perfect. And so by definition, everything else, all that he has created has to be imperfect. That's just again, part of his nature, which is the same as the nature of logic itself.

So there's going to be a matter of degree of perfection. This is why I think even if he's not using the ontological argument, even if he doesn't say that, oh, there must be a most perfect thing in existence is part of perfection. Like, luckily he doesn't actually rely on that, but everything in here is very much in the same flavor as what was going on in the ontological argument.

27:50 Seth: A couple things that echo to me out of what you guys were just talking about, the notion of perfection, that a creation cannot be as perfect as the thing that creates it. Right? That comes from the ontological argument. So there's the fact that creation, no matter how beautiful and fantastic and perfect it is, is not going to be completely perfect the way God is. So that's one thing that we have to take into account. The second thing is that thinking about his systematizing theme, the elements, creation as a whole, the perfection of creation as a whole is not equidistributed amongst all of the components of creation.

So there are going to be more and less perfect components of creation precisely because of the relationships that they come into and the ways in which they're going to play out in the drama that is the universe. And that brings up the point where the analogy of talking about God As a ruler or whatever making decisions, God sees the full totality not just of space, but of time. And we shorthand that by talking about causality. But the reality is there's a conceptual gap between our ability to comprehend and think about what it would be to make a decision with full foreknowledge.

It's just the way that we think about decision making. And if you bring your common sense intuition about an indeterminate future and that you're making decisions without knowing the outcomes, it's not going to make sense. The way that Leibniz is talking about

29:15 Wes: this, should we get into some of the ways that he's making his decision about what his criteria are for a best possible world? And I think that starts with number eight.

29:25 Seth: We started with seven, and we're on to eight.

29:27 Wes: We're on to eight. So, I mean, one of the things he describes in section 8 is something like a kind of butterfly effect. Everything is connected. And if you make one tiny adjustment to one part of creation, you change another part, you say, okay, look, someone cut themselves yesterday in their kitchen. Why not just do that one good deed, God, why not just make it the same universe? But that person doesn't cut themselves. For Leibniz, that doesn't work, that move, because everything is causally interconnected, and it's like a big jigsaw puzzle. And if you change that one thing, you change lots of other things. Changing any one tiny part has a big implication for the rest, and then also for the whole it does.

30:11 Dylan: And so he's making the claim that for all those parts, there's one unique maximum solution for them. All of these things are connected to one another, and it's a maximization problem. I have a hard time believing he wouldn't have thought of it. But I don't understand why he doesn't discuss it, that there may be multiple configurations that get you to the maximum. Maybe it's something that he didn't think of, that I might have such a large number of possibilities, and any given arrangement, I might have a billion different arrangements of my 10 to the 300 possibilities or whatever it is, and they might all be equally maximal.

30:53 Wes: Then he has to pick one out of a hat.

30:57 Dylan: What I'm saying is that his way of thinking about the maximum is that not only is there one maximum governed by God's goodness and so forth, is that one maximum has one arrangement of the contingent factors. And it seems a little strange to me that he would not have imagined that there were multiple arrangements of contingent factors that were equal. Now that means this way I'm talking about right now is a mathematical physical way of talking that really does come later. So maybe it just isn't in his vocabulary to think about multiple maximums, or that's sort of a separate idea. Not the global maximum, but individual maximum. But there would be multiple arrangements of the different states of things that led to the same maximal solution.

31:43 Mark: But I'm also thinking about scrutability, per our interview with David Chalmers. Is it really that he has to imagine every single thing, or is there a minimum set that he has to set in place? And then, you know, he can foresee the rest, he can foresee the details, but he doesn't actually have to choose among quite a large a set, as we might think, because the way that the pieces are fit together, it's not like he has to individually move everything. He just has to set the dominoes up in a certain way. And so the dominoes in their positions like those are the minimum, you know, the atomic facts. And then everything else will come out from that. That actually even allows for real free will.

32:23 Dylan: Exactly.

32:24 Mark: It's just that he foresees what the choices people are going to make. That's the way he puts it in nine. God has ordered all things beforehand once and for all, having foreseen prayers, good and bad actions, and all the rest. And each thing is an idea has contributed before its existence to the resolution that has been made upon the existence of all things. So maybe he' thinking of, should I set this person in this situation knowing how much willpower they have? Okay, I see what that comes out to if they make the wrong decision and screw up a lot of other lives is that somehow is this still fit into a bigger picture that makes it better that I allow that person in that situation?

32:58 Wes: And we should keep in mind that big picture is not necessarily the human picture. Right? It's not necessarily about screwing up human lives. This is a point that he makes that it could be that the best possible world from the human perspective is not the best at all. It could be that it's a pretty crappy world for human beings. But that doesn't mean that on the whole it's not the best, because Leibniz is interested in animals and in matter and everything else, and aliens, those things all count if the aliens are rational beings.

33:28 Dylan: But he admits that there could be an infinite number of other intelligent beings in the universe for which those on this earth are an infinitesimal percentage of them, such that the maximum goodness of the universe could be such that we are a local evil minimum.

33:47 Wes: It could be that every other advanced civilization in the universe is just having a good old time and what made that possible was our little hell that we live in.

34:01 Dylan: It seems like it's a corollary argument, right? Is that in this universe of contingencies where you have a maximum, there's going to be a local minimum of all these possibilities. There's going to be. Just like there are individual lives that are worse than others, there's probably a worse life just like there is a best life.

34:17 Wes: He kind of plays around with a lot of different ways that you would make this type of decision with different sorts of criteria. So sometimes, for instance, God sounds kind of like a utilitarian. You might get into some means justifies the ends types of arguments. Well, someone has to suffer here. If the outcome is less suffering overall. Assuming that Leibniz would do that, we just said he would reject that simply focusing on human suffering. But if we did that, you might get into some utilitarian sort of reasoning. Or some of it does sound summative.

Like it sounds like you might think about taking every part of the universe and saying, how evil is it? Let's get an evilness rating and then just sum that up. And then I'm going to run through all the possibilities and whichever gets the highest rating, then that's the one I choose. But the more sophisticated than the one that Leibniz seems to like the best is the more what I've called kind of criterion of emergence. One of his examples is two evils adding up to a good in the same way that two liquids might produce a solid. And similarly, I like to think about, when I think about emergence.

So water, right? If you thought that oxygen was really terrible in and of itself and that hydrogen was great, and then you said, well, what do I get when I add oxygen and hydrogen? And I wanted to add and subtract. That's not the way to do it. What I think about, I have to evaluate the emergent phenomenon of water as we know it as this liquid, as this refreshing thing and whatever macro level properties that water has. So I completely shift my evaluation from the internal makeup and composition of something to the sort of outside global perspective.

And I think what Leibniz is thinking is that you can do the same thing with the universe so that everything as it looks from the inside, that doesn't really give you the relevant criteria. I talk about suffering, I talk about this, I talk about that. That's like talking about the molecules in Water. When what I'm interested in is the emergent phenomenon. In the case of the universe, that's something that's available only to God, that emergent phenomenon. In fact, we don't even know what that means. Leibniz can't tell us. Obviously, it's a mystery.

36:26 Mark: And there still are Hindenburgians that believe that flying with hydrogen is awesome. It's just that fucking oxygen that was around that allowed the thing to explode. Damn oxygen.

36:35 Wes: Exactly.

36:36 Mark: Just flew it in a vacuum.

36:38 Wes: There you go.

36:40 Seth: Actually, Wes, I think that's really interesting because if you do try to figure out what the calculus is that God is going through to make the decision of what constitutes the best of all possible worlds, it sounds like that concept of best implies some kind of finitude in the form of an end state. How would you judge the totality if you didn't have at some point an end to the universe where you could say it ended up in the best possible state? Right. You'd have to conceive of it as something, as you said, emergent, where it's. Maybe it's generating the best possible outcomes over time. And I think that's an interesting complexity.

37:19 Wes: I think the problem is he throws a lot of different stuff at the wall here. And, like, I just concentrated on the emergent one, but he does get into the parts as well. Like, he'll want to say things like, our suffering actually makes the good things better, for instance, like he gives certain psychological explanations. What he's getting at there is that there are these internal structural constraints that the very concept of good, if it has something to do with experience of conscious beings, there may be internal constraints that make goodness from that perspective, impossible unless we introduce suffering.

37:53 Mark: I just want to be clear that because he has set us up that this is the best possible world with a pure a priori argument, just based on pure reason, that shifts the burden of proof. Whereas if you were just going in and saying, hmm, I don't know, is the world the best one? Or not? Let's look at stuff, then it might be really hard to get up to it being the best. But if you start with it is the best unless you can prove otherwise, and then people raise all these things and he's like, come on, stop complaining. Like he explicitly says, you're insisting on seeing the downside of things.

Surely there are upsides to nearly every case of suffering. You know, this, of course, then drives you to come up with the worst possible thing you can think of. And he at least can say, well, look, it's at least conceivable that this sort of thing that looks totally bad when combined with something else could result in a better overall picture that we just can't see. So it does actually, in that sense, come down to faith. But it's not faith in like, this is something I can't rationally understand. I just need to have faith. It's no faith in your rationality that you have established beforehand God's awesomeness to rise up and recognize that you might need to have faith in the face of certain exact sufferings.

39:03 Wes: This is not an argument that we live in the best possible world. That's not what this is about. This is an argument this says, we assume that God would create the best possible world. Now let's say how it's possible that that's true given everything we know. And it seems very counterintuitive. So let's see if we can say why that's possible. And that argument, Mark, that you mentioned, that we make our suffering worse when we concentrate on it, that's one of his interesting psychological arguments. Because what it says is that the experience of suffering is not a fixed quantity when we do our evaluations, right? It has to be identified relationally. I can't say that any one experience in a given person when I'm doing my. As a God doing my possible world calculations counts as X amount of goodness or X amount of badness.

39:47 Mark: He would not like Bentham. Bentham's calculus. It would not capture the subtlety that he thinks would be that only God could get a handle on. I would be interested to hear what he would actually have to say about the sheer gall of people trying to count pleasures.

40:00 Dylan: I'm not sure if it's related to the. To the Bentham case, but it does make the individual calculus of one's own contingency. It feels like it's a hard sell. You know, you could pick your spectrum of favorite sufferings, right? But the experience of that suffering, the balm for it is that, well, if you take the sum total of all the suffering in the world, it actually turns out okay even though you're being tortured or even though you're living a miserable, deprived life. When all is said and done, the world is pretty good place. And in one's individual contingency, that can be a hard sell.

40:35 Seth: Yeah, I remember this. I don't know if I said, on a T shirt or something, I said, you have to entertain the possibility that your life is just to serve as a warning to others, right? And when you're talking about aliens, like I just thought about expanding that. It's just like, what if the purpose of the human race is to just be a demonstration to all of the other superior alien races of what not to do? But you know, that's the best of all possible worlds for them because. And there's multiple civilizations because then they get to see like, oh, this is what evil looks like.

And oh yeah, now we understand and we can change our behavior without having to actually go through it all. I have a really hard time with that because there's a very deep, deep conservative Judaic argument that relates to the contractual arrangement with God in the Torah that says God says if you obey these laws, then you get this piece of land and some other stuff happens. Then whenever suffering is brought down upon the Jews, they say, well, it's because you're not obeying the laws. And if you just obey the laws, then you wouldn't be suffering.

And so it becomes this argument for this ultra conservative orthodox and the idea that certain kinds of suffering are deserved because of your behavior. You know, it's one thing to talk about perpetrating crimes and then we talk about justice and whatever, but to say that you're destined to suffer because you're not meeting some criteria or you're not following some, I find that really, really hard to deal with. And this type of argument that like, well, this is the best of all possible worlds and yeah, your individual circumstances may suck, but okay, well that doesn't help me.

Why are we even spending time if the whole point of your philosophy is to tell me to just shut up. It's like kind of like rational stoicism, then no thank you.

42:22 Mark: I think it's apologetics. So he considers these really harsh things like Calvinism in particular. In section four he's talking about beyond just the suffering that we witness. What about these views that but a small number of men will be saved, all the rest will perish eternally. So he considers those things and those are compatible with still there being some grand plan. But he seems to be a good natured guy who does not believe in that kind of stuff that we can a priori rule out the idea that as countless men in childhood or maturity that have never heard or have not heard enough of Jesus Christ's savior of the human race die before receiving the necessary succor for their withdrawal from the abyss of sin. This is like the kind of thing Bayle is putting forward. He rules out that kind of theology.

43:03 Wes: He wants to say everyone goes to heaven ultimately but if we take the emergence thing seriously, then we have to admit that the best possible world from one perspective could be the worst possible world from another. And it could be that the best possible world from God's perspective is the worst possible world from the human perspective. Because God, right, is standing on the outside looking at the macro level phenomenon and saying, that's good. That may require that at the molecular level, so to speak, that internally that everything be hellish. You know, maybe what supervenes on hellishness is the best possible world.

43:39 Seth: Yeah, but ultimately, of what use is that thought process? What is even the point of going through that intellectual exercise?

43:46 Mark: If he really stopped where Wes said he stopped, then that leaves open the existentialist to say, God, you can try to define goodness in that way all you want, but I live in the human world and we have to define it according to ways that we actually understand. So screw you and your laws. We're not going to obey that anymore. Like, even though that's open to him to be a hard ass like that and say, like Wes did, that we could be essentially like the Matrix. Like we could be just fuels for some, some superior species that is capable. Those are the ones that are all going to go to heaven and we're just little bugs on their shoe.

I think Leibniz is fervently committed to the idea that, no, we actually can understand goodness. He's like Plato, that God is the light that is shining. And every time we investigate anything or do any serious moral thought, we are led toward the obvious perfection that is God. So following his laws is essentially turning toward that light. He just sees the whole nature is shot through with morality in this way that, that really rules out the radical disconnection that Wes was just describing.

44:52 Wes: I'm not sure that it's ruled out. I mean, he does say, right, that this doesn't mean it's the best possible world for human beings. He explicitly says that.

44:58 Mark: But still, good and bad are discernible.

45:01 Dylan: I agree that he says that and he says the stuff about the aliens and says, well, he makes all these kind of clever limit mathematical arguments, but in the end I think his own intuition is that the whole of the world is the Earth and that the whole of the contingency is human experience. And that in the end it's more common that we don't pay enough attention to the good stuff, like in 13, he says, but it will be said that the evils are great and many in number in comparison to the good that is erroneous. It is only want of attention that diminishes our good, and this attention must be given to us through some admixtures of evils.

If we were usually sick and seldom in good health, we should be wonderfully sensible to that great good, and we should be less sensible to our evils. But is it not better, notwithstanding that our health should be usual and sickness the exception? I think that he basically thinks that's true in general.

45:51 Wes: Yeah. And that argument gets at certain structural constraints for the architect. So in the same way that you can't make an arch without a.

46:01 Mark: Is it a keystone without a space under the arch?

46:04 Wes: The spandrel.

46:05 Mark: Yeah.

46:05 Wes: Well, there are structural implications. When I say I'm making an arch, there are other structural elements implied. And this comes up in biology. Right. Because evolutionarily, some traits are thought to be. You wouldn't say they're selected for, they're structural byproducts of traits that are selected for. They're just grounds for the conditions of those traits. So what Leibniz is saying here, and what he's going to get into more detail in, in section 20 onwards, is that if you think about the nature of existence or the nature of consciousness, it just may be that what we call evil is built into the very nature of it.

It may be that evil is built into the very nature of what we call good. That's what that psychological argument implies. At the very least, our awareness of good may be critically tied to our awareness of evil, or our experience of pleasure may be critically tied to the possibility of experiencing pain, and so on.

46:56 Mark: All right, so we're going to get into some of those details in part two. See you.