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ABSTRACT
Recent work in the philosophy of religion has resurrected Leibniz’s idea that there is a best possible world, perhaps ours. In particular, Klaas Kraay’s [2010] construction of a theistic multiverse and Nevin Climenhaga’s [2018] argument from infinite value theory are novel defences of a best possible world. I do not think that there is a best world, and I show how both Kraay and Climenhaga may be resisted. First, I argue that Kraay’s construction of a theistic multiverse can be resisted from plausible assumptions about set theory. Next, I argue against the value-theoretic assumptions that underlie Climenhaga’s argument, and I show how to give an infinite value theory where there is no best world.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 A urelement is anything that is not a set—like a table or a person.
2 See Colyvan [Citation2006, Citation2008] and Colyvan and Hájek [2017].
3 But see Chen and Rubio [Citationforthcoming] on why you cannot replace infinite numbers with very large finite numbers.
4 The interested reader should consult Conway [1974] for the basics, and Chen and Rubio [Citationforthcoming] for a clear presentation of, and argument for, their use in decision theory.
5 Indeed, in the case in which we are interested (a world where every life is infinitely valuable), even views where removing someone with a positive but low level of well-being improves the world will not apply when everyone has the same infinitely high level of welfare.
6 Indeed, this is precisely the assumption made by the Priorean semantic tradition in tense logic, as typified by Belnap and Green [Citation1994].
7 Climenhaga also entertains the possibility that people are worldbound, and so can only exist in one world. He doesn’t say much about this case, but the defender of worldbound individuals must say something about the semantics of de re modal claims. Even if I am worldbound, I could have had an older sister. Since I do not actually have an older sister, as long as I could have had an older sister without excluding someone else from the world, God could have created a superset of the people who are actual. Even if we do not exist in other worlds, it will be a de re modal fact about me that I could have had an older sister, and a de re modal fact about everyone else that they (together with me) could have shared a planet, galaxy, universe, or multiverse with my older sister, and so, no matter how Climenhaga deals with de re modal facts, he will have to say that there could have been everyone that there is, and then some. This is so, at any rate, unless he has an argument that including anyone who is not actual necessarily excludes someone who is.
8 In the easy case, consider someone who is not actual but could have been, but would have died as an infant, long before they could have an effect on which couples proceed to make children.
9 I should reiterate that I am happy to let surreal numbers stand for values. But then it will not follow, from the fact that we have represented the value of a life with a surreal infinite number, that it cannot be improved. Every surreal infinite number can be increased by adding even a very small number to it. I am not insisting on surreals here, because to adopt either surreal or cardinal numbers would be to beg the question, and I can answer the argument without resorting to them. I should note, however, that a surreal value theory, as in Chen and Rubio [Citationforthcoming, Citationmanuscript], is perfectly adequate to representing infinitely valuable yet improvable lives.
10 Thanks to Nevin Climenhaga, Dean Zimmerman, Chris Hauser, Klaas Kraay, Christina van Dyke, and audiences at Rutgers and Notre Dame for helpful comments that went into the construction of this paper.