Abstract
It is sometimes argued that if God were to exist, then the actual world would be the best possible world. However, given that the actual world is clearly not the best possible world, then God doesn’t exist. In response, some have argued that the world could always be improved with the creation of new people and that there is thus no best possible world. I argue that this reasoning gives rise to an instance of Parfit’s mere addition paradox and should thus be rejected. Others (Robert Adams, in particular) have argued that the actual world may, in fact, be the best possible world, at least for all actual people. I argue that this reasoning gives rise to Parfit’s non-identity problem and should thus be rejected.
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Notes
This name is coined by Brown and Nagasawa (2005). Note that my formulation of the argument differs somewhat from theirs. Also, I don’t here consider their response to the argument.
The argument that follows is developed in greater detail by Grover (1999).
But couldn’t God always improve the world by creating new people whose well-being is equal to or greater than that of the people already in existence? Unfortunately this ad hoc attempt to side-step the mere addition paradox gives rise to unacceptable implications. For instance, on this view, the order in which God creates people is given undue significance. (God acts wrongly if he creates Happier before Happy, but not vice versa.)
If happiness is analyzed in terms of preference satisfaction, a person will be as happy as she can be if all her preferences are satisfied. (It is implausible to claim that a person is better off when she acquires new preferences. See Fehige 1998.) Alternatively, if happiness is analyzed in terms of an objective list of basic goods, then ultimate happiness will consist in one’s obtaining (or otherwise appropriately partaking in) all of these goods.
This conception of the best possible world needs to be adjusted in light of the proposal presented later in the paper. There I suggest that even when every actual person is as happy as she can be, the world would be better if happier people could have existed in the place of at least some actual people. So, I suggest that the best possible world would be one in which (a) every person is as happy as she can be, and (b) there is no happier person who could have existed in the place of any actual person.
See Adams (1979: 58). Here, and in what follows, I present a simplified reconstruction of Adams’ arguments that doesn’t do justice to their subtlety and complexity.
Adams, in fact, develops a somewhat different argument to this. He emphasizes that it may not be unfair to be the victim of some evil when one owes one’s existence to God’s policy of permitting such evils, in general (Adams 1979: 58-59). There is something unsatisfying about this approach, however. Even if the victim of a tsunami can’t reasonably complain about God’s policy of permitting tsunamis, in general (because she owes her existence to such a policy), surely she can still complain that the precise enactment of the policy involved a tsunami in her own village. The argument in the text represents how Adams should have argued, in my view.
Caspar Hare introduces the idea of duties to people de dicto by reporting a joke from Zsa Zsa Gabor, who apparently claimed that, by continually divorcing and then re-marrying, she was doing the good deed of keeping ‘her husband’ young and healthy. See Hare (2007: 514).
Thanks to Morgan Luck and Nick Trakakis for helpful comments on this paper.
References
Adams, R. M. (1979). Existence, self-interest, and the problem of evil. Noûs, 13, 53–65.
Brown, C., & Nagasawa, Y. (2005). The best of all possible worlds. Synthese, 143, 309–320.
Fehige, C. (1998). A pareto principle for possible people. In C. Fehige & U. Wessels (Eds.), Preferences. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Grover, S. (1999). Mere addition and the best of all possible worlds. Religious Studies, 35, 173–190.
Hare, C. (2007). Voices from another world: Must we respect the interests of people who do not, and will never, exist? Ethics, 117, 498–523.
Parfit, D. (1987). Reasons and persons. Clarendon: Oxford University Press.
Swinburne, R. (2004). The existence of God (2nd ed.). Clarendon: Oxford University Press.
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Cohen, D. Creating the Best Possible World: Some Problems from Parfit. SOPHIA 48, 143–150 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0098-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-009-0098-3