ABSTRACT
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s one published book, the Essays in Theodicy, is the culmination of his lifelong interest in the problem of evil – that is, the problem of reconciling the presence of evils in the world with the existence of a just, benevolent, and omnipotent God. From Leibniz’s revision of Malebranche’s teachings, it is natural to infer that the criteria in terms of which possible worlds are evaluated are exclusively physical; the criteria concern such things as the properties of laws and the range of phenomena to be explained in terms of those laws. Leibniz’s commitment to God’s concern to promote the happiness of minds is beyond dispute, but it raises an obvious problem. Leibniz’s dominant view thus seems to be that the best possible world is the one that achieves the optimal balance between moral and physical perfection. Leibniz’s basic commitments serve his theodicy better than they serve his theory of freedom.
