The best of all possibleworlds

Campbell Brown; Yujin Nagasawa

doi:10.1007/s11229-005-7043-y

The best of all possibleworlds

Campbell Brown^*, Yujin Nagasawa

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The Argument from Inferiority holds that our world cannot be the creation of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being; for if it were it would be the best of all possible worlds which evidently it is not. We argue that this argument rests on an implausible principle concerning which worlds it is permissible for an omnipotent being to create: roughly the principle that such a being ought not to create a non-best world. More specifically we argue that this principle is plausible only if we assume that there is a best element in the set of all possible worlds. However as we show there are conceivable scenarios in which that assumption does not hold.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	309-320
Number of pages	12
Journal	Synthese
Volume	143
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-7043-y
Publication status	Published - Feb 2005

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The best of all possibleworlds

Abstract

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