Leibniz on evil

In his novella Candide, or Optimism, Voltaire introduces a character named Pangloss, a German professor who teaches that one should be content with the calamities that occur in the world, since this is the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss’s naïve optimism is considered a caricature of the positions G.W. Leibniz defended. ² These views were greatly discredited in European intellectual circles after the spectacle of natural and moral evil shown during Lisbon’s earthquake in 1755. The intellectual environment of the critics of the mid-eighteenth century, however, differed sharply from the context of concerns that gave rise to the release of Essays of Theodicy in 1710, Leibniz’s main work on the problem of evil. The term Theodicy, coined by Leibniz himself, is a compound of “justice” (in Greek, diké) and “God” (in Greek, theós), meaning “the justification of God.” The primary aim of the book was to reply to the fideistic arguments of Pierre Bayle, who, in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (and more precisely in the entry on Manicheans), defended the position that human reason cannot give a satisfactory answer to the problem of the apparent incompatibility between the existence of evil and God’s goodness and wisdom. Leibniz’s Theodicy, however, is the highlight of a continuous reflection that lasted his entire life. His concern with the problem of evil appears in his very early works, such as On the Omnipotence and Omniscience of God and the Freedom of Man (1670–1671?) and The Confession of a Philosopher (1672–1673?), reappearing constantly in every stage of his philosophical production. In this context, rather than earthquakes and natural evils, ³ Leibniz’s main concern was to make compatible the different theological positions of his time concerning the justice of God given the unequal dispensation of grace, salvation, and damnation. ⁴ As he states in The Confession of a Philosopher:

If God is delighted by the happiness of everyone, why did he not make everyone happy? If he loves everyone, how is it that he damns so many? If he is just, how is it that he presents himself as so unfair that from matter that is the same in every respect, from the same clay, he brings forth some vessels intended for honor, others intended for disgrace? And how is it that he is not a promoter of sin if, having knowledge of it (though he could have eliminated it from the world), he admitted it or tolerated it? Indeed, how is it that he is not the author of sin, if he created everything in such a manner that sin followed? And what of free choice, when the necessity of sin has been posited, and what of the justice of punishment, when free choice has been taken away? And what of the justice of reward, if grace alone brings it about that some are distinguished from others? Finally, if God is the ultimate ground of things, what do we impute to men and what to devils?

(A VI 3: 118; trans. CP: 33) ⁵