Absurdism

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism

 

Sisyphus, the symbol of the absurdity of existence, painting by Franz Stuck (1920)

In philosophy, "the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find these with any certainty. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd; rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.

The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus stated that individuals should embrace the absurd condition of human existence.

Absurdism shares some concepts, and a common theoretical template, with existentialism and nihilism. It has its origins in the work of the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who chose to confront the crisis that humans face with the Absurd by developing his own existentialist philosophy. Absurdism as a belief system was born of the European existentialist movement that ensued, specifically when Camus rejected certain aspects of that philosophical line of thought and published his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The aftermath of World War II provided the social environment that stimulated absurdist views and allowed for their popular development, especially in the devastated country of France.

Contents

• 1 Overview
• 2 Relationship to existentialism and nihilism
• 3 Søren Kierkegaard
• 4 Albert Camus
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 Further reading
• 8 External links

Overview

... in spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible – no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other – no, that he will not do for all the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself – with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be.

– Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

See also: Existentialism § The absurd

In absurdist philosophy, the Absurd arises out of the fundamental disharmony between the individual's search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. In absurdist philosophy, there are also two certainties that permeate human existence. The first is that humans are constantly striving towards the acquisition or identification with meaning and significance. It seems to be an inherent thing in human nature that urges the individual to define meaning in their lives. The second certainty is that the universe's silence and indifference to human life give the individual no assurance of any such meaning, leading to an existential dread within themselves. According to Camus, when the desire to find meaning and the lack of meaning collide, this is when the absurd is highlighted. The question then brought up becomes whether we should resign ourselves to this despair. As beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world, humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma. Kierkegaard and Camus describe the solutions in their works, The Sickness Unto Death (1849) and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), respectively:

• Suicide (or, "escaping existence"): a solution in which a person ends one's own life. Both Kierkegaard and Camus dismiss the viability of this option. Camus states that it does not counter the Absurd. Rather, in the act of ending one's existence, one's existence only becomes more absurd.
• Religious, spiritual, or abstract belief in a transcendent realm, being, or idea: a solution in which one believes in the existence of a reality that is beyond the Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. Kierkegaard stated that a belief in anything beyond the Absurd requires an irrational but perhaps necessary religious "leap" into the intangible and empirically unprovable (now commonly referred to as a "leap of faith"). However, Camus regarded this solution, and others, as "philosophical suicide".
• Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts the Absurd and continues to live in spite of it. Camus endorsed this solution, believing that by accepting the Absurd, one can achieve the greatest extent of one's freedom. By recognizing no religious or other moral constraints, and by rebelling against the Absurd (through meaning-making) while simultaneously accepting it as unstoppable, one could find contentment through the transient personal meaning constructed in the process. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, regarded this solution as "demoniac madness": "He rages most of all at the thought that eternity might get it into its head to take his misery from him!"

Relationship to existentialism and nihilism

Absurdism originated from (as well as alongside) the 20th-century strains of existentialism and nihilism; it shares some prominent starting points with both, though also entails conclusions that are uniquely distinct from these other schools of thought. All three arose from the human experience of anguish and confusion stemming from existence: the apparent meaninglessness of a world in which humans, nevertheless, are compelled to find or create meaning. The three schools of thought diverge from there. Existentialists have generally advocated the individual's construction of their own meaning in life as well as the free will of the individual. Nihilists, on the contrary, contend that "it is futile to seek or to affirm meaning where none can be found." Absurdists, following Camus's formulation, hesitantly allow the possibility for some meaning or value in life, but are neither as certain as existentialists are about the value of one's own constructed meaning nor as nihilists are about the total inability to create meaning. Absurdists following Camus also devalue or outright reject free will, encouraging merely that the individual live defiantly and authentically in spite of the psychological tension of the Absurd.

Camus himself passionately worked to counter nihilism, as he explained in his essay "The Rebel", while he also categorically rejected the label of "existentialist" in his essay "Enigma" and in the compilation The Lyrical and Critical Essays of Albert Camus, though he was, and still is, often broadly characterized by others as an existentialist. Both existentialism and absurdism entail consideration of the practical applications of becoming conscious of the truth of existential nihilism: i.e., how a driven seeker of meaning should act when suddenly confronted with the seeming concealment, or downright absence, of meaning in the universe. Camus's own understanding of the world (e.g., "a benign indifference", in The Stranger), and every vision he had for its progress, however, sets him apart from the general existentialist trend.

Basic relationships between existentialism, absurdism and nihilism Monotheistic existentialism Atheistic existentialism Absurdism Nihilism 1. There is such a thing as meaning or value: Yes Yes It is a logical possibility. No 2. There is inherent meaning in the universe: Yes, but the individual must have come to the knowledge of God. No No No 3. The pursuit of meaning may have meaning in itself: Yes Yes Such a pursuit can and should generate meaning for an individual, but death still renders the activity "ultimately" meaningless. No 4. The individual's construction of any type of meaning is possible: Yes, though this meaning would eventually incorporate God, being the creator of the universe and the "meaning" itself. Yes, meaning-making in a world without inherent meaning is the goal of existentialism. Yes, though it must face up to the Absurd, which means embracing the transient, personal nature of our meaning-making projects and the way they are nullified by death.[8] No 5. There is resolution to the individual's desire to seek meaning: Yes, the creation of one's own meaning involving God. Yes, the creation of one's own meaning. Embracing the absurd can allow one to find joy and meaning in one's own life, but the only "resolution" is in eventual annihilation by death. No

Such a chart represents some of the overlap and tensions between existentialist and absurdist approaches to meaning. While absurdism can be seen as a kind of response to existentialism, it can be debated exactly how substantively the two positions differ from each other. The existentialist, after all, doesn't deny the reality of death. But the absurdist seems to reaffirm the way in which death ultimately nullifies our meaning-making activities, a conclusion the existentialists seem to resist through various notions of posterity or, in Sartre's case, participation in a grand humanist project.

Søren Kierkegaard

Main article: Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard designed the relationship framework based (in part) on how a person reacts to despair. Absurdist philosophy fits into the 'despair of defiance' rubric.

A century before Camus, the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote extensively about the absurdity of the world. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes about the absurd:

What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act... The Absurd, or to act by virtue of the absurd, is to act upon faith ... I must act, but reflection has closed the road so I take one of the possibilities and say: This is what I do, I cannot do otherwise because I am brought to a standstill by my powers of reflection.

— Kierkegaard, Søren, Journals, 1849

Here is another example of the Absurd from his writings:

What, then, is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence, has been born, has grown up. etc., has come into existence exactly as an individual human being, indistinguishable from any other human being, in as much as all immediate recognizability is pre-Socratic paganism and from the Jewish point of view is idolatry.
—Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846, Hong 1992, p. 210

How can this absurdity be held or believed? Kierkegaard says:

I gladly undertake, by way of brief repetition, to emphasize what other pseudonyms have emphasized. The absurd is not the absurd or absurdities without any distinction (wherefore Johannes de Silentio: "How many of our age understand what the absurd is?"). The absurd is a category, and the most developed thought is required to define the Christian absurd accurately and with conceptual correctness. The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd — if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge. The absurd terminates negatively before the sphere of faith, which is a sphere by itself. To a third person the believer relates himself by virtue of the absurd; so must a third person judge, for a third person does not have the passion of faith. Johannes de Silentio has never claimed to be a believer; just the opposite, he has explained that he is not a believer — in order to illuminate faith negatively.
—Journals of Søren Kierkegaard X6B 79

Kierkegaard provides an example in Fear and Trembling (1843), which was published under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. In the story of Abraham in the Book of Genesis, Abraham is told by God to kill his son Isaac. Just as Abraham is about to kill Isaac, an angel stops Abraham from doing so. Kierkegaard believes that through virtue of the absurd, Abraham, defying all reason and ethical duties ("you cannot act"), got back his son and reaffirmed his faith ("where I have to act").

Another instance of absurdist themes in Kierkegaard's work appears in The Sickness Unto Death, which Kierkegaard signed with pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Exploring the forms of despair, Kierkegaard examines the type of despair known as defiance. In the opening quotation reproduced at the beginning of the article, Kierkegaard describes how such a man would endure such a defiance and identifies the three major traits of the Absurd Man, later discussed by Albert Camus: a rejection of escaping existence (suicide), a rejection of help from a higher power and acceptance of his absurd (and despairing) condition.

According to Kierkegaard in his autobiography The Point of View of My Work as an Author, most of his pseudonymous writings are not necessarily reflective of his own opinions. Nevertheless, his work anticipated many absurdist themes and provided its theoretical background.

Albert Camus

Though the notion of the 'absurd' pervades all Albert Camus's writing, The Myth of Sisyphus is his chief work on the subject. In it, Camus considers absurdity as a confrontation, an opposition, a conflict or a "divorce" between two ideals. Specifically, he defines the human condition as absurd, as the confrontation between man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity on the one hand – and the silent, cold universe on the other. He continues that there are specific human experiences evoking notions of absurdity. Such a realization or encounter with the absurd leaves the individual with a choice: suicide, a leap of faith, or recognition. He concludes that recognition is the only defensible option.

For Camus, suicide is a "confession" that life is not worth living; it is a choice that implicitly declares that life is "too much." Suicide offers the most basic "way out" of absurdity: the immediate termination of the self and its place in the universe.

The absurd encounter can also arouse a "leap of faith," a term derived from one of Kierkegaard's early pseudonyms, Johannes de Silentio (although the term was not used by Kierkegaard himself), where one believes that there is more than the rational life (aesthetic or ethical). To take a "leap of faith," one must act with the "virtue of the absurd" (as Johannes de Silentio put it), where a suspension of the ethical may need to exist. This faith has no expectations, but is a flexible power initiated by a recognition of the absurd. (Although at some point, one recognizes or encounters the existence of the Absurd and, in response, actively ignores it.) However, Camus states that because the leap of faith escapes rationality and defers to abstraction over personal experience, the leap of faith is not absurd. Camus considers the leap of faith as "philosophical suicide," rejecting both this and physical suicide.

Lastly, a person can choose to embrace the absurd condition. According to Camus, one's freedom – and the opportunity to give life meaning – lies in the recognition of absurdity. If the absurd experience is truly the realization that the universe is fundamentally devoid of absolutes, then we as individuals are truly free. "To live without appeal," as he puts it, is a philosophical move to define absolutes and universals subjectively, rather than objectively. The freedom of humans is thus established in a human's natural ability and opportunity to create their own meaning and purpose; to decide (or think) for him- or herself. The individual becomes the most precious unit of existence, representing a set of unique ideals that can be characterized as an entire universe in its own right. In acknowledging the absurdity of seeking any inherent meaning, but continuing this search regardless, one can be happy, gradually developing meaning from the search alone.

Camus states in The Myth of Sisyphus: "Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death, and I refuse suicide." "Revolt" here refers to the refusal of suicide and search for meaning despite the revelation of the Absurd; "Freedom" refers to the lack of imprisonment by religious devotion or others' moral codes; "Passion" refers to the most wholehearted experiencing of life, since hope has been rejected, and so he concludes that every moment must be lived fully.

Moral relativism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism 

Moral relativism or ethical relativism (often reformulated as relativist ethics or relativist morality) is a term used to describe several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different peoples and their own particular cultures. An advocate of such ideas is often labeled simply as a relativist for short. In detail, descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this. Meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong. Normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, everyone ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when considerably large disagreements about the morality of particular things exist.

Said concepts of the different intellectual movements involve considerable nuance and cannot be treated as absolute descriptions. Descriptive relativists do not necessarily adopt meta-ethical relativism. Moreover, not all meta-ethical relativists adopt normative relativism.

American philosopher Richard Rorty in particular has argued that the label of being a "relativist" has become warped and turned into a sort of pejorative. He has written specifically that thinkers labeled as such usually simply believe "that the grounds for choosing between such [philosophical] opinions is less algorithmic than had been thought", not that every single conceptual idea is as valid as any other. In this spirit, Rorty has lamented that "philosophers have... become increasingly isolated from the rest of culture."

Moral relativism is generally posed as a direct antithesis to "moral idealism" (also known as "ethical idealism" and "principled idealism"). Through an idealistic framework, examples being that of Kantianism and other doctrines advocated during the Enlightenment era, certain behavior seen as contrary to higher ideals often gets labeled as not only morally wrong but fundamentally irrational. However, like many fuzzy concepts, the distinction between idealist and relativist viewpoints is frequently vague.

Moral relativism has been debated for thousands of years across a variety of contexts during the history of civilization. Arguments of particular notability have been made in areas such as ancient Greece and historical India while discussions have continued to the present day. Besides the material created by philosophers, the concept has additionally attracted attention in diverse fields including art, religion, and science.

Variations

Descriptive

Descriptive moral relativism is merely the positive or descriptive position that there exist, in fact, fundamental disagreements about the right course of action even when the same facts hold true and the same consequences seem likely to arise. It is the observation that different cultures have different moral standards.

Descriptive relativists do not necessarily advocate the tolerance of all behavior in light of such disagreement; that is to say, they are not necessarily normative relativists. Likewise, they do not necessarily make any commitments to the semantics, ontology, or epistemology of moral judgement; that is, not all descriptive relativists are meta-ethical relativists.

Descriptive relativism is a widespread position in academic fields such as anthropology and sociology, which simply admit that it is incorrect to assume that the same moral or ethical frameworks are always in play in all historical and cultural circumstances.

Meta-ethical

Meta-ethical moral relativists believe not only that people disagree about moral issues, but that terms such as "good", "bad", "right" and "wrong" do not stand subject to universal truth conditions at all; rather, they are relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of an individual or a group of people. The American anthropologist William Graham Sumner was an influential advocate of this view. He argues in his 1906 work Folkways that what people consider right and wrong is shaped entirely - not primarily - by the traditions, customs, and practices of their culture. Moreover, since in his analysis of human understanding there cannot be any higher moral standard than that provided by the local morals of a culture, no trans-cultural judgement about the rightness or wrongness of a culture's morals could possibly be justified.

Meta-ethical relativists are, first, descriptive relativists: they believe that, given the same set of facts, some societies or individuals will have a fundamental disagreement about what a person ought to do or prefer (based on societal or individual norms). What's more, they argue that one cannot adjudicate these disagreements using any available independent standard of evaluation—any appeal to a relevant standard would always be merely personal or at best societal.

This view contrasts with moral universalism, which argues that, even though well-intentioned persons disagree, and some may even remain unpersuadable (e.g. someone who is closed-minded), there is still a meaningful sense in which an action could be more "moral" (morally preferable) than another; that is, they believe there are objective standards of evaluation that seem worth calling "moral facts"—regardless of whether they are universally accepted.

Normative

Normative moral relativists believe not only the meta-ethical thesis, but that it has normative implications on what we ought to do. Normative moral relativists argue that meta-ethical relativism implies that we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when it runs counter to our personal or cultural moral standards. Most philosophers do not agree, partially because of the challenges of arriving at an "ought" from relativistic premises. Meta-ethical relativism seems to eliminate the normative relativist's ability to make prescriptive claims. In other words, normative relativism may find it difficult to make a statement like "we think it is moral to tolerate behaviour" without always adding "other people think intolerance of certain behaviours is moral". Philosophers like Russell Blackford even argue that intolerance is, to some degree, important. As he puts it, "we need not adopt a quietism about moral traditions that cause hardship and suffering. Nor need we passively accept the moral norms of our own respective societies, to the extent that they are ineffective or counterproductive or simply unnecessary". That is, it is perfectly reasonable (and practical) for a person or group to defend their subjective values against others, even if there is no universal prescription or morality. We can also criticize other cultures for failing to pursue even their own goals effectively.

The moral relativists may also still try to make sense of non-universal statements like "in this country, it is wrong to do X" or even "to me, it is right to do Y".

Moral universalists argue further that their system often does justify tolerance, and that disagreement with moral systems does not always demand interference, and certainly not aggressive interference. For example, the utilitarian might call another society's practice 'ignorant' or 'less moral', but there would still be much debate about courses of action (e.g. whether to focus on providing better education, or technology, etc.).

History

While British philosopher David Hume did not advocate for relativist views of morality per se and held nuanced opinions, his thinking has been widely influential in the development of relativism.

Moral relativism encompasses views and arguments that people in various cultures have held over several thousand years. For example, the ancient Jaina Anekantavada principle of Mahavira (c. 599–527 BC) states that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth; and the Greek philosopher Protagoras (c. 481–420 BC) famously asserted that "man is the measure of all things". The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–420 BC) observed that each society regards its own belief system and way of doing things as better than all others. Sextus Empiricus and other ancient Pyrrhonist philosophers denied the existence of objective morality.

In the early modern era Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) notably held that nothing is inherently good or evil. The 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) serves in several important respects as the father both of modern emotivism and of moral relativism, though Hume himself did not espouse relativism. He distinguished between matters of fact and matters of value, and suggested that moral judgments consist of the latter, for they do not deal with verifiable facts obtained in the world, but only with our sentiments and passions. But Hume regarded some of our sentiments as universal. He famously denied that morality has any objective standard, and suggested that the universe remains indifferent to our preferences and our troubles.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) believed that we have to assess the value of our values since values are relative to one's goals and one's self. He emphasized the need to analyze our moral values and how much impact they may have on us. The problem with morality, according to Nietzsche, is that those who were considered "good" were the powerful nobles who had more education, and considered themselves better than anyone below their rank. Thus, what is considered good is relative. A "good man" is not questioned on whether or not there is a "bad", such as temptations, lingering inside him and he is considered to be more important than a man who is considered "bad" who is considered useless to making the human race better because of the morals we have subjected ourselves to. But since what is considered good and bad is relative, the importance and value we place on them should also be relative. He proposed that morality itself could be a danger. Nietzsche believed that morals should be constructed actively, making them relative to who we are and what we, as individuals, consider to be true, equal, good and bad, etc. instead of reacting to moral laws made by a certain group of individuals in power.

One scholar, supporting an anti-realist interpretation, concludes that "Nietzsche's central argument for anti-realism about value is explanatory: moral facts don't figure in the 'best explanation' of experience, and so are not real constituents of the objective world. Moral values, in short, can be 'explained away.'"

It is certain that Nietzsche criticizes Plato's prioritization of transcendence as the Forms. The Platonist view holds that what is 'true', or most real, is something which is other-worldly while the (real) world of experience is like a mere 'shadow' of the Forms, most famously expressed in Plato's allegory of the cave. Nietzsche believes that this transcendence also had a parallel growth in Christianity, which prioritized life-denying moral qualities such as humility and obedience through the church. (See Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, etc.)^{[citation needed]}

Anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) have cautioned observers against ethnocentricism—using the standards of their own culture to evaluate their subjects of study. Benedict said that transcendent morals do not exist—only socially constructed customs do (see cultural relativism); and that in comparing customs, the anthropologist "insofar as he remains an anthropologist ... is bound to avoid any weighting of one in favor of the other". To some extent, the increasing body of knowledge of great differences in belief among societies caused both social scientists and philosophers to question whether any objective, absolute standards pertaining to values could exist. This led some to posit that differing systems have equal validity, with no standard for adjudicating among conflicting beliefs. The Finnish philosopher-anthropologist Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) ranks as one of the first to formulate a detailed theory of moral relativism. He portrayed all moral ideas as subjective judgments that reflect one's upbringing. He rejected G.E. Moore's (1873–1958) ethical intuitionism—in vogue during the early part of the 20th century, and which identified moral propositions as true or false, and known to us through a special faculty of intuition—because of the obvious differences in beliefs among societies, which he said provided evidence of the lack of any innate, intuitive power.

Arguments for meta-ethical relativism

Scientific

Morality and evolution

See also: Evolution of morality

Research within evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, ethology, and evolutionary anthropology has shown that morality is a natural phenomenon that was shaped by evolutionary mechanisms. In this case, morality is defined as the set of relative social practices that promote the survival and successful reproduction of the species, or even multiple cooperating species.

Literary

The literary perspectivism begins at the different versions of the Greek myths. Symbolism created multiple suggestions for a vers. Structuralism teaches us the polysemy of the poems.

Examples of relativistic literary works: Gogol's Dead Souls; The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell; Raymond Queneau's Zazie dans le métro. Or Nuria Perpinya's twenty literary interpretations of the Odyssey.

Criticisms of meta-ethical relativism

Philosophical

R. M. Hare

See also: Universal prescriptivism

Some philosophers, for example R. M. Hare (1919–2002), argue that moral propositions remain subject to human logical rules, notwithstanding the absence of any factual content, including those subject to cultural or religious standards or norms. Thus, for example, they contend that one cannot hold contradictory ethical judgments. This allows for moral discourse with shared standards, notwithstanding the descriptive properties or truth conditions of moral terms. They do not affirm or deny that moral facts exist, only that human logic applies to our moral assertions; consequently, they postulate an objective and preferred standard of moral justification, albeit in a very limited sense. Nevertheless, according to Hare, human logic shows the error of relativism in one very important sense (see Hare's Sorting out Ethics). Hare and other philosophers also point out that, aside from logical constraints, all systems treat certain moral terms alike in an evaluative sense. This parallels our treatment of other terms such as less or more, which meet with universal understanding and do not depend upon independent standards (for example, one can convert measurements). It applies to good and bad when used in their non-moral sense, too; for example, when we say, "this is a good wrench" or "this is a bad wheel". This evaluative property of certain terms also allows people of different beliefs to have meaningful discussions on moral questions, even though they may disagree about certain "facts".

Walter Terence Stace

"Ethical Relativity" is the topic of the first two chapters in The Concept of Morals, in which Walter Terence Stace argues against moral absolutism, but for moral universalism.

Philosophical poverty

Critics propose that moral relativism fails because it rejects basic premises of discussions on morality, or because it cannot arbitrate disagreement. Many critics, including Ibn Warraq and Eddie Tabash, have suggested that meta-ethical relativists essentially take themselves out of any discussion of normative morality, since they seem to be rejecting an assumption of such discussions: the premise that there are right and wrong answers that can be discovered through reason. Practically speaking, such critics will argue that meta-ethical relativism may amount to moral nihilism, or else incoherence.

These critics argue specifically that the moral relativists reduce the extent of their input in normative moral discussions to either rejecting the very having of the discussion, or else deeming both disagreeing parties to be correct. For instance, the moral relativist can only appeal to preference to object to the practice of murder or torture by individuals for hedonistic pleasure. This accusation that relativists reject widely held terms of discourse is similar to arguments used against other "discussion-stoppers" like some forms of solipsism or the rejection of induction.

Philosopher Simon Blackburn made a similar criticism, and explains that moral relativism fails as a moral system simply because it cannot arbitrate disagreements.

Other criticism

Some arguments come when people question which moral justifications or truths are said to be relative. Because people belong to many groups based on culture, race, religion, etc., it is difficult to claim that the values of the group have authority for the members. A part of meta-ethical relativism is identifying which group of people those truths are relative to. Another component is that many people belong to more than one group. The beliefs of the groups that a person belongs to may be fundamentally different, and so it is hard to decide which are relative and which win out. A person practicing meta-ethical relativism would not necessarily object to either view, but develop an opinion and argument.

Religious

Roman Catholicism

See also: Relativism § Catholic Church and relativism

Catholic and some secular intellectuals attribute the perceived post-war decadence of Europe to the displacement of absolute values by moral relativism. Pope Benedict XVI, Marcello Pera and others have argued that after about 1960, Europeans massively abandoned many traditional norms rooted in Christianity and replaced them with continuously evolving relative moral rules. In this view, sexual activity has become separated from procreation, which led to a decline in the importance of families and to depopulation. The most authoritative response to moral relativism from the Catholic perspective can be found in Veritatis Splendor, an encyclical by Pope John Paul II. Many of the main criticisms of moral relativism by the Catholic Church relate largely to modern controversies, such as elective abortion.

Buddhism

Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist monk, has written: "By assigning value and spiritual ideals to private subjectivity, the materialistic world view ... threatens to undermine any secure objective foundation for morality. The result is the widespread moral degeneration that we witness today. To counter this tendency, mere moral exhortation is insufficient. If morality is to function as an efficient guide to conduct, it cannot be propounded as a self-justifying scheme but must be embedded in a more comprehensive spiritual system which grounds morality in a transpersonal order. Religion must affirm, in the clearest terms, that morality and ethical values are not mere decorative frills of personal opinion, not subjective superstructure, but intrinsic laws of the cosmos built into the heart of reality."

Views Commonly Confused with Moral Relativism

Moral Relativism vs Ethical Subjectivism

Moral relativism is a distinct position from ethical subjectivism (the view that the truth of ethical claims are not mind independent). While these views are often held together, they do not entail each other. For example, someone who claims "something is morally right for me to do because the people in my culture think it is right" is both a moral relativist (because what is right and wrong depends on who is doing it), and an ethical subjectivist (because what is right and wrong is determined by mental states, i.e. what people think is right and wrong).

However, someone who thinks that what is right and wrong is whatever a deity thinks is right or wrong would be a subjectivist (morality is based on mental states), but not a relativist (morality is the same for everyone). In contrast, someone who claims that to act ethically you must follow the laws of your country would be a relativist (morality is dependent on who you are), but not a subjectivist (morality is based on facts about the world, not mental states).

Moral Relativism vs Moral Anti-Realism

Depending on how a moral relativist position is constructed, it may or may not be independent of moral realism. Moral realists are committed to some version of the following three claims:

1. Semantic thesis: Moral statements have meaning, they express propositions, or are the kind of things that can be true or false.
2. Alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are true.
3. Metaphysical thesis: The metaphysical status of moral facts is robust and ordinary, not importantly different from other facts about the world.

While many moral relativists deny one or more of these claims, and therefore could be considered moral anti-realists, a denial is not required. A moral relativist who claimed that you should follow whatever laws your country has accepts all three claims: moral facts express propositions that can be true or false (you can see if a given action is against the law or not), some moral propositions are true (some actions abide by the laws in someone's country), and moral facts are ordinary (laws are not mental states, they are physical objects in the world). However, this view is a relativist one as it is dependent on the country you are a citizen of.

Science of morality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_morality

The science of morality may refer to various forms of ethical naturalism grounding morality in rational, empirical consideration of the natural world. It is sometimes framed as using the scientific approach to determine what is right and wrong, in contrast to the widespread belief that "science has nothing to say on the subject of human values".

Overview

Moral science may refer to the consideration of what is best for, and how to maximize the flourishing of, either particular individuals or all conscious creatures. It has been proposed that "morality" can be appropriately defined on the basis of fundamental premises necessary for any empirical, secular, or philosophical discussion and that societies can use the methods of science to provide answers to moral questions.

The norms advocated by moral scientists (e.g. rights to abortion, euthanasia, and drug liberalization under certain circumstances) would be founded upon the shifting and growing collection of human understanding. Even with science's admitted degree of ignorance, and the various semantic issues, moral scientists can meaningfully discuss things as being almost certainly "better" or "worse" for promoting flourishing.

History

In philosophy

Utilitarian Jeremy Bentham discussed some of the ways moral investigations are a science. He criticized deontological ethics for failing to recognize that it needed to make the same presumptions as his science of morality to really work – whilst pursuing rules that were to be obeyed in every situation (something that worried Bentham).

W. V. O. Quine advocated naturalizing epistemology by looking to natural sciences like psychology for a full explanation of knowledge.^{[further explanation needed]} His work contributed to a resurgence of moral naturalism in the last half of the 20th century. Paul Kurtz, who believes that the careful, secular pursuit of normative rules is vital to society, coined the term eupraxophy to refer to his approach to normative ethics. Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and Peter Singer believe that we learn what is right and wrong through reason and empirical methodology.

Maria Ossowska used the methods of science to understand the origins of moral norms.

Maria Ossowska thought that sociology was inextricably related to philosophical reflections on morality, including normative ethics. She proposed that science analyse: (a) existing social norms and their history, (b) the psychology of morality, and the way that individuals interact with moral matters and prescriptions, and (c) the sociology of morality.

In popular literature

The theory and methods of a normative science of morality are explicitly discussed in Joseph Daleiden's The Science of Morality: The Individual, Community, and Future Generations (1998). Daleiden's book, in contrast to Harris, extensively discusses the relevant philosophical literature. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris's goal is to show how moral truth can be backed by "science", or more specifically, empirical knowledge, critical thinking, philosophy, but most controversially, the scientific method.

Patricia Churchland offers that, accepting David Hume's is–ought problem, the use of induction from premises and definitions remains a valid way of reasoning in life and science:

Our moral behavior, while more complex than the social behavior of other animals, is similar in that it represents our attempt to manage well in the existing social ecology. ... from the perspective of neuroscience and brain evolution, the routine rejection of scientific approaches to moral behavior based on Hume's warning against deriving ought from is seems unfortunate, especially as the warning is limited to deductive inferences. ... The truth seems to be that values rooted in the circuitry for caring—for well-being of self, offspring, mates, kin, and others—shape social reasoning about many issues: conflict resolutions, keeping the peace, defense, trade, resource distribution, and many other aspects of social life in all its vast richness.

Daleiden and Leonard Carmichael warn that science is probabilistic, and that certainty is not possible. One should therefore expect that moral prescriptions will change as humans gain understanding.

Views in scientific morality

See also: Moral psychology

Training to promote good behaviour

See also: Character education and Values education

The science of morality may aim to discover the best ways to motivate and shape individuals. Methods to accomplish this include instilling explicit virtues, building character strengths, and forming mental associations. These generally require some level of practical reason. James Rest suggested that abstract reasoning is also a factor in making moral judgements and emphasized that moral judgements alone do not predict moral behaviour: “Moral judgement may be closely related to advocacy behaviour, which in turn influences social institutions, which in turn creates a system of norms and sanctions that influences people’s behaviour.” Daleiden suggested that religions instill a practical sense of virtue and justice, right and wrong. They also effectively use art and myths to educate people about moral situations.

The role of government

Harris argues that moral science does not imply an "Orwellian future" with "scientists at every door". Instead, Harris imagines data about normative moral issues being shared in the same way as other sciences (e.g. peer-reviewed journals on medicine).

Daleiden specifies that government, like any organization, should have limited power. He says "centralization of power irrevocably in the hands of one person or an elite has always ultimately led to great evil for the human race. It was the novel experiment of democracy—a clear break with tradition—that ended the long tradition of tyranny.” He is also explicit that government should only use law to enforce the most basic, reasonable, proven and widely supported moral norms. In other words, there are a great many moral norms that should never be the task of the government to enforce.

The role of punishment

Main articles: Differential reinforcement and Prison

One author has argued that to attain a society where people are motivated by conditioned self-interest, punishment must go hand-in-hand with reward. For instance, in this line of reasoning, prison remains necessary for many perpetrators of crimes. This is so, even if libertarian free will is false. This is because punishment can still serve its purposes: it deters others from committing their own crimes, educates and reminds everyone about what the society stands for, incapacitates the criminal from doing more harm, goes some way to relieving or repaying the victim, and corrects the criminal (also see recidivism). This author argues that, at least, any prison system should be pursuing those goals, and that it is an empirical question as to what sorts of punishment realize these goals most effectively, and how well various prison systems actually serve these purposes.

Research

See also: Positive psychology and Moral development

The brain areas that are consistently involved when humans reason about moral issues have been investigated. The neural network underlying moral decisions overlaps with the network pertaining to representing others' intentions (i.e., theory of mind) and the network pertaining to representing others' (vicariously experienced) emotional states (i.e., empathy). This supports the notion that moral reasoning is related to both seeing things from other persons’ points of view and to grasping others’ feelings. These results provide evidence that the neural network underlying moral decisions is probably domain-global (i.e., there might be no such things as a "moral module" in the human brain) and might be dissociable into cognitive and affective sub-systems. An essential, shared component of moral judgment involves the capacity to detect morally salient content within a given social context. Recent research implicated the salience network in this initial detection of moral content. The salience network responds to behaviourally salient events, and may be critical to modulate downstream default and frontal control network interactions in the service of complex moral reasoning and decision-making processes. This suggest that moral cognition involves both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes, mediated by discrete large-scale brain networks and their interactions.

Other implications

Daleiden provides examples of how science can use empirical evidence to assess the effect that specific behaviours can have on the well-being of individuals and society with regard to various moral issues. He argues that science supports decriminalization and regulation of drugs, euthanasia under some circumstances, and the permission of sexual behaviours that are not tolerated in some cultures (he cites homosexuality as an example). Daleiden further argues that in seeking to reduce human suffering, abortion should not only be permissible, but at times a moral obligation (as in the case of a mother of a potential child who would face the probability of much suffering). Like all moral claims in his book, however, Daleiden is adamant that these decisions remain grounded in, and contingent on empirical evidence.

The ideas of cultural relativity, to Daleiden, do offer some lessons: investigators must be careful not to judge a person's behaviour without understanding the environmental context. An action may be necessary and more moral once we are aware of circumstances. However, Daleiden emphasizes that this does not mean all ethical norms or systems are equally effective at promoting flourishing and he often offers the equal treatment of women as a reliably superior norm, wherever it is practiced.

Criticisms

The idea of a normative science of morality has met with many criticisms from scientists and philosophers. Critics include physicist Sean M. Carroll, who argues that morality cannot be part of science. He and other critics cite the widely held "fact-value distinction", that the scientific method cannot answer "moral" questions, although it can describe the norms of different cultures. In contrast, moral scientists defend the position that such a division between values and scientific facts ("moral relativism") is not only arbitrary and illusory, but impeding progress towards taking action against documented cases of human rights violations in different cultures.

Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion occupy "non-overlapping magisteria". To Gould, science is concerned with questions of fact and theory, but not with meaning and morality – the magisteria of religion. In the same vein, Edward Teller proposed that politics decides what is right, whereas science decides what is true.

During a discussion on the role that naturalism might play in professions like nursing, the philosopher Trevor Hussey calls the popular view that science is unconcerned with morality "too simplistic". Although his main focus in the paper is naturalism in nursing, he goes on to explain that science can, at very least, be interested in morality at a descriptive level. He even briefly entertains the idea that morality could itself be a scientific subject, writing that one might argue "... that moral judgements are subject to the same kinds of rational, empirical examination as the rest of the world: they are a subject for science – although a difficult one. If this could be shown to be so, morality would be contained within naturalism. However, I will not assume the truth of moral realism here." 

Best of all possible worlds

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds 

 

Gottfried Leibniz, the philosopher who coined the term "best of all possible worlds" in his 1710 work Théodicée.

The phrase "the best of all possible worlds" (French: le meilleur des mondes possibles; German: Die beste aller möglichen Welten) was coined by the German polymath and Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal (Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil). The claim that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds is the central argument in Leibniz's theodicy, or his attempt to solve the problem of evil.

Problem of evil

Main article: Problem of evil

Among his many philosophical interests and concerns, Leibniz took on this question of theodicy: If God is omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, how do we account for the suffering and injustice that exists in the world? Historically, attempts to answer the question have been made using various arguments, for example, by explaining away evil or reconciling evil with good.

Leibniz outlined his perfect world theory in his work The Monadology, stating the argument in five statements:

1. God has the idea of infinitely many universes.
2. Only one of these universes can actually exist.
3. God's choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, that is, God has reason to choose one thing or another.
4. God is good.
5. Therefore, the universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds.

To further understand his argument, these five statements can be grouped in three main premises. The first premise (corresponding to the first and second statements) states that God can only choose one universe from the infinite amount of possible universes. (The term "one universe" does not necessarily mean a single three-dimensional physical reality, but refers to the sum total of God's creation, and thus might include multiple worlds.) The second premise (the third and fourth statements) states that God is a perfect existence, and he makes decisions based on reason. The third premise (the fifth statement) concludes that the existing world, chosen by God, is the best.

Leibniz used Christianity to back up the validity of all the premises. For the first premise, God's existence and role as the creator of the world was proven by the Bible. The second premise is proven since "God acts always in the most perfect and most desirable manner possible". Therefore, His choice will always be the best, and only perfect existence can make perfect decision throughout time. Since all the premises are right, then Leibniz concluded, "The universe that God chose to exist is the best of all possible worlds".

To begin his argument, Leibniz conceded that God has created a world with evil in it and could have created a world without it. He argued that this is still the best world God could have made by claiming the existence of evil does not necessarily mean a worse world. In fact, he went as far as to claim that evil's presence creates a better world, as "it may happen that the evil is accompanied by a greater good". In other words, Leibniz argued that the contrast provided by evil can result in the production of a greater good. Without the existence of evil, everything would be good; goodness would no longer appear good, it would simply be normal and expected, no longer praised. As put by Leibniz: "an imperfection in the part may be required for a perfection in the whole". The reaction people have from evil can allow them to understand and make decisions that bring about a greater good. God allowed evilness in the world for us to understand goodness which is achieved through contrasting it with evil. Once we understood evil and good, it gives us the ability to produce the "greatest possible good" out of all the goodness. Evil fuels goodness, which leads to a perfect system.

Although this appears like God created evil, which would seem to go against his nature, Leibniz borrowed the same idea Augustine used to fix this issue. "Evil, though real, is not a 'thing,' but rather a direction away from the goodness of the One". Evil is the absence of good and exists in the same way the hole of a donut exists. The donut was created, but one would never say the hole itself was made; it was just never filled in. This also means there cannot be evil without more good, as you can never have the hole in the donut without having donut around it. "God is infinite, and the devil is limited; the good may and does go to infinity, while evil has its bounds". Using Augustine's model of evil, Leibniz set up the foundation for why a world with evil brings more good, and is therefore better, than a world without evil.

Free will versus determinism

See also: Free will and Determinism

For Leibniz, an additional central concern is the matter of reconciling human freedom (indeed, God's own freedom) with the determinism inherent in his own theory of the universe. Leibniz' solution casts God as a kind of "optimizer" of the collection of all original possibilities: Since he is good and omnipotent, and since he chose this world out of all possibilities, this world must be good—in fact, this world is the best of all possible worlds.

Considering the three factors: good, evil, and free will, God created that best possible world he could with the most good and the least evil, with regards to how free will affects people's choices. This is a short summary of Gottfried Leibniz's Best of All Possible Worlds philosophy regarding the "problem of evil" and how the current world can still be the most viable option. Free will is defined as the "power or capacity to choose among alternatives or to act in certain situations independently of natural, social, or divine restraints". This basically gives anyone the freedom to do whatever is in their capabilities and inclination—whether it be good or evil. When God breathed the world into existence, He accounted for free will to be a factor of human choice and all the issues it could bring alongside it, as addressed by Leibniz.

"According to Leibniz there are three forms of evil in the world: moral, physical and metaphysical...Since He wills what is best, the world he created has the greatest number of compatible perfections". These "compatible perfections" are referring to the good and bad effects of choices made through free will. Humans are obviously able to tell the difference from right to wrong, but how they act upon their knowledge is what creates a need for compatibility in the world. God is not the creator of evil, evil is simply the lack of human-induced good. Often, humans make the claim that evil exists because God allowed it into the world, however, "God is not the author of sin". Sin is necessary in creating the best of all possible worlds and is a result of our free will. There has to be a balance between good and evil in order to maintain the gap between humans and God. If humanity were to be perfect, it would put them on the same level as God, which would destroy the need for grace. Instead, humans are weighed down by their own free will, in perfect contrast to the sovereignty of God. God accommodates for this issue with divine grace and endless mercy to solve the consequences of free will.

In his writing Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz first establishes that God is an absolutely perfect being. He says people can logically conclude this through reason since "the works must bear the imprint of the workman, because we can learn who he was just by inspecting them". He calls this the Principle of Perfection, which says that God's knowledge and power is to the highest degree, more so than any human can comprehend. Due to God's omnipotence, Leibniz makes the premise that God has thought of every single possibility there is to be thought of before creating this world. His perfection gives him the ability to think "beyond the power of a finite mind", so he has sufficient reason to choose one world over the other.

Out of all the possibilities, God chose the very best world because not only is God powerful, but he is also morally good. He writes "the happiness of minds is God's principal aim, which He carries out as far as the general harmony will permit", meaning a benevolent God will only do actions with the intention of good will towards his creation. If one supposed that this world is not the best, then it assumes that the creator of the universe is not knowledgeable enough, powerful enough, or inherently good, for an inherently good God would have created the best world to the best of his ability. It would overall be a contradiction to his good and perfect nature, and so the universe that God has chosen to create can only be the best of all possible worlds.

On the one hand, this view might help us rationalize some of what we experience: Imagine that all the world is made of good and evil. The best possible world would have the most good and the least evil. Courage is better than no courage. It might be observed, then, that without evil to challenge us, there can be no courage. Since evil brings out the best aspects of humanity, evil is regarded as necessary. So in creating this world God made some evil to make the best of all possible worlds. On the other hand, the theory explains evil not by denying it or even rationalizing it—but simply by declaring it to be part of the optimum combination of elements that comprise the best possible godly choice. Leibniz thus does not claim that the world is overall very good, but that because of the necessary interconnections of goods and evils, God, though omnipotent, could not improve it in one way without making it worse in some other way.

Giovanni Gentile, in his work The General Theory of Mind as Pure Act, claimed that if God had created everything to fall into line with the most favorable possible condition, it would suppose that all of reality is pre-realized and determined in the mind of God. Therefore, the apparent free will displayed by both God, by his necessity of being bound by what is the most good, and humanity in their limitations derived from God to be in line with the most good, are not free wills at all but entirely determinate. Thus ultimately relegated to blind naturalistic processes entrapping both God and humanity to necessity, robbing both of any true freely creative will.

Leibniz, unlike Giovanni, does believe humans have free will despite the predetermined nature of the world. His argument revolves around the idea that "if it is certain that we shall perform them, it is not less certain that we shall choose to perform them." He maintains that God has chosen this universe and that all things will fall in line with the best world, but we still have choice. For example: if you were to either between vanilla or chocolate ice-cream. You choose chocolate, the choice god knew you would. However, there is a separate, non-perfect, universe in which you chose vanilla. This gives you similar results to Multiverse theory.

Leibniz's multiverse acts differently than ones we are accustomed to. Unlike modern multiverse or even unlike the ancient ideas posed by the atomists in ancient Greek times, Leibniz does not believe all the possible universes exist. Decisions do not create branching universes depending on your decision and there is no other, less perfect universe, existing alongside our own. It is only the perfect universe we live in. This is due to the nature of God choosing the universe. It is as if God sees all the possible universes and chooses the one he wants, the perfect one, and creates only that one.

Criticism

Following the devastating Lisbon Earthquake (1 November 1755), which occurred decades after the publication of the Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal (1710), Leibniz's philosophical optimism and theodicy incurred considerable criticism both from his fellow Enlightenment philosophers and Christian theologians as well. Critics of Leibniz, such as Voltaire, argue that the world contains an amount of suffering too great to justify optimism. While Leibniz argued that suffering is good because it incites human will, critics argue that the degree of suffering is too severe to justify belief that God has created the "best of all possible worlds". Leibniz also addresses this concern by considering what God desires to occur (his antecedent will) and what God allows to occur (his consequent will). Others, such as the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, criticized Leibniz's theodicy by arguing that there probably is not such a thing as the best of all possible worlds, since one can always conceive a better world, such as a world with one more morally righteous person.

The Theodicy was deemed illogical by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell argues that moral and physical evil must result from metaphysical evil (imperfection). But imperfection is merely limitation; if existence is good, as Leibniz maintains, then the mere existence of evil requires that evil also be good. In addition, libertarian Christian theology (not related to political libertarianism) defines sin as not necessary but contingent, the result of free will. Russell maintains that Leibniz failed to logically show that metaphysical necessity (divine will) and human free will are not incompatible or contradictory. He also claims that when Leibniz analyzes the propositions, he is "ambiguous or doubtful..." (O'Briant). Leibniz does not sound sure and is unsure of himself when he writes his premises. He says they do not work together without making Leibniz sound unsure of himself.

Another philosopher who weighs into Leibniz's philosophy is Kant. Although Leibniz influenced Kant a great deal, Kant found that Leibnizian philosophy "misleading." (Kant and Early Moderns). He says that the misleading nature of Leibniz's works is due to the one-sidedness of the theory.

The physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, in his "Leibnizian Thoughts in Modern Science" (1870), wrote that Leibniz thought of God as a mathematician:

As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to him for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations – the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.

Du Bois-Reymond went on to argue that even Charles Darwin supported a version of Leibniz's perfect world, since every organism can be understood as relatively adapted to its environment at any point in its evolution.

Nonetheless, the statement that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" drew scorn, most notably from Voltaire, who lampooned it in his comic novella Candide by having the character Dr. Pangloss (a parody of Leibniz and Maupertuis) repeat it like a mantra when great catastrophes keep happening to him and Candide. From this, the adjective "Panglossian" describes a person who believes that the world about us is the best possible one.

While Leibniz does state this universe is the best possible version of itself, the standard for goodness does not seem clear to many of his critics. To Leibniz, the best universe means a world that is "the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena", in addition to the "happiness of minds" being God's main goal. Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, and other critics seem to equate goodness of the universe to no evil or evil acts whatsoever, presuming that a universe that did not contain evil would be "better" and that God could have created such a universe, but chose not to. According to Leibniz, that is not the case. He believes that if a better alternative existed "God would have brought it into actuality". Essentially, Leibniz affirms that no human can truly think of a better universe because they lack a holistic understanding of the universe, and God, who has that holistic understanding, has already chosen the best option. All of this shifts the meaning of goodness from morality and actions to the quality and phenomena of this universe's existence. Despite that, the concept of the goodness of the universe is still a point of major contention in Leibniz's argument, as someone could always argue about the lack of goodness in the universe based on those parameters.

While not directly criticizing Leibniz, Spinoza holds a drastically different view on creation and the universe. Spinoza believes "that everything that God thinks or conceives must also exist", and he combines God's will and God's understanding where Leibniz separates them. In other words, God cannot imagine an infinite number of worlds and "as a separate act of will" choose one of those to create. How does Spinoza explain creation then? To put it simply, everything in the universe "is a direct result of God's nature". The moment God thinks of something, it exists. As there are not an infinite amount of universes (according to Spinoza and Leibniz) God must have only conceived of one universe. This, however, still runs into the problem of the existence of evil. How can God, in His perfection, create a world capable of evil if the world is an extension of his mind? In any case, Spinoza still tries to justify a non-infinite basis for the universe, where reality is everything God has ever thought of.

Arthur Schopenhauer argued, contrary to Leibniz, that our world must be the worst of all possible worlds because if it were only a little worse it could not continue to exist.

Other philosophers

"Stoicism's theory of determinism is also provedentialism. Consequently, this world is not only the only possible world, it is the best of all possible worlds."

Aquinas, using Scholasticism, treats the "Best of all possible worlds" problem in the Summa Theologica (1273):

Objection 1: It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word "God" means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

He counters this in general by the quinque viae, and in particular with this refutation:

Reply to Objection 1: As Augustine says (Enchiridion xi): "Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil." This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

More recently, the theological theory of pandeism has been classed as a logical derivation of this proposition with the contention that:

If divine becoming were complete, God's kenosis--God's self-emptying for the sake of love--would be total. In this pandeistic view, nothing of God would remain separate and apart from what God would become. Any separate divine existence would be inconsistent with God's unreserved participation in the lives and fortunes of the actualized phenomena."