Optimalism holds that, of metaphysical necessity, the best world is actualized.
There are two ways to understand “the best world”: (1) the best of all metaphysically possible worlds and (2) the best of all (narrowly) logically possible worlds.
If we understand it in sense (1), then the best world is the best out of a class of one, and hence it’s also the worst world in the same class. So on reading (1), optimalism=pessimalism.
So sense (2) seems to be a better choice. But here is an argument against (2). It seems to be an a posteriori truth that I am living life LAP (the life in our world associated with the name “Alexander Pruss”) and that Napoleon is living life LNB (the life in our world associated with the name “Napoleon Bonaparte”). There seems to be a narrowly logically possible world just like this one where I live LNB and Napoleon lives LAP. That world with me and Napoleon swapped is neither better nor worse than this one. Hence our world is not the best one. It is tied or incommensurable with a whole bunch of worlds where the identities of individuals are permuted.
Maybe my identity is logically tied to certain aspects of my life, though? Leibniz certainly thought so—he thought it was tied to all the aspects of my life. But this is a controversial view.
Assuming that distinct life-swapped worlds are logically possible, I don’t think we know enough about identity to be able to say definitively that life-swapped worlds are neither better nor worse. If I were to suppose that there is a thisness to Napoleon, then perhaps it’s just more fitting for Napoleon’s thisness to be with L_NB. If not, and it is tied to some modal or non-modal feature, then either we could say the same thing or we could be forced into denying the logical possibility of distinct life-swapped worlds. (Or both, since it seems intuitive to me that some logically impossible worlds are also much worse than the actual world.)
ReplyDeleteThat said, it still seems plausible enough to me that there are two logically possible worlds neither of which is worse than some other logically possible world, either because they are equally good or because there is no ordering between the two worlds in question.