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The Goodness of God
David Basinger (perhaps) in International Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1980), 34.
Is God obligated to do all within his power to maximize the quality of
life for each individual in our world? Let us consider the following
principle: (P1) A necessary condition for the actualization of any possible world
containing sentient, self-determining beings is that God do all he can
within the legitimate constraints inherent in this world to maximize
the quality of life for such beings. Since many, if not most, versions of the problem of evil are based
on the contention that a perfectly good God would do more to rid our
world of pain and suffering, all parties agree that P1 is a very
important principle, perhaps the most important of its type. It might
be argued initially that P1 stipulates an impossible task for God. Just
as there can be no 'best' actualizable world, someone might maintain,
there can be no maximal state of existence for any given individual
since for every state of existence we might identify as such, there
would, in principle, always be another state of existence with even
higher quality that God could (or attempt to) produce.
