Abstract

Leibniz’s account of moral necessity does double heavy-duty: it aims a) to provide explanations of divine choices without rendering these divine choices metaphysically necessary, thus permitting for divine freedom; and b) to ground the conviction that God did the best God could have done in creating the world, or Leibnizian Optimism. I present a novel interpretation of what Leibniz calls ‘the principle of the best’ as a second-order will to do what is best (read de dicto) that grounds a set of subjunctive conditionals of divine freedom. These conditionals encode what God would do (namely the best) if God were to deliberate about creating one of a set of mutually exclusive options which are metaphysically possible for God to create. I argue that this reading of the principle of the best enables Leibnizian moral necessity to do the mentioned double heavy-duty.