HKB
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Often appears with: will, choice, and freedom · universal reason · unity of reason · the problem of evil and theodicy · self-determining power · reason and the intellect · providence and divine governance · permitting evil conditionally · necessitarians · moral responsibility · money, coin, and credit · logic, method, and demonstration
Usually: argument (3) · detachment (2) · indignation (1)
“I venture to affirm, moreover, that however we may bring our understandings into bondage to the more comprehensible doctrine, simply because it is comprehensible under the forms of the understanding, every man does, in fact, believe himself possessed of freedom in the higher sense of self-determination.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inqui · insight
Leibniz accepts a general principle about permitting evil only when a greater evil would follow, but says God faces no better alternative; supreme reason forces him to permit this evil.
it would be a great fault in him not to choose the best. I have said so many times. He would then prevent sin by something worse than all sins. 132. XVII. 'It is all the same whether one employ a necessary cause, or employ a free cause while choosing the moments when one knows it to be determined. If I imagine that gunpowder has the power to ignite or not to ignite when fire touches it, and if I know for certain tha…
It continues that contradictory propositions cannot be held once recognized, that necessary truths of reason should apply to all rational beings, and that therefore unity of reason supports reconciling religion with reason.
when we have reflected, and discovered the inconsistency, we cannot retain both. We cannot believe two contradictory propositions knowing them to be such. It would be irrational to do so. Again, we cannot conceive it possible, that what by the same power of intuition we see to be universally and necessarily true should appear otherwise to any other rational being. We cannot, for example, but consider the proposition…
He insists that avoiding these moral and religious perplexities requires either a self-determining will beyond nature or else embracing Necessitarianism, which he says makes the Supreme Reason a blind Fate.
their nature. They preclude the very idea of a free-will, and render the feeling of moral responsibility not an enigma merely, not a mystery, but a self-contradiction and an absurdity. Turn the matter as we will--call these correlatives, namely, the inherent susceptibilities and the causes acting on them from without, natural, or moral, or spiritual--so long as their action and reaction, or the law of reciprocity, w…