The Euthyphro Dilemma: Who Decides What Good Means?

By Neel Burton | August 4, 2026

Plato’s Euthyphro, the Euthyphro Dilemma, and Why They’ll Never Leave You

Socrates in conversation with Euthyphro, with Meletus standing in the shadows. — *Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.*

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

The Euthyphro is one of Plato’s shortest dialogues—and one of his finest. It is funny, dramatic, and unexpectedly modern. What begins as a chance encounter outside an Athenian courthouse turns into one of the most profound and celebrated conversations in the history of philosophy.

On his way to answer a charge of impiety, Socrates meets the self-professed religious expert Euthyphro, who has decided to prosecute his own father for the manslaghter of a servant. Intrigued by his resolve, Socrates asks him an apparently simple question: What is piety? The answer proves far more elusive than either man expects. The problem has exercised philosophers ever since—not least the ‘last universal genius’ Gottfried Leibniz.

The core of the dialogue is the so-called Euthyphro dilemma: is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious? In modern terms, are things like justice, virtue, and beauty merely matters of authority, or are they woven into the very fabric of reality? Does God, or anyone else, decide what is good, or is there an independent standard?

Outline and Summary of Plato’s Euthyphro

Socrates is on his way to answer a charge of impiety for ‘corrupting young men’ and ‘creating new gods and not believing in the old ones’. The charge is being pressed by a certain Meletus, a little-known young man with a beak-like nose, long straight hair, and a sparse beard.

In the agora (market or central square), Socrates runs into the dogmatically religious Euthyphro. Following the death of a servant, Euthyphro has pressed a charge of manslaughter against his own father. Euthyphro tells Socrates that he is prosecuting his father for inadvertently killing a servant who, in a drunken rage, murdered one of the household slaves. After binding the servant and throwing him into a ditch, Euthyphro’s father sent a messenger to a priest to enquire what ought to be done. Unfortunately, the servant died of hunger and cold before the messenger could return.

Socrates flatters Euthyphro, saying that he must be far advanced in wisdom if he is willing to prosecute his own father on so questionable a charge. Euthyphro responds that his relatives are angry at him for prosecuting his father on behalf of a murderer whom he did not deliberately kill. Although they would say that he is behaving impiously, he himself thinks that he is behaving piously—and that he has knowledge of the pious and impious.

Posing as ignorant, Socrates asks Euthyphro to define the pious and impious. Euthyphro replies that the pious is to prosecute a wrongdoer regardless of who he is, and the impious not to prosecute him. He cites the example of Zeus, ‘the best and most just of gods’, who bound his father Cronus for unjustly swallowing his children.

Socrates says that many actions can be pious: but what is it that makes all pious actions pious, and all impious actions impious? What, in short, is the essence of piousness? Euthyphro offers that the pious is that which is dear to the gods. An action or man that is dear to the gods is pious, whereas an action or man that is hated by the gods is impious.

Socrates points out that the gods may be at odds, so that what is pious to one god may not be so to another. Euthyphro replies that none of the gods would be at odds on a matter such as his. Socrates argues that while both gods and men agree that whoever has killed someone unjustly ought to pay a penalty, they might disagree about who the wrongdoer is, what he did, and so on. Can Euthyphro be sure that, in his case, all the gods are in agreement? Even assuming that they are, this merely signifies that the action is hated by the gods. It does not signify that what is hated by the gods is impious, or that what is loved by them is pious. Even assuming that it does, is that which is pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods? If the gods love something because it is pious, it cannot be their love that makes it pious. Whereas if something is pious because the gods love it, we still don’t know for what reason they love it.

Euthyphro complains that Socrates makes his arguments go around in circles. But Socrates points out that all he is doing is asking questions: it is Euthyphro’s answers and Euthyphro’s arguments that are going round in circles.

Socrates next argues that all that is pious is necessarily just. But whereas all that is pious is necessarily just, not all that is just is necessarily pious. Thus, where there is piety there is also justice, but where there is justice there is not necessarily piety, because piety is a part or aspect of justice. So what part of justice is piety? Euthyphro replies that piety is the part of justice that is concerned with the care of the gods, with the rest of justice being concerned with the care of men. Socrates asks Euthyphro what he means by ‘care’. In most instances, ‘to care’ means ‘to aim at the good of that which is cared for’. So does piety, which is concerned with the care of the gods, aim to make them better? Euthyphro suggests that piety, the care of the gods, is the sort of care that slaves have for their masters, and thus that it is a kind of service. If piety is a kind of service to the gods, asks Socrates, what is the goal of this service? The goal of service to doctors is health, and the goal of service to shipbuilders is the building of a ship. So what is the goal of service to the gods? Euthyphro answers that service to the gods is the knowledge of how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, for the preservation of private households and public affairs of state.

Socrates says that, if the pious is the knowledge of how to pray and sacrifice, it is the knowledge of how to beg and give to the gods. To beg correctly would be to ask from them the things that we need, whereas to give correctly would be to give to them the things that they need—so that piety would amount to a sort of trading skill between gods and men. Euthyphro says, ‘Trading yes, if you prefer to call it that’—to which Socrates replies, ‘I prefer nothing, unless it is true.’

Socrates wonders what benefit the gods might derive from the gifts that they receive from us. Or do we have such a trading advantage over them that we receive all our blessings from them and they receive nothing in return? Euthyphro now claims that we give gifts to the gods so as to honour and please them. Socrates asks whether the pious is then pleasing, rather than beneficial or dear, to the gods—to which Euthyphro replies, ‘I think it is of all things most dear to them.’ Socrates points out that they have returned to Euthyphro’s original definition of piety, namely, that piety is that which is dear to the gods.

Socrates says that Euthyphro is more skilful than Daedalus, in that Daedalus could only make arguments move whereas Euthyphro can make them go round in a circle. Socrates suggests that they begin their inquiry anew, but Euthyphro says that he is in a hurry and leaves!

Analysis and Themes of Plato’s Euthyphro

The Euthyphro is often treated as an early Platonic dialogue, interesting only insofar as it introduces the Euthyphro dilemma. But that would be to miss much of its richness. It is also a brilliant study of dogmatism, intellectual humility, and the nature of dialectic and philosophical enquiry. And, chronologically, it is the first of the four dialogues that retrace the final days of Socrates—to be followed by the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. If Plato’s internal chronology is to be relied upon, the conversation in the Euthyphro takes place on the same day as the conversation in the Theatetus, which follows the preliminary hearing (anakrisis) at the porch of the King Archon.

At no point does Euthyphro realise that he may be ignorant, or even that his knowledge of impiety may be less than complete. He confidently prosecutes his own father, without questioning whether this is what the gods would really want. When Socrates challenges the source of his self-esteem—knowledge of the gods—he finds himself unable to refute Socrates—and so simply leaves. It is a masterclass in the psychology of self-deception. The irony, too, is striking. Socrates is on his way to answer a charge of impiety, yet proves far more concerned with piety than the supposed expert on religion.

Whereas Euthyphro mistakes certainty for knowledge, Socrates is content to admit his ignorance and continue the search. It is apparent, especially in the unabridged dialogue, that Euthyphro struggles to understand what Socrates is asking of him—in other words, he struggles to understand what Socrates means by a definition. The same might be said of other so-called experts who engage with Socrates, including Laches in the Laches and Meno in the Meno. The confusion of these experts, some of whom, like Meno, were philosophically trained or at least philosophically aware, suggests that Socrates’ search for rigorous definitions was something original and radical.

For Socrates, it is not sufficient simply to define an ethical concept in terms of itself or related concepts, or by a list of its instances, or according to convention or popular opinion (‘piety is what is dear to the gods’). Instead, a rigorous definition is one which, by picking out the nature or essence of the ethical concept, applies to all its instances and no more. For example, Meno’s definition of virtue as ‘the ability to rule over people’ is both too narrow for excluding children and slaves, and too broad for including those who rule unjustly. Today, we take the search for rigorous definitions so much for granted that it is easy to forget how revolutionary it once was.

If beauty, courage, justice, and piety can have an essence that can be defined, perhaps they can also have an independent reality. In time, Socrates’ search for essences would evolve into Plato’s Theory of the Forms. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle is quite clear that Socrates did not originate the Theory of the Forms: ‘Two things may properly be ascribed to Socrates, inductive reasoning and definition by universals… But Socrates did not assign to the universal or the definitions an independent existence.’ Nonetheless, the seeds of the Theory of the Forms are already present in dialogues such as the Euthyphro.

Leibniz and the Best of All Possible Worlds

In the modern era, Leibniz (1646–1716) followed the direction of Socrates’ argument while going beyond anything that Socrates himself explicitly claimed. God does not make something good simply by willing it; rather, he wills it because it is good. Eternal or necessary truths—including the standards of the beautiful, the good, and the just—depend on God’s understanding, but not on his will.

This is no mere point of theology. It underpins Leibniz’s most famous doctrine, that this is the best of all possible worlds. If goodness depended solely on God’s will, then whatever world God chose to create would de facto have been the best, rendering the claim empty.

The very idea that God chose to create the best of all possible worlds presupposes an objective standard of goodness by which the alternatives can be judged. Notice that, in the Bible, in Genesis, as God created the world, he kept on checking that what he had done was ‘good’—and even, at the end of the sixth day, ‘very good’. Had there not been an independent standard of goodness, he would not have needed to look.

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To delve deeper into Plato, see The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plato’s Shadow: A Primer on Plato.

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A Life in Ideas: Baruch Spinoza

By Neel Burton | July 24, 2026

His Life, Character, and Philosophy

An attempt on the life of Baruch Spinoza — A religious fanatic slashes Spinoza’s cloak outside Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue. Spinoza kept the torn cloak for the remainder of his life.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Baruch Spinoza transformed Western philosophy with his radical ideas on God, freedom, and the nature of reality, inspiring thinkers from Goethe and Hegel to Einstein. Yet the man who identified God with nature was denounced as a heretic, excommunicated by his own community, and earned his living grinding lenses in rented rooms. Few philosophers have lived so quietly while thinking so dangerously.

Steeped in Descartes

When Descartes died, Baruch Spinoza (also known, after his excommunication, as Benedict, or Benedictus, de Spinoza) was seventeen years old.

Growing up in Amsterdam, he became familiar with the philosophy of Descartes—to the extent that, until 1660, he supported himself by giving private lessons in Cartesianism.

In fact, he became, as far as method is concerned, more thoroughly Cartesian even than Descartes. His Principles of Cartesian Philosophy, published in 1663, is a reconstruction of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in the formal deductive format of Euclid’s geometry, complete with definitions, axioms, and theorems. It succeeded not only in recasting Descartes’s system, but also in clarifying, refining, and, finally, undermining it.

Given its merits, Spinoza held on to the geometric method for his magnum opus, the Ethics [Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata]. Its geometric method provided Spinozism with added curiosity and credibility, and, to an extent, still does.

Freedom in the Dutch Republic

Like Descartes before him, Spinoza enjoyed relative freedom in what has retrospectively been called the Dutch Republic (formally, the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands; informally, the United Provinces), then in its golden age and the most liberal, and richest, place in Europe.

In the preface to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP, 1670), Spinoza eulogises his country and its constitution:

Now since we have the rare good fortune to live in a commonwealth where freedom of judgement is fully granted to the individual citizen and he may worship God as he pleases, and where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom, I am undertaking no ungrateful or unprofitable task in demonstrating that not only can this freedom be granted without endangering piety and the peace of the commonwealth, but also the peace of the commonwealth and piety depend on this freedom.

In the TTP, Spinoza critically analyses the Bible and argues for the establishment of a secular state founded on toleration. His purpose in critiquing the Bible is to undermine the repressive theological and political order of the era. ‘The purpose of the state’ he concludes, ‘is freedom’—a maxim far ahead of its time, and inscribed on the pedestal of his monument in Amsterdam.

Merchant or Philosopher?

For all its freedoms, life in Amsterdam had not been a bed of tulips. Spinoza’s paternal grandfather Isaac, a Portuguese Jew, had fled the Iberian Inquisition. In the early 1630s, his father Miguel and uncle Abraham moved the family business from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, where Baruch was born. Had the firm not been bankrupted, essentially, by the First Anglo-Dutch War, Spinoza might have continued as an importer of fruits, nuts, and wine.

Attempted Assassination and Excommunication

In April 1655, on the steps of Amsterdam’s Portuguese synagogue, a knife-wielding fanatic attempted to assassinate Baruch, shouting, ‘Heretic!’ Fortunately, the assassin succeeded only in slashing his cloak, which he kept as a memento of the dangers of fanaticism.

A year later, on 27 July 1656, in his twenty-fourth year, his Jewish community expelled him for his freedom of mind. His excommunication order decried his ‘abominable heresies’ and ‘monstrous deeds’: ‘By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza…’

Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law.

The sting, however, came in the tail, banning all members of his community, including close family, from engaging with him: ‘We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favour, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells [around four metres] of him, or read anything composed or written by him.’

In a tradition going back to Socrates and Plato, he wrote (but did not publish) an ‘apology’, or defence. Although the work has been lost, he incorporated its contents into later works, especially the TTP—which a viral pamphlet described as, ‘forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil…’

Some time after his excommunication, he adopted the motto Caute [Take care] and had it engraved on his signet ring along with a thorny rose (‘Spinoza’ derives from the Latin spinosus, ‘thorny’).

Life as a Castaway

After his excommunication, Spinoza boarded in rented rooms in other people’s houses, in Amsterdam, in Rijnsburg near Leiden, in Voorburg, and finally in The Hague.

Those who knew him were struck by his simplicity, courtesy, and quiet contentment. He lived so frugally that his daily meals often consisted of little more than bread, milk, raisins, and a little butter. In his spare moments, he watched spiders weave their webs and observed flies under his microscope.

In Rijnsburg, under the influence of Descartes, he wrote the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, on knowledge and method and the purification (or ‘emendation’) of the intellect.

This work on ‘thinking skills’ opens with a sentence that could have been written by Seneca or some other Stoic:

After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resolved at length to enquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else—whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.

For fear of compromising his freedom, Spinoza rejected a stipend from a patron and a professorship at Heidelberg, to eke out a living by grinding lenses—including for Huygens, who, in 1667, wrote to his brother, ‘The [lenses] that the Jew of Voorburg has in his microscopes have an admirable polish.’

He should have taken the stipend: the inhalation of glass dust led to his death in 1677, at the age of forty-four, from silicosis.

In the months preceding his death, the thirty-year-old Leibniz, as if acting on a premonition, travelled to The Hague and spent several days in conversation with him—in arguably the greatest meeting of minds since Plato and Aristotle.

The God of the Ethics

Spinoza’s masterpiece, The Ethics, completed in 1675 and published posthumously in 1677, consists of five parts.

The first part, Concerning God, contains an ontological proof, founded on his necessary perfection, for the existence of God, not dissimilar to the one deployed by Descartes.

Departing from Descartes, Spinoza argues that God is not beyond the world but at one with it. Propositions 14 and 15 state, ‘No substance apart from God can exist or be conceived,’ and, ‘Whatever exists, exists in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.’ This lack of a distinction between the Creator and his creation is encapsulated in the slogan, Deus sive natura, ‘God, or nature.’

Many contemporaries understood Spinoza to be an atheist, although later Romantics interpreted him rather as a pantheist. The Romantic poet Novalis (1772-1801) famously referred to him as ein Gottbetrunkener Mensch, ‘a God-intoxicated man.’

The Mind-Body Problem

Whereas, starting from an ontological argument, Descartes had argued that at least one thing exists, and that that one thing would not deceive us, Spinoza had argued that at most one thing exists, and that that one thing is everything, including us.

For Spinoza, you and I have no independent existence outside of God; we are not substances, but modes of God, who is the one and only substance.

God has infinitely many attributes, but we can only know two of them, namely, thought and extension. Spinoza’s answer to the mind-body problem is thus to deny that there is a problem: thought and extension, that is, mind and body, are two ways of apprehending the same reality.

Mind and body do not interact, or even correlate, but simply correspond, like the two sides of a same coin.

Freedom

God being eternally and necessarily as he is, things could not be otherwise. Everything follows from God’s essence and prior causes. This being so, nothing is intrinsically good or evil; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are simply subjective judgements as to what may be helpful or harmful to our survival.

Freedom, too, is a construct of the human mind. People think that they have free will because they cannot grasp the complex concatenation of infinite causes that determines their every thought and action. Freedom is not the ability to do otherwise, but the capacity to comprehend reality as if outside of time and subjectivity, sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, in the manner of a geometrical proof.

Freedom, in other words, is knowledge, which leads to tranquillity and virtue, is blessedness, and can only be achieved in the secular state.

Immortality

There is no afterlife or personal immortality, because there is no person. But the human mind is capable of grasping eternal truths and, in so doing, participates in something that transcends the individual. If we can bring ourselves to see the world sub specie aeternitatis and share in the eternal mind of God, we achieve a kind of immortality.

Appraisal

As I said, Spinoza has been read by some as an atheist and by others as a pantheist. I see in his Ethics many parallels with Stoicism, Paganism, and, above all, Hindu Vedanta. As per the Chandogya Upanishad, ‘When a man knows the best and the greatest, he becomes the best and the greatest.’

Both ancient and remarkably modern, Spinoza stood completely outside, or beyond, his time. While we may debate the nature of his God, we cannot doubt what he, or it, is not, namely, the God of the Bible—and wonder whether Spinoza’s metaphysics derives, in fact, from his politics.

When asked whether he believed in God, Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.’

Whereas Descartes, with his vain attempts at resolving the mind-body problem, had struggled to salvage received religion from the trainwreck of the Scientific Revolution, Spinoza did his utmost to overturn it.

The metaphysics of Leibniz, who almost literally picked up the torch from the dying Spinoza, may be read as an attempt to solve the mind-body problem while preserving, rather than overturning, the status quo ante.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The German Greeks.

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Why Does the World Exist?

By Neel Burton | May 27, 2026

Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

Two birds in a tree — There is a certain urge for existence… a straining toward existence in possible things. —Leibniz

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why does the world exist? Or to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing? This ultimate mystery in philosophy and physics has been called the ‘Fundamental Question of Metaphysics’.

The question is stranger than it might at first seem. We are accustomed to asking why particular things exist—a tree, a country, even a planet—but here we are asking why there should be anything at all.

First, it might be that the question itself is misguided. ‘Nothing’, it is argued, is a human abstraction used to describe the absence of specific entities. The concept cannot be extended to all reality. If there truly was ‘nothing’, then nothing could ever exist, which contradicts the brute fact that we are here to pose the question.

Already in the fifth century BCE, the pre-Socratic Parmenides of Elea argued that one cannot speak or think of ‘nothing’. To think of anything at all, it must in some sense exist or pre-exist. Logically, something cannot come out of nothing, or nothing out of something. If there is something, there cannot have been nothing, and vice versa.

This line of reasoning led Parmenides to conclude, first, that reality, properly understood, cannot come into being or pass away, and, second, that all change is in some sense an illusion.

Quantum Physics

When we try to imagine nothingness, we find that we cannot. In our mind’s eye, there is still, for example, light and space. ‘Nothing’ could be a non-descript state, lacking the laws and properties enabling it to maintain itself. Thus, ‘nothing’ would be an unstable state, and bound to collapse into ‘something’. Existence, perhaps, is more stable than non-existence—with complex existence being most stable of all. Maybe that’s why you’re here, reading this essay: because you’re quite stable.

Many physicists tell us that an absolute vacuum is likely impossible. Quantum fields constantly fluctuate, creating energy and particles out of what we perceive as empty space. What we perceive as empty space is really a bubbling ‘foam’ in which virtual particles and fields constantly flicker in and out of existence. The hypothesis that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ (horror vacui) is attributed already to Aristotle.

Still, a quantum field is something. Quantum physics merely explains how to get ‘something from something’, rather than ‘something from absolute nothing’. Also, quantum physics presupposes the laws of quantum physics, without being able to account for their origin. Maybe that’s all that existence, or minimal existence, entails: simply a set of laws, or mathematics.

But the same question remains, albeit at one remove: why are there laws, or mathematics, rather than nothing at all?

Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) built his entire metaphysical system of monads on just two fundamental principles of reasoning, namely, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason.

The principle of non-contradiction states that a proposition and its negation cannot simultaneously be true; therefore, if one is true, the other must be false, and vice versa.
The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or cause, even when those reasons cannot be known to us. There are no brute facts.

From the principle of sufficient reason follows Leibniz’s question: If everything has a cause or reason, the universe, too, must have had some first cause or reason—traditionally identified with God.

Leibniz thought that the old ontological argument for the existence of God, according to which the very concept of God as a supremely perfect being entails his existence, is incomplete, since it proves only that the perfect being exists if he is possible.

In 1697, Leibniz wrote a short treatise, On the Ultimate Origin of Things, in which he supplements and buttresses the ontological argument with a ‘cosmological argument’ founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which the cause of the cosmos, which consists in a contingent series of dependent causes, can only be a first, necessary, or uncaused cause.

The critical distinction is between contingent things, which might not have existed, and the necessary being, which could not have failed to exist. The chain of contingent explanations, Leibniz thought, must ultimately lead back to necessity.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

But that there is a God, or First Cause, does not explain why this entity created the world. Thus, in On the Ultimate Origin of Things, Leibniz also asks our question, why is there something rather than nothing—and replies, rather poetically: because good and beautiful things demand to exist.

…since something rather than nothing exists, there is a certain urge for existence or (so to speak) a straining toward existence in possible things or in possibility or essence itself; in a word, essence in and of itself strives for existence.

Furthermore, it follows from this that all possibles, that is, everything that expresses essence or possible reality, strive with equal right for existence in proportion to the amount of essence or reality or the degree of perfection they contain, for perfection is nothing but the amount of essence. From this it is obvious that of the infinite combinations of possibilities and possible series, the one that exists is the one through which the most essence or possibility is brought into existence…

Instead of asking why anything should have escaped from nothingness, Leibniz imagines possible things straining for existence, competing, as it were, to be realised.

Leibniz used this line of thought to bolster his argument that ours must be the best of all possible worlds, with moons, roses, starfish, wine, and talking monkeys like us.

In Candide, Voltaire famously mocked Leibniz’s optimism. But quantum physics seems to echo his deeper idea: that existence might not be some accident, but something towards which possibility itself inclines.

Moreover, there is something intuitively true in Leibniz’s idea. Or why else do we build cathedrals, compose symphonies, and plant gardens?

I’ll leave you with this one thought. Whenever we are able to imagine something good and beautiful, we, too, like God, conspire to bring that thing into existence.

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To explore Leibniz’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

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God’s Own Lawyer

By Neel Burton | May 25, 2026

Gottfried Leibniz and the Problem of Evil

God in the dock with Leibniz as his lawyer — ‘It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there so much evil in the world? In the Theodicy, Gottfried Leibniz, philosopher, mathematician, and trained lawyer, took it upon himself to mount God’s defence.

Many people who have heard of Gottfried Leibniz first heard of him through Voltaire’s satirical Candide (1759), in which Leibniz is caricatured as the deluded Dr Pangloss, ‘the greatest philosopher of the Holy Empire’, a parody that is hard to get past. Insofar as Leibniz is remembered, it is for holding, in the words of Voltaire, that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.

Unlike his predecessors Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz received a university education in philosophy, even though, in his day, university philosophy amounted to little more than Aristotelian-Christian Scholasticism. In April 1661, at the age of 14, he enrolled at Leipzig University to study liberal arts. Five years later, in 1666, Altdorf University granted him a doctorate in law, along with the offer of a professorship.

However, he declined the professorship, deeming, perhaps, that a university might not be the best place for an original thinker.

Still, Leibniz now had a licence to practise law. Later, in the Theodicy (1710), he would pose as God’s own lawyer—to defend God against the charge of having introduced evil into the world. ‘Theodicy’, a word that he himself coined, derives from the Greek for ‘vindication of God’.

The Problem of Evil

In 1755, nearly 40 years after Leibniz’s death, Lisbon suffered a magnitude 9 earthquake, sparking fires that led to greater devastation than the earthquake itself. Voltaire has Candide crawling through charred ruins, saying to himself, ‘If this is the best of all possible worlds, what can the rest be like?’

This so-called problem, or paradox, of evil has the pedigree of antiquity, having been attributed by Lactantius (d. 325 CE) to Epicurus (d. 270 BCE): God either wishes to take away evils, but cannot; or he can, but does not wish to. In the first instance, he is less than omnipotent; in the second, less than benevolent.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume eloquently restated the problem:

Epicurus’ old questions remain unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Leibniz’s Defence

In the Theodicy, Leibniz’s response to the Problem of Evil is that God, having created the best of all possible worlds, that is, the one that is simplest in theories while being richest in phenomena, does not cause evil but permits it for the greater good. Evil results indirectly or accidentally from the absence of good. Because God did not create evil, evil is not a substance and has no proper existence.

What from our limited perspective appears to be evil in fact contributes to the greater goodness of Creation, like shadows in a painting which bring out its colours, or discordant notes in a piece of music which contribute to its richness.

Leibniz distinguishes between three forms of evil:

Metaphysical evil, which is the necessary imperfection or limitation in creation—since created things are not God, and if they could be perfect, would merge back into God.
Natural evil, which is pain and suffering, and a consequence of metaphysical evil.
Moral evil, which arises from the poorly exercised free will of rational minds, and leads to natural evil.

God could have created a world without minds. But although such a world would have been free from moral and natural evil (and, so, much less evil), it would not have been the best of possible worlds.

Our Role in All This

What’s more, the world, in man, carries within itself the potential for its own optimisation. We can work, first, to improve ourselves, and then, to improve the world and reduce suffering. If asked, what is the meaning of life, Leibniz would reply, ‘To perfect God’s creation!’

Schopenhauer, that paradigm of a pessimist, riffing upon Leibniz, would remark that ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

And if it were any worse, it wouldn’t exist at all—a hypothesis that humanity seems keen to test.

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To explore Leibniz’s ideas in their historical context—and discover how they influenced Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—see my book, The German Greeks.

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God Is Dead. Now What?

By Neel Burton | May 23, 2026

How Would You Respond to Nietzsche’s Madman?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 15 August 2026.

The Scientific Revolution disrupted the centuries-old Aristotelian system of the Church and universities. It all began in 1543, when the Pole Nicolaus Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This work challenged the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy in which the Earth—and, more importantly, man—stood proud and unmoving at the centre of the universe. The Aristotelian system had provided not only a scientific model but also a moral and metaphysical order, with everything in its proper place. To overthrow it was to overthrow everything.

It is arguably Newton who completed the Copernican Revolution, and put the nail in the coffin of the Aristotelian system, with the publication, in 1687, of his Principia mathematica. In this work, which is deemed impenetrable, he introduced his three laws of motion along with the Law of Universal Gravitation. These laws applied to the celestial spheres as much as to a falling apple—with the implication that the heavens were not some separate, higher realm, but of one piece with your backyard.

In the mid-1660s, Newton kept a notebook with the title, Certain Philosophical Questions. Above this title, he inscribed the motto (which is a paraphrase of Aristotle): Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a greater friend still.

The More Radical Revolution

Also undermining the Aristotelian worldview were William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood, published in his De motu cordis of 1628, and Galileo’s discovery that falling objects undergo uniform acceleration irrespective of their mass, published in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (i.e. the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic and the Copernican) of 1632. Old Aristotle had held that heavier objects fall faster, and that blood is constantly produced in the liver and consumed in the body’s periphery.

More radically, both Harvey and Galileo privileged experiment and observation over the authority of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, and the Bible. Only a decade earlier, in 1620, Francis Bacon had formalised the modern scientific method in his Novum organum, which sought to undermine and replace Aristotle’s canonical treatise on logic, the Organon (hence the title, Novum organum, or New Organon). Galileo even had the gall to publish in Italian rather than the de rigueur Latin.

The revolution was not merely in what people believed, but in how they came to believe it—and who they should believe.

In Search of a Hero

The demise of the Aristotelian system, for all its promises, left a void that needed filling, ideally by some all-encompassing metaphysical system on the scale of the old, Aristotelian one. If the Earth no longer stood at the centre of the cosmos, was man not the glory of creation, as affirmed in the Bible (1 Corinthians 11:7)? In this new mechanistic, atomistic world of matter in motion, where might God and the immaterial soul fit in? Where freedom and justice? And where, therefore, heaven and hell?

Consider the scale of the imaginative shift required. In 1588, as a young mathematician, Galileo had been invited to address the Florentine Academy on the location, size, and arrangement of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno. The Scientific Revolution had begun to dismantle the circles of hell, and everything else, while remaining silent on what might replace them.

The three men who rose to the almost impossible challenge of weaving a new metaphysics that could accommodate the Scientific Revolution and make sense of man’s place within it were René Descartes (1596–1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

Each offered a radically different solution. Descartes preserved God and the immortal soul by splitting reality into mind and matter. But in so doing, he created the problem of how such radically different substances might interact. Spinoza went in the opposite direction, collapsing mind and matter by identifying God with Nature. Leibniz sought another way out of the mind-body problem: his universe consisted not of interacting minds and bodies but of immaterial ‘monads’, co-ordinated by God in a ‘pre-established harmony’. Whereas Descartes and Leibniz sought to salvage what they could, and reaffirm man’s position in the order of things, the ‘heretic’ Spinoza provided no such comforts.

In November 1676, Leibniz travelled to The Hague to meet the dying Spinoza. He had been troubled by Spinoza’s still-secret metaphysics, and spent hours in discussion with him. If God and Nature were one and the same, and everything followed necessarily from the nature of God, what became of freedom, providence, and man’s special place in creation? Leibniz’s own metaphysics—the monadology—can be read as an attempt to solve Descartes’s mind-body problem without falling into Spinozism.

Nietzsche’s Break

By Nietzsche’s time, the great metaphysical systems had begun to look like what they were: elaborate attempts to salvage God and the soul of man from the assaults of science.

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche calls time on the projects of his predecessors. Nietzsche could not have been more categorical about this: God, he declares, is dead.

Nietzsche was not simply announcing his atheism. By the late nineteenth century, there would have been nothing new in that. Instead, he was pointing to the consequences of unbelief: if our highest values—human dignity, moral obligation, justice—are founded in God, what happens to them if we can no longer believe in this God? Do we just go around pretending as if nothing had changed? Or do we invent ourselves anew?

The Gay Science is especially remembered for Aphorism 125, the so-called Parable of the Madman. In it, a madman lights a lantern in the bright morning hours, runs into the marketplace, and cries incessantly, ‘I seek God! I seek God!’ When the people laugh and jeer at him, he jumps into their midst and pierces them with his eyes: ‘Whither is God? … I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the seas? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?’

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the din of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. [Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!]

Later that same day, the madman forces his way into several churches to strike up a requiem for God. When dragged out and called to account, he always replies, ‘What after all are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’ [Was sind denn diese Kirchen noch, wenn sie nicht die Gräber und Grabmäler Gottes sind?]

The townspeople are not scandalised by the Madman’s atheism. They are themselves unbelievers, which is why they laugh at him. The joke, however, is on them. They have abandoned God without thinking it through. The Madman has arrived, then as today, ‘too early’.

Instead of facing up to this crisis, we linger in a state of denial and false hope, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, who lend their lives structure and meaning by waiting for Godot.

In response to the death of God, Nietzsche advocates a so-called ‘gay science’: a sceptical, light-hearted, artistic approach to life. Nietzsche’s response to the collapse of certainty is not despair, as is often thought, but freedom, creation, and experimentation: the courage to live without assurances and treat life as something to be interpreted, repurposed, and affirmed.

Not simply hanging around, unsure whether to stay or leave.