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Question I was just discussing with a friend the concept of a perfect world. We were trying to define what would be a perfect world. I thought the perfect world would be world with a healthy balance of life and death, a healthy balance of war and peace, not enough food and not enough of other resources, and a healthy balance of one's own pain, and a world of distrust on top of that. But my friend seemed to hold a different view of it - a perfect world, to him, seemed to be one where there was always enough food, a world without death, a world with no war, and a world where you could go anywhere and trust every single person. We argued for a couple hours, but it was clear at one point that we had reached a stalemate. What do you guys think? What would be defined as a perfect world?

Accepted:
October 23, 2005

Comments

I have to say that from your description of the debate I'm inclined to side with your friend. His world contains a lot less suffering, and lot more human flourishing. You talk about a "healthy balance" of well-being and suffering. But why is this better than a world with very little or no suffering?

Perhaps your idea is that some suffering is somehow needed in order to maximize human well-being. Is it that there needs to be some suffering so we can realize the well-being that comes from struggling towards and eventually achieveing something? Or is it that a world in which everything went perfectly would contain no background of even mild misfortune against which to appreciate our well-being as well-being. Such a world would be experienced as "flat", and almost dull in it's unwavering fortune. I'm skeptical of this, but in any case, the "healthy balance" of misfortune that might allow us to realize these greater forms of well-being would seem to require a lot less suffering than does our actual world.

Your debate reminds me of the ancient debate over the problem of evil: why would God create a world that contains so much evil? The entry in the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia provides a good entry into that intricate and very interesting topic.

One way of thinking of a perfect world is as a world that cannot be improved upon in any way. There are no problems to be solved, because everything is as it should be. But paradoxically, perhaps, such a perfect world would not be perfect for us. We’ve evolved to be the ultimate problem solvers, and we take a great deal of satisfaction in our successful problem solving. If there were no longer any problems to be solved, there would no longer be anything left for us to do. And how perfect can life be if there’s no point to doing anything?

Having said that, I think that I would opt for a world in which there was always enough food, no war, and eminently trustworthy people. Such improvements seem only to eliminate a lot of pointless suffering, and there would still be plenty of interesting problems remaining to be solved. Whether the elimination of death would be a genuine improvement is unclear to me. Bernard Williams has argued (“The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” reprinted in his Problems of the Self) that if we were immortal, our lives would become miserably boring. I’m not so sure.