Leibniz as a Moralist: In Memory of Marcelo Dascal

This article is written in the memory of Marcelo Dascal, and is conceived as an imaginary answer to a question put by him to the author: what is the point – given a shared non-religious, even atheistic, outlook – in translating (into the Hebrew) of Leibniz’s Théodicée? The two main theses of this imagined answer are: 1. That there is in the Théodicée a moral theory, partly implicit but irreducible and relatively independent of its theological content, and that this theory is based on a paradoxical – but original and important – concept of moral necessity, extracted from the theory of the absolute need to choose the best possible; 2. That this concept of moral necessity may be developed into a theory of responsibility, looking back to the need to give accounts about what has been done (or not done), and forward, to what has to be done (or not) now.