Time, Modality, and Moral Desirability

In contrast with presentism, non-presentism holds that there are past events and thus a fortiori past painful events. In contrast with standard realism, Lewis’ modal realism is committed to all sorts of concretely existing possible worlds and thus to worlds completely filled with pain. This paper presents a line of reasoning that exploits the intrinsic obnoxiousness and repulsiveness of pain in order to establish that (i) a presentist world is morally more desirable than a non-presentist world, and (ii) reality as conceived by standard realism is morally more desirable than reality as conceived by modal realism. The paper also offers some tentative speculations on how one can move from (belief in) the moral desirability of presentism and modal realism to (belief in) their truth.