God cannot exemplify pain, despite pain being a real property.

Although such pain is a “perfection” and thus a real property, for Leibniz, it still involves a kind of weakness or imperfection in the person who has it, and so God cannot, in the end, exemplify this “perfection”. Rather, God’s possession of maximal pleasure is somehow sufficient to ground the “reality” that is found in both pleasure and pain (Leibniz 1677 [1969: 177]). This seems fishy, and other philosophers argue against Leibniz that if pain is a real property (rather than a mere absence), t