An argument against libertarianism

Victor Reppert has posted the following argument:

Here's an argument against compatibilism.

1. If compatibilism is true, then God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
2. If God is omnipotent and perfectly good, then, if God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
3. But God did not create the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
4. Therefore, compatibilism is false.

Oh yeah, 1 is true only if theism true. But theism is true, therefore, the argument works!

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2008/04/argument-against-compatibilism.html

My first reaction upon reading this was to think of something Peter Geach once said. Commenting on the problem of evil, he remarked:

“I want to bar the way to a familiar solution, the so-called Free Will defence. This would work only if the exercise of free will may sin inevitable. But free choices need not be between good and bad, right and wrong; any one of us often has a free choice between two goods, where it would not be wrong to choose either. So the Free Will Defence utterly fails,” Truth & Hope (Notre Dame Press 2001), 87.

So, if we plug Geach’s criticism into Reppert’s syllogism, this is the result:

Here's an argument against libertarianism.

1. If libertarianism is true, then God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
2. If God is omnipotent and perfectly good, then God could have created the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
3. But God did not create the world in such a way that everyone freely does what is right.
4. Therefore, libertarianism is false.

Oh yeah, 1 is true only if theism true. But theism is true, therefore, the argument works!

Thus, there is a possible world in which free agents (in the libertarian sense) always do what is right.

So why, according to Reppert, didn’t God choose to instantiate that possible world?

As for Reppert’s own argument, the weak link is with second minor premise. This premise overlooks the fact that a fallen, but redeemed world might be better than an unfallen world.

For example, Alvin Plantinga has mounted just such an argument. As one reviewer summarizes it:

Perhaps the most intriguing argument of the book is made by Alvin Plantinga in ‘Supralapsarianism, or ‘‘ O felix culpa ’’ ’. First Plantinga offers a careful discussion of a traditional position: The value of the Incarnation is so inestimably great that a world in which sin occurs and the need for atonement arises is a very, very good world. He responds to possible questions. Why suffering ? Some is the result of free creatures choosing evil and causing suffering, and some suffering may be instrumentally valuable, perhaps as a means towards improving our character, and especially as a way of our sharing in the redeeming passion of Christ. Why so much sin and suffering ? Plantinga writes, ‘ it seems to me that we have no way at all of estimating how much suffering the best worlds will contain ’.

http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FRES%2FRES42_01%2FS0034412505008218a.pdf&code=007e2e6ced042b50bcc11dafcdd37ae9#page=1

Reppert is also disregarding a couple of important articles by Robert Adams, which challenge the assumption of premise #2:

"Must God Create the Best?" Philosophical Review, 81 (1982). Reprinted in The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

"Existence, Self-Interest, and the Problem of Evil", in The Virtue of Faith.